Anyone who regularly reads my wafflings here, will know that I have a marked partiality for the wonderful magic that the guys at Ottolenghi can summon, with the help of a few herbs, some lentils and a noodle or two.

So, when hubby suggested we have couscous with our devilled sausages (recipes on my blog), I laughed. I laughed because every single attempt at injecting flavour into couscous, to date (as was) has been a catastrophic failure.

I've gone down the herbs & lemon route; I've gone down the cumin & eastern spice route. I've even gone down the "Ainsley's couscous in a packet" route, just in case I was missing something there. ~Shakes head~

All have been devoid of the kind of flavour that makes you look forward to couscous appearing on the menu.

Until now.

The moment hubby suggested couscous, I knew I had to take some serious advice on the subject - and where better to go for couscous advice than the two Ottolenghi cook books, "The Cook Book" and "Plenty".

I will admit that I rejected the first couscous recipe I found therein, but that was largely because the ingredients were hugely expensive and wouldn't particularly have sat well beside a sausage.

"Green Couscous" didn't appear - at first reading - terribly hopeful. However, having scanned the ingredients I discover that we had almost everything barring a couple of the herbs.

As I'm always keen (and even keener, now) to try another Ottolenghi recipe, we were on.

As with a lot of couscous recipes, it's not that difficult to make - provided you have a good blender/processor that will chop herbs down to a fine paste.

We've got one of those hand blenders (left over from when son & heir was a baby) that has a tub which you can plug the blender into - that chopped the herbs – parsley, mint, coriander and tarragon - perfectly.

As for the flavour, well it'd be more true to say that it's a case of flavours, not flavour.

Everything combines most beautifully yet each and every flavour from the individual herbs to the fried onion mixed with ground cumin, stands out in multiple layers of surprise.

I'd used coarse sea salt for it, as the grains when they are tumbled through the couscous leave delicious trails of saltiness behind them.

Hubby was amazed to discover that there was only a quarter of a teaspoon of coarsely ground sea salt involved (not counting the stock cube, of course).

It turned out that my pack of dill had decided to dissolve into green slush, so that's one difference from the original recipe, as is the lack of fresh tarragon (which I couldn't find anywhere).

I substituted a teaspoonful of dried tarragon and nobody noticed it, so that's fine. I wouldn't recommend doing the entire recipe in dried herbs of course!

Another difference is that the original recipe demanded a green chilli and all we had in the fridge were red ones, but again I suspect that it didn't really matter.

Son & heir, needless to say, took a teensy tiny forkful and decreed he didn't like it and left all of his. ~shrug~ Hey ho, it was expected and his Dad and I polished it off for him, so no harm done.

If you're lucky enough to have a copy of "Plenty" on your bookshelves (if not, you can always ask at the Library), the original recipe can be found on page 255.