Tabouleh

[idun]

Tabouleh: Like so many things  I cook that I learned to do in France, I was given the recipe verbally, and have no idea if any are 'true' recipes, or just local adaptations.

This is a dish that my son and I can snack on, we just love it.

Out of curiosity I have looked at some recipes and BBC food for example says to use bulgar wheat, which I am not so keen on, and I always use the same semoule that I use then making a couscous and would not dream of using that.

Although to confuse things in England they call 'semoule', cous cous???? and I find that weird, why not call it semolina, beause that is surely what it is????

[woolybanana]

Semolina is delicious but has a bad reputation thanks to school meals, I suspect, so a fancy name is used.

[idun]

 Semolina is delicious as is semoule for savoury foods.

I never got why some school food was so badly thought of. There was little that I didn't like.

The worst and only thing I can think of was the cheap, grisly fatty beef cubes, which I didn't like, but the rest was lovely.

[BritinBretagne]

Couscous is a dish made from semolina (semoule) and water, the basis of taboulé. The word semolina is also given to the sweet pudding made from the grains. The semoule that I buy in France says couscous on the packet.

[Patf]

I used to make couscous from the Carrefour brand, medium, when we were in France. It was so easy - a measure of couscous, same measure of boiling water or stock, fork up and that was it. I added other things later.

But the couscous , and bulgar wheat that you get here (Tesco) seems different. I have to microwave it to get rid of the extra water they say in the recipe.

I still use it for a salad in the summer. After 'cooking' and cooling I add a tiny amount of salt, lemon juice and walnut oil, and parsley and mint from the back garden. A few raisins and chopped cashews. And chopped dried apricots.

We have it with cold meat or chicken. But back to basic casseroles now, less work.

[nomoss]

[quote user="idun"] ...........................

I never got why some school food was so badly thought of. There was little that I didn't like. ...... [/quote]

You obviously didn't have anything like the mutton stew served at my primary school.

They were already cooking it when we arrived in the morning, together with the boiled cabbage, and spuds, which they may well have been started the day before.

I'll never forget the large cubes of yellowish fat, with a sliver of meat concealed within them, which quivered like jelly when touched with a fork[+o(]

[woolybanana]

Bof, that’s nothing; we had to go out the night before and scrape up the road kill so the cooks who were on loan from the local prison could boil it all night to make our stew!???

[idun]

It is a very long time since I have bought semoule in France, but seem to remember it saying semoule pour couscous, like I would see 'pudding rice' on short grain rice in the UK.

When I first got back really did ask for semolina, and then when they would show me the stuff for puddings, I would say for cous cous and that is all that was on the packet here.

I always fluff my semoule up, whether for the full dish 'couscous' or for tabouleh. I work it and always have, whether I use either my couscousier or a micro wave, I cook it a little and then use two forks, and keep lifting and turning it.

[nomoss]

This is how our bonne femme used to make couscous from semoule when we lived in Algeria

[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1xdR8N-IyU[/url]

It was even more boring than "cleaning" the rice - i.e. spreading it out on the kitchen table to take out the little stones and mouse turds.

This becomes quite satisfying once you get the hang of moving the rice under your hand from one side of the table to the other while simultaneously flicking the unwanted bits into a separate pile.

The kids used to love helping with the job.

[Patf]

We used to get pantry moths. They loved all dried goods such as couscous, laid their eggs which turned into tiny worms. Plus cobwebby  stuff. So you had to keep all dried goods in closed containers.

That's assuming they weren't already infested, like yours nomoss.

I haven't seen pantry moths here yet, but you never know, with global warming.

[woolybanana]

Presumably, nomoss, ypu made a sort of Colman’ Mouseturd sauce??

[nomoss]

[quote user="woolybanana"]Presumably, nomoss, ypu made a sort of Colman’ Mouseturd sauce??[/quote]

No but sounds tasty, maybe with road kill[:D]

When we were back in England, the kids were really disappointed they could no longer take charge of cleaning the rice.

We once found a jar at the back of a cupboard jammed solid with moths which had hatched out. Mabe the pantry moths mentioned by Pat.

[woolybanana]

My eyesight is not what it used to be which means I sometimes misread texts with odd results. I was intrigued therefore to read that nomoss had ‘panty moths’, that famous condition suffered by elderly ladies!

[idun]

My friends in France often used to go to Italy and one of the things they would bring back was Polenta, they would store it in the freezer to stop the moths.

[mint]

[quote user="Patf"]

We used to get pantry moths. They loved all dried goods such as couscous, laid their eggs which turned into tiny worms. Plus cobwebby  stuff. So you had to keep all dried goods in closed containers.

That's assuming they weren't already infested, like yours nomoss.

I haven't seen pantry moths here yet, but you never know, with global warming.

[/quote]

Do the grubs look like little pink threads with a black spot at one end?  Would that be their eye or their backside?

[nomoss]

Read all about them here

[mint]

Thank you, nm.  I have looked at your link and other images of the blighters.

Yes, those pink wrigglies in my rice bin are indeed pantry moth babies.  I have chucked out a huge container of split peas and another of cashew nuts.

Beats me how they get in as all my stuff is in containers (though maybe the lids are not as tight as they should be)[:(]  I think OH might have found the source of the infestation.  I had 4 large bowls of walnuts and he found the lavae in all of them.  So that's all my walnuts, gathered over many walks, gone for a burton[:@]

[nomoss]

Don't throw all that food away!

Put the jars in the freezer overnight to kill the blighters, then pour them out on a nice clean table top and sort them out, as we used to do with the rice.

OK, we did rinse the rice in cold water before we cooked it, but the odd ingested weevil ain't going to hurt a couple of tough old persons like you, is it?

EDIT.-If we'd thrown away the rice because it had weevils, stones, and mouse crap in it when we lived in Sarawak, we'd not have had much to eat, and if we were bothered about little things like that, we couldn't have eaten in any local places.

Potatoes were really expensive, as they were only flown down by light aircraft from the mountains, or very old imported ones from far away.

[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LmU7ncCc28[/url]

[BritinBretagne]

When I was a child we used to drive down to southern Italy every summer, camping. One year we took a large tin of Cadbury’s drinking chocolate with us which, for some reason, had wasps in it. I can remember my mother sieving the powder every time we used it.

[nomoss]

[quote user="BritinBretagne"]When I was a child we used to drive down to southern Italy every summer, camping. One year we took a large tin of Cadbury’s drinking chocolate with us which, for some reason, had wasps in it. I can remember my mother sieving the powder every time we used it.[/quote]

Very sensible, your Mum. Drinking chocolate is probably unobtainable in Italy, and the wasps would float to the top so you could easily skim them off[:D]

[Patf]

Very good link, Nomoss, thanks. And I've heard the tip about putting in the freezer. We often saw the little moths flying round the kitchen, searching for a place to lay their eggs.

Mint - your infestation could have started before you bought whatever it was. ie the eggs could have already have been laid before packaging etc.