This evening Quercus and I took what we generally think of as the lazy way out for dinner. It probably says a lot that we’ve realised, due to the innate shittery of our oven, that it’s quicker to cook something from scratch every time than to bung in a (bought) pizza. Thus, our convenience food of choice is perhaps not your average… It’s cous cous. ‘Cause it’s super-quick and dead simple to adapt to the bits and bobs which fall out of the cupboard at you when you least expect it. In this case, it was as follows:

Pretentious lemon, spinach, apricot and sunflower cous-cous 

Ingredients
Shitload of cous-cous;
Knob of butter;
Stockcube (As some of this was destined for the witchling’s lunch tomorrow, I used a low-salt version);
Shitload of spinach;
As many dried apricots, chopped, as you can decently claim to have been ‘only a handful’ (I tend to go for the unsulphured ones as I prefer the almost datey taste);
Lemon, the zest thereof (and I grate these to within an inch of their lives; bugger all that ‘the zest alone; avoid the pith’ – I mean, are you taking the pith or what, I ask? Heh…);
Sprinkling of sunflower seeds.

Then…
Boil the spinach up briefly in as much stock as you think the cous-cous’ll take to do its thing, and chuck in the apricots for a quick soak while you’re at it. Grate the lemon zest into the pan (my advice is to avoid doing this over the pan at a height of about five feet, which is what, thanks the sublime ergonomics of life with a sod-bagging counter-top cooker, I did – it nearly killed my arm, but did I stop? Did I fuck as like – I went on, bloody-mindedly, until the bitter [should that be sour?] end), and poke the resulting goop about a bit before slinging in the cous-cous, butter and sunflower seeds. Stick a lid on the pan and wait for about five minutes, before giving it all a bloody good stir, and scoffing the lot. Preferably with an indecent quantity of black pepper.

 (Quercus says to tell you that he thinks this smells of Jeyes Fluid. Isn’t he lovely? I note that this association did little to stop him eating it like it was his last meal.)