… Couscous Salad & Salsa 
I have been quite intrigued to cook this one. Cooking a little brick of crab seems quite interesting.
This meal requires that you have preserved lemons. I have really struggled to find preserved lemons. It is one of the very few pantry ingredients that has eluded me. I have looked in every supermarket I have been to and never seen them. As a precaution, before I go shopping, I write down the ingredients for another meal just in case I can’t get the lemons. But tonight I found them. Either it has been absent from the supermarket for the last few months, or I have just been very unobservant. This does however mean that the several meals I have wanted to cooked, seen preserved lemons on the list of ingredients, and had to pass by, I can now cook.
It’s Gavin’s birthday and I know he likes fish and so this is why I was keen to do this one tonight. So I was extra glad I found the preserved lemons.
I was far from confident that I would be able to do this in the fifteen minutes. Less to do with the recipe and more to do with the fact that I just felt I was having a slow day.
It feels like quite a long time before you actually start to cook. That said the only thing that is actually cooked is the crab bricks. Everything else is raw. There is quite a bit to chop up to go in the crab mix and it is fiddly to wrap the pastry round the small piles of carb meat mix. I tear the pastry here and there, but it does work out ok in the end.
It all feels a little rushed tonight. Constant cooking and far too much consulting the book. Most nights I can hold a good portion of the recipe in my head. Not tonight.
By 2/3ds of the way through I’m pretty sure I’ll be over the fifteen minutes. And I am. In transferring one of the crab bricks to the serving board I drop it on the table and it breaks.
I’m done in sixteen minutes exactly.
The meal tastes really, really great.
Gavin says it is probably his favourite so far. It’s up there for me too.
This one is well worth a go!
Who with: Gavin
How long: Sixteen minutes
