For my second Plated adventure, I tried the Halloumi Cheese with Couscous. This recipe featured several ingredients that I have never tried before, like the halloumi cheese and the couscous, and ingredients that I have never cooked before, like pistachios and apricots. I was originally so excited about this recipe but it didn’t quite meet my expectations.

Like the previous recipe, we start out with the instructions broken out into 6 steps. This time I read the steps all the way through before I started cooking. I probably should have done this last time but hindsight.

I was making this around sunset so the sun was glaring right into my window. It felt like I was prepping food in hell.

I have the pistachios and the apricots chopped for the couscous. For the cheese, we have well, cheese, lemon and shallot. One thing I have appreciated through out this process is the use of shallot. I am not a huge onion fan. I view them like children in the 50’s, seen but not heard. Shallots are more mild and thus, more mild on the palate.

I  put the cheese in the cast iron with the shallot, lemon, lemon juice and white wine. I think my pan was little big so I added more white wine. In  retrospect, it wasn’t needed.

While my cheese was in the oven, I got started on the couscous. I sautéed the spices. This is really where the recipe lost me. The mixture of cardamom and clove smelled like a musky old perfume. And it looked like crap. Literally. After I sautéed the spices, I added raisins and apricots.

After the apricots and raisins, I added the couscous. I tossed them around the spice mixture and toasted it.

Then I added some water and let it simmer.

Around this time, the cheese was done. So I took it out and plated that it.

Ta-da!

Here’s the thing, it wasn’t very good. The cheese was delicious. It was like burnt yummy delicious cheese. But the couscous? Awful. The apricots and raisins I enjoyed. The couscous itself wasn’t that bad, but the spices. Oh gosh. You know when you leave a whole clove in food and you forget to take it out and then you bite into it and get a whole mouth of bitterness? It tasted exactly like that. Every bite was met with bitterness. The cheese though. So so so tasty.

Overall Ratings:

Ease of Recipe: 5 out of 5 stars. This was probably the easiest of the recipes.

Precision of the Recipe: 4 out of 5 stars. The problem was that I don’t have a working broiler. The recipe called the cheese to be moved to the broiler for a few minutes. I just moved it to the top rack, which didn’t make it any different.

Taste of Recipe: 2 out of 5 stars. Cheese good. Couscous bad. So so bad.

Quality of Ingredients: 3 out of 5: This recipe only had two fresh ingredients (lemon and shallot) so it was a little hard to really judge. This was also one of those recipes where I question the price, $24 for these two portions is definitely step.

Final Verdict: Three out of Five stars.

And of course–Plated is awesome because they tweeted me again!

 

Disclaimer: All opinions are my own. This post is not sponsored by Plated and I did not receive anything in exchange for this review.