Already I have made 13 recipes from my one Julia Turshen cookbook. And there are still a few more cookbooks of hers to look forward to! But I don’t want to buy another one until I’m done making all the recipes that appeal to me in Simply Julia.
I continue to be amazed each time I make a new recipe of hers that yes, we like this one too. Julia’s recipes are easy to make, almost always call for ingredients I already buy, AND we like how they taste! I also really like that she includes measurements for dry ingredients in grams. It shouldn't surprise you that I am someone who likes to use a kitchen scale so I can be as exact as possible when following a recipe.
The two recipes in this post are ones I’ve made for dinner at least half a dozen times now. I always make the two dishes to serve together, along with a simple butter lettuce salad with fresh herbs. These two are truly standout recipes!
Both recipes say they serve four people, so I double both recipes so we can eat a big dinner for five and still have some leftovers for Cash to take to school. I made some notes at the bottom of the chicken recipe to give more details from my own experience. The couscous one is easy and you just do what the recipe says, but in case you haven’t bought pearl couscous before, this is the one I buy (from Vitacost):
The one tweak I made to the couscous recipe is that she calls for Cara-Cara oranges (the ones with pink flesh) and I did use those the first couple times when I made the effort to seek out those oranges. But regular navel oranges are the ones I usually keep on hand for smoothies, so now I just use those. The pink color was prettier in the salad, but the orange oranges taste just as good. The links to both recipes are at the bottom of this post and here is one (not-so-great) photo of the meal. I’m not even almost a food photographer. But you might notice that I had one Cara-Cara orange left that I included in the salad when I took this photo.
Click here for Almond Chicken Cutlets.
Click here for Pearl Couscous + Citrus Salad.
In other news, I hope to be switching to a Substack blog pretty soon. I don’t even know if it’s accurate to call a Substack a blog but I want it to serve the same purpose for me as this blog has. TJ is going to help me figure out how to transfer the recipes from this blog to my Substack but bear with me if it takes a little while to figure out how to get all the recipes back and formatted correctly. I’m not even almost a food blogger. My goal is simply to have all the recipes I’ve posted in the past few years show up in one place for free instead of paying Squarespace each year for how few things I post. But I am pretty sure some poetry posts will still make their appearances…..also quotes and lists and tally marks of things because I just can’t help myself. Deer, de-deer, deer, deer.