Coquelet with couscous and mushroom stuffing

I stumbled across a food event somewhere, which was a sort of paddock to plate affair. Cook up your dish, but show the before and after shots.

I found a little coquelet for sale at the markets, just the right size for dinner for one (well actually it made two dinners for one) being just 500g. As a single woman living alone, its not often I get to have a roast, so I snapped this up. I just adore my chickens stuffed (in some countries its called "dressed" which is up there with scones being called "biscuits" for weird descriptions) and it is something I miss very much living in Europe where beasts are roasted a naturale. But I didn't have any bread in the house, so what do I stuff the bird with? Ahah! Couscous... why not!?

So in fact, as I have lost where the paddock to plate food event is happening, this actually became an entry in "Culinarty"'s first foodblog event for an original recipe. Mind you, I could enter just about every dish I cook into this one, as I tend to be a bit of an original when it comes to cooking!

I am afraid I can't offer much in the way of guidance on quantities, as I did it all by eye. The stuffing was pretty straightforward though: make up a half cup of couscous with hot stock, some oregano and some broken up dried mushrooms (bolets and shitakes in this case). Allow to cool and mix in an egg. Stuff inside your bird, then roast. I actually had some extra left of the stuffing and put it into a butterfly cake mould to make this terribly cute stuffing extra.

I served the cooked coquelet with snow peas and potatoes au gratin and discovered that no matter how I arranged things, this meal refused to photograph beautifully. Still, it tasted great, and I guess that is what counts! The couscous stuffing was really very good - I had wondered whether the texture would be odd, but it was tasty and texturally interesting but not too interesting, if you know what I mean.

I decided too to go on to smugly celebrate my all round inventiveness and have added a label to the recipes I put up on the web, marking those which are my own original inventions. So you can go to the list of keywords and choose "Original" to make a collection of Kiriel originals.