Occasional cooks: vegetarian meals

 Here is your weekly thread to talk anything and everything food. 

Share your cooking this week, ask for tips or recipes for a dish, tell us about your meals out. 

I keep trying to eat more vegetarian or meat-free meals, mostly out of sustainability concerns. But then I stop thinking about it and realise I've had meat most days. So I'm trying to get more vegetarian or easily adaptable-to-vegetarian meals into my repertoire, so that I won't go straight to a meat dish when I need something quick.

This chermoula-roasted orange vegetables with chickpeas and cous cous ​is a great one. 

Chermoula is a spice rub from Tunisia - this recipe gives directions to make it yourself, but you may be able buy it in jars. Garlic, cumin, paprika, cayenne, lemon juice, fresh coriander (cilantro) and parsley, olive oil. 

Any orange-coloured vegies you can buy - carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, yellow/red capsicums, tomatoes. Chop them up in largish pieces, apply the chermoula all over.

Roast, then at the end add chick-peas and couscous, stir in honey, a squeeze of lemon juice and some extra chermoula.

This is great because it's really variable. 

Good hot or cold, as a main or a side-dish. The chick-peas make it a main meal, take them out for something lighter. 

Take out the honey and it's vegan. Or add some fresh feta on top for some dairy. Change the couscous to quinoa for a gluten-free option.

My only complaint with this recipe is their excessively complicated way to cook the couscous:

Put the couscous into a shallow bowl, along with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and stir through to coat the grains. Pour over the vegetable stock and stir well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let stand for 10 minutes. Uncover, drizzle with the remaining olive oil and stir together, then cover with foil and heat in the oven for five minutes. Remove from the oven and fluff up the grains with a fork.

Why on earth does this need a second cooking stage in the oven?? They're lucky if I even use stock and not just boiling water.

And another bug-bear is the use of plastic wrap to cover the bowl. I try and avoid single-use plastic products (I'm far from perfect at this) - for couscous, I just put a plate on top of the bowl. Or I could even... use a container with a lid. We've gotten so used to conveniences that didn't even exist before the last century, when people have been cooking couscous for a thousand years without this.