Roasted Vegetable Couscous Salad (by G)

In my head this dinner (as is so often the case) was much nicer than it turned out in reality.  In my head it was a mix of big grained couscous, savoury roasted vegetables and some chunks of juicy lamb.

On the whole I blame two of the vegetables - the sweet potato and the pumpkin. They were anaemic and not very flavourful. Anyway, I roasted them in the oven with salt, pepper and cumin. I pan fried some red onion, red capsicum, swiss brown mushrooms and garlic until they were tender - then I fried two lamb back-straps in the same pot until they had some colour and popped them in the oven tray with the roasting vegetables to cook through a bit.

The couscous was the instant kind so I poured too much of it into some boiling vegetable stock and waited for it to cook through - using the same pot as everything else was cooked in to add as much flavour as possible.  Once the couscous was about done I stirred through a fistful of butter (which is the key to couscous) then added all the vegetables and some chopped parsley.

While the servings might have been a bit too large I still decided to add some sour cream on top to add some kind of a sauce in-case the couscous was too dry.

Dinner turned out to be pretty flavourful but it didn't match the potential amazingness that I had built up in my head.