Couscous with Mint Pesto

By Jess Ziman

Pasta with pesto has always been one of my staple comfort foods but it can get a little repetitive when it’s your go-to meal.

To change it up, I like to substitute couscous for the pasta. Couscous is also a wheat grain but the texture and flavor are very different from pasta. While bland on its own, couscous absorbs flavors much better than pasta.

Couscous is also quicker cooking and requires no draining. You simply pour boiling water over the couscous, bring it to a simmer, turn off the heat and let it sit for 5 minutes.

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Couscous Makes an Easy, Go-To Meal

By Sandy Hu

I’m on Twitter every weekday afternoon as @specialforksndy trying to help people with their most pressing need of the evening: what to cook for dinner. One of my favorite ideas for cooks in a hurry is couscous salad.

Here’s the couscous recipe in a tweet, under the 140 character limit: “Boil 1 ½ c broth; add 1c couscous. Off heat, cover & stand 5 mins. Fluff w/fork; add chick peas+g onions+feta cheese+olives+Ital dressing.”

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What to Serve a New Twitter Friend

By Sandy Hu

What can you learn about a person in 140-character comments over a single day? I learned enough about @Melissa808 to know I wanted to invite her for dinner.

Melissa Chang is a freelance writer and a social media consultant in Honolulu who tweets as @Melissa808. I, as @specialforksndy, met her over tweets just last Thursday, trying to help a friend of a friend with restaurant suggestions for her trip to Hawaii.

Although I was the food editor of the Honolulu Advertiser years ago, I wasn’t very current on the restaurant scene so I tweeted @Kamaka_Hawaii, the only foodie from Hawaii I followed on Twitter, for some advice. She, in turn, involved two people with the pulse on restaurant dining in Hawaii, tweeting back “both @Melissa808 and @thedailydish (Catherin Toth) are big time Foodies, Bloggers, Journalists from Oahu.”

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Step Aside, Sister! An Easy Dessert Makes me the Hero

By Amy Jacbos

Growing up as one of three daughters of a home economics teacher, dinners were always organized and planned. Dessert was my elder sister’s specialty, mine the main course and the youngest, well, she made the Chex Mix.

I don’t do dessert. I’ll think nothing of burning through the daylight hours planning something for dinner but curse dessert if takes more than 15 minutes. So when a recipe this simple comes along with ingredients that don’t require leavening agents or a mixer, I see it as my opportunity to be the dessert hero, the superwoman of sweetness that has eluded me growing up.

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