Green & lean couscous with asparagus, sugar snaps, mushroom and spring onion

Green green green! That’s all I could think and see when I was making my dinner. I was craving my first green asparagus meal of the season and as I was shopping for more ingredients, I somehow ended up with nothing but green ingredients, so I added some mushrooms to have some extra flavour and colour at the same time. As you can see there’s no meat or fish in this recipe, making it a very lean and healthy meal as we are not combining loads of carbs with high amounts of protein but are focusing on veggies.

There are a few ingredients to me that live and breath spring and green asparagus is one of them. You can buy them all year round, but keep in mind that in Ireland the season runs from April until July, so if you buy them outside of the season you should be aware that there’s no way it comes from Ireland/UK or Europe in general.

What I love about asparagus is that you can use it in so many recipes & cook it in lots of different ways (you can even eat it raw!) and even more important than that: it’s healthy! Asparagus are both anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory and provides Vitamin C, B1, B2, B6 and E as well as GSH. These nutritients can help you reduce type 2 diabetes as well as heart disease and can help reduce the risk of certain types of cancer.

Other than that asparagus also help your digestive system and helps with better nutrient absorption, lower risk of allergy, and lower risk of colon cancer. It’s also rich in fiber and contains some good protein that helps your digestive system even more.

Serves: 2-3 people

Ingredients

• 150g Irish button mushrooms
• 300g couscous
• 4 spring onions
• 300g sugar snaps
• 500g thin green asparagus
• Optional: fresh parsley

Preparation

Peel your mushrooms and slice them up. Remove the little moustache from the spring onions as well as the last centimeters of the dark leaves and slice everything else up in thin slices. Keep a few of the darker green slices on the side as we’ll be using them when we plate our meal.

Both the sugar snaps and the asparagus don’t require much work. Simply cut the tip away from both sides of the sugar snaps and slice them in half. For the asparagus you only need to remove a small piece of the bottom and slice the remaining parts up in thick slices. Do not slice up the tips though, stop as soon as you reach them. Put a few tips on the side as well, we’ll use them as a finishing touch along withe some of the spring onion.

For the couscous simply follow the instructions on the package.

Heat up some good quality olive oil in a pan and add the spring onions first. Cook them for 3 minutes and then add mushrooms, continue to cook until they have browned and then add sugar snaps and asparagus as they only need to cook for a little while. Continue to cook it all for 3-5 minutes and your meal is done. I personally would not add any salt or pepper or any other spices for that matter but simply keep this as fresh as possible. You can, however, add some fresh parsley on top.