Shawarma-Spiced Vegetable & Couscous Bowls

Food Prep and Cooking

Nick:

This seemed simple enough; roast veggies, make couscous in a pot, make lemon labneh, combine. BTW, here's the super secret way to make lemon labneh:

1. Open labneh container.

2. Put labneh in a bowl.

3. Squirt lemon on top.

However, as we were wrapping up I started getting a really bad feeling. The third to last step was mixing salsa verde into the couscous, and I tried a little bit. I don't know what I thought salsa verde is, but this tasted 100% like pesto. Realizing I had just mixed what tasted like lawn waste into the couscous, I started getting a sinking feeling that this was gonna be real bad.

Katie:

I had never seen or heard of kohlrabi before. It looked like a squished green onion with tentacles coming out of it. The instructions said to peel it. I couldn't figure out how to do that so I just started cutting off big pieces of the outside with a knife. The inside looked like a melony potato.

I swear the last time I had salsa verde with something...it was just weird tasting green salsa. Not pesto liquid. Is there more than one??

Post-meal thoughts

Nick:

This was real bad. Actually, saying it was real bad seems like an understatement; I think this is the first thing we've made that was completely inedible. When you think of a shawarma-spiced vegetable & couscous bowl, what flavors do you think of? Shawarma? Maybe the nice earthy taste of roasted carrots and kohlrabi? The lemon mixed into the labneh and squired over the top of the finished dish? Well, none of these flavors are present; they have been obliterated by the nuclear explosion of pesto. This tastes like sitting down to eat a nice big bowl of bitter grass. Why is there pesto in this? What does pesto have to do with shawarma or roasted veggies or couscous? I took one bite, regretted the life decisions that had lead me to this point, and fed it right to the garbage disposal. You're on thin ice, Blue Apron. Absolutely disgusting. I wouldn't feed this to a pig I hated. Without any hyperbole, absolutely the most disgusting thing we've made with any of these meal services. Barf.

Katie:

Pesto is fine for pasta sometimes. I was not expecting pesto on my couscous. I think this would have been a hit if we'd just left the salsa verde off or had another sauce with this. We're going to have to be careful in our meal selection next time. Yuck for the pesto sauce. The roasted veggies and the labneh were really good though. It was just hard to taste them around the bad sauce.