It’s not often that I’m surprised by my own cooking. Disappointed, yes, but not surprised. I generally know whether something has a good chance of succeeding (or if I’m running the risk of failure) and where it will rate on the deliciousness scale (or the healthiness and/or easiness scale, as the case may be). But these onions stuffed with ground beef and pork and served over couscous really surprised me. I wasn’t expecting them to be as good as they were.

B, being Korean, is used to having rice at every meal. I, being American (despite my 7 years in Korea), still am not. I am okay with having a rice-like component, but just plain white rice is not something I’m down for more than once or twice a week. Actually, if I had my way, it would be brown rice or the highway, even in typical white rice situations, like with Korean food. But that’s beside the point. The point is, I’m always looking for a way to sneak in another grain.

Couscous is one of my favorite, but a lot of the things that go well with it need to be cooked for a really long time. I wasn’t sure these stuffed onions would provide enough flavor, but, as I said, I was pleasantly surprised.

A lot of people include rice in their onion stuffing, but that just seemed like a recipe for pasty, dry results to me. Instead, I went the other way and basted the onions in butter as they cooked to keep them from drying out and to allow for a little caramelization on the onions. The butter mingled with the stuffing and spices and added just enough moisture and flavor to keep the couscous from being stodgy.

When I got to the end of the onions and realized I still had a ton of stuffing left, I just shaped them into patties and cooked them off in the frying pan to make an extremely bastardized version of ddeokgalbi that B happily gobbled up at breakfast and lunch — that’s three meals in a row. (Don’t worry — I adjusted the recipe below to account of the extra stuffing, but I do recommend trying this mixture for meatballs or patties sometime. I have a feeling B is going to be requesting them done that way again in the near future.)

The best part is, I had originally planned on stuffing the onions with Italian sausage I bought at the foreign mart. When I opened them on the day, it was clear something funky was going on, so I threw them out. I had already gutted the onions and was stuck until I remembered I had ground beef and pork in the freezer, so I improvised. Luckily, thanks to this blog, I’ve started actually recording what I do in the kitchen, so I have the recipe for the future.

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