Substitute for Flaked Millet in a Nut Roast

I need a substitute for flaked millet for my Christmas Nut Roast.  I’m using the Cranks Cashew and Brazil Nut Roast as my base recipe, but I’m then adding in my own food cheats and changes to make it quicker and easier to prepare.  My sibling always makes it from scratch, using top quality and fresh ingredients, that are hand prepared and hand chopped on the day …. pfft… that’s not me is it!  One of the Cranks Nut Roast ingredients is flaked millet, but it only requires a little bit and so I won’t be buying a whole bag of flaked millet to use in one recipe once a year (although I really should make this nut roast more often as it is gorgeous).

What can I use as a substitute for the flaked millet?  The simplest way, for me, is to use couscous – because I already have it in the cupboard, languishing.  In fact, I’ve some unused packets of Ainsley Harriott couscous as well as an opened bag of plain couscous.  One of the Ainsley Harriott couscous packets I’ve got is a Lemon, Parsley and Mint Couscous, so I could use that one as the Christmas Nut Roast recipe includes lemon and parsley – but I might just go with the plain bag of plain couscous on the day, so as to not “taint” the nut roast too much with outside influences.

Flaked millet is often used to make a porridge, so it’s like porridge oats – I could’ve used oats in my recipe, but I didn’t fancy that – and my oats aren’t very finely milled, so I thought it might be a “bit like sawdust” if I did that 🙂  At least couscous will blend into the general mix and be unnoticeable.

What’s good about couscous is it doesn’t need any cooking – to cook couscous you simply pour hot water on it and wait 5 minutes.  What I’ll do is use the dry couscous as an exact weight-for-weight replacement for the flaked millet and I’ll mix it with a little bit of the stock just before I bring all the other ingredients together.  The nut roast will be cooking for some time, so the couscous would have plenty of time without me doing that to fully form…. but I’ll add a splash of stock to it anyway “just to be sure” as they say!

While there are other substitutes for flaked millet, I don’t have any of those in my cupboard.  I have couscous, it’s easy to substitute straight in – so that’s what I’ll do!

As I said, it is a Food Cheats version of my favourite nut roast …. with many changes to make it fit my level of interest in “making a special effort”, which isn’t overly high!