| Greg's lamb tajine |
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This is a dish that I put together on 4 January 2011 from a number of different recipes, including this one and this one. Clearly a Tajine is flexible: you put in the meat and vegetables you have at hand. But all the recipes suggest relatively fast cooking, and that seems wrong to me: the whole purpose of the dish is long, slow cooking, and that's what I did today.
The results: quite different from what I expected. The tajine (pot) really does keep nearly all the moisture in, and at the end of 3 hours I had more juice than at the beginning. And it was gelatinous from the decomposed fat, not something that you'd get from fast cooking. I'm not convinced that I can't improve on the spices, but I've updated the recipe for what I'll do next time.
This dish is intended to be cooked slowly in a tajine, a cooking pot with a high conical cover which closes well and keeps the moisture in despite the long cooking time. The same result can be achieved with other pots, in particular the French casseroles with an indented lid in which you put water:
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In principle any casserole with a tightly fitting lid will do, though possibly you'll need to add water during the cooking.
Serves: many
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 150 g | dried chick peas or | 1 | ||
| 300 g | canned chick peas (weight of peas, not liquid) | 1 | ||
| 1.3 kg | Leg of lamb, deboned | 2 | ||
| 40 ml | olive oil | 2 | ||
| 400 g | onions | 3 | ||
| 2 g | pepper | 4 | ||
| 4 g | cumminseed | 4 | ||
| 5 g | cinnamon | 4 | ||
| 10 g | ginger | 4 | ||
| 20 g | garlic | 4 | ||
| 0.5 g | saffron | 4 | ||
| 500 ml | lamb or chicken stock | 4, 5 | ||
| 30 g | honey | 5 | ||
| 20 g | salt | 5 | ||
| 400 g | tinned tomatoes | 5 | ||
| 200 g | carrots | 6 | ||
| 500 g | potatoes | 6 | ||
| 350 g | pumpkin | 6 | ||
| 300 g | courgettes (zucchine) | 7 | ||
| 100 g | prunes | 7 | ||
| 100 g | green olives | 7 | ||
| coriander leaves | 8 | |||
| parsley | 8 | |||
Total time: 4½ hours
If using dried chick peas, bring about 500 ml water to boil, add the chick peas and boil for 2 minutes. Turn off the flame and leave for 2 hours.
Chop the meat into rough cubes about 3 to 4 cm on a side. Fry in the olive oil in two or three batches until slightly brown but not crisped. Reserve.
While frying the meat, chop the onions top to bottom into segments of about 60°. Separate and fry gently in the oil after the meat is finished. The onions should be translucent but not brown.
While the onions are frying, grind the pepper, cumminseed and cinnamon finely. Add the ginger, garlic, saffron and some of the stock and blend finely.
When the onions are done, add the meat, spice mixture, unblended tomatoes, honey, salt and the rest of the stock. Mix well, bring to the boil and then simmer gently on the lowest heat for 1½ hours.
1½ hours before serving, mix the chick peas into the meat. Put the potatoes, pumpkin, carrots on top of the meat. They should not be covered in liquid. Bring back to the boil, then simmer at lowest temperature again.
45 minutes before serving, insert the olives into the meat mixture, covered with the juice. Put the courgettes and prunes olives on top of the other ingredients. Bring back to the boil, then simmer at lowest temperature again.
Garnish with chopped coriander and parsley. Serve with cous-cous.
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