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chicken and apricot tagine

October 21st, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in general

chicken and apricot tagine

using up: some chicken thighs, peppers in green, red and yellow

We needed to do some cooking for the freezer, so we looked at the ingredient stocks to see what we had.  And what we had was a big bag of chicken thighs in the outside freezer, and thus a chicken tagine was born.

On Friday night, I put some chickpeas in to soak, and then boiled them up on Saturday.  On Sunday afternoon we set to.

I browned all the chicken (some of it went into a batch of lemony chicken with coriander) and set it aside while we scoffed a cooked breakfast!

Then chopped up two red onions, the peppers, and lots of garlic, and cooked them down in some olive oil.  Then we fried in some ground spices - cinnamon, dried ginger, allspice, coriander, returned the chicken to the pan, added chickpeas, a quartered lemon, chopped fresh coriander and a little water.

Put it in a low oven (gas 2-3) for about 2 hours.

Out of about 1.5kg of chicken, we got 7 meals, or 14 portions, including the other dish.  Lovely meals, too.

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vegetable tagine

September 14th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in recipe

vegetable tagine

Using up: bits of veg - courgettes, carrots, aubergine, spinach

As I said a day or so back, I wanted to do something other than moussaka with the aubergine.  We also had some green beans that needed eating up, a fair number of carrots and a lot of courgettes, so they seemed like suitable candidates for this.

Firstly, I simmered the cut green beans and carrots for 5-6 minutes, as they would need longer to cook than the other veg. I also cooked the last third of the bag of spinach for a couple of minutes, rinsed it under cold water, drained it, and marmalised it in the food processor.

We chopped up two red onions, lots of garlic and two green chillis, and cooked them down in olive oil in my old faithful Le Creuset cast iron casserole.  Then we added some spices, ground up in our trusty spice grinder; Pete did them, and there’s no point in asking for quantities - just do what you think is right.  He did cumin and coriander seeds, allspice, dried ginger, cinnamon and turmeric, and some black pepper.

We added this to the pan and fried them a bit to release the flavour.  Then we added one each of aubergine and courgette, cut into dice, and stirred them around a bit until they were coated with oil.  Added the carrots and green beans, and quite a lot of chickpease (I’d put a big batch into soak on Friday night, and cooked them up yesterday; not sure yet what I’m going to do with them).

Added a tin of tomatoes and a little salt, brought it to the boil, put a lid on it, and simmered for about 25 minutes, then added the spinach puree and simmered for another ten or so.

Ate it with couscous.  I put three tubs in the freezer this morning, so that made eight portions for what can’t have been more than about four quid, which I think is pretty good.  And it was delicious too!

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