Chicken Tagine with Caramelised Baby Onions and Honey

The Lake District was beautiful and sunny on Friday evening, sitting in the quiet of the valley watching the deer with their new bambi's was a lovely end to the week. It did rain pretty much continuously from then on in, but it was still a lovely weekend. It stopped long enough to light the bbq for supper, but also managed to soak us thoroughly while out for a walk. The mist was rolling down the hills dramatically as we left but even in bad weather it is still such a beautiful and relaxing place.

So it may be August, British Summer Time, in case you had forgotten, but I think this rainy windy day calls for something a little bit warming... I have mentioned Claudia Roden before, her book Arabesque is never far from hand in my kitchen. A taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, full of spice and flavour. My favourite section is full of Moroccon tagines, spiced with ginger and cinnamon, sweet with honey and perfumed with saffron...

Claudia uses a whole jointed chicken for her version of this tagine, but as I was only cooking for two I used boned chicken thighs. I find chicken thighs much tastier than breast meat, and for longer cooking times like this tagine, thigh meat is much less likely to dry out.

Start with 150g of shallots or baby onions. Pour hot water over them, in a bowl, and leave for five minutes to blanch. This makes removing the skin whilst keeping the onions or shallots whole much easier. While they are bobbing around in hot water finely chop a small onion and then cook slowly in a tablespoons of olive oil. Cook until soft, for about 5 minutes, and then add half a teaspoon of ginger, half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a pinch of saffron. Continue to cook the onion and spices for a few minutes longer.

Chop about 300g of boned and skinned chicken thighs into bite size pieces, perhaps a bit more if you're really hungry. Add the chicken to the pan with the onions and spices, and when it is sealed all over add 150ml of water, the blanched onions with their skins removed and a pinch of salt and pepper. Leave the tagine to cook, on a medium heat, uncovered for about 20 minutes.

While the tagine is cooking you can prepare the couscous. It needs to be in a pan that can go in the oven. Use 100g per person, pour it into the pan and add the same amount of salted water to the couscous, cover and leave for 10 minutes. I used 200g of couscous to 200ml of boiling water with a teaspoon of salt in it. Fluff up the couscous after it has absorbed all of the water, it may have become quite a hard mass, but just break it apart with a fork until it is light and fluffy. Add a glug of olive oil and work it all through the couscous with your hands, getting lots of air into it as you do. Finally put the dish into a pre heated oven at 200°C for 15 minutes. Before serving stir a knob of butter through the piping hot couscous and fluff it up again. Claudia uses 20g of butter, but I think you can get away with a lot less, but just to your own tastes.

To finish the final stage of the tagine remove the chicken pieces from the sauce and set them aside, leave the onions in the pan to continue to soften. The sauce now needs to reduce and thicken up a bit. Add 2 tablespoons of honey and lots more black pepper, you need quite a lot to balance the sweetness of the honey. Just keep tasting it until it suits your taste. Turn the heat up a little and allow the sauce to bubble away and reduce by about half. Finally return the chicken to the pan to heat through for a few minutes.

Fill a bowl with a large scoop of buttery couscous and top with the chicken, sauce and onions. I sprinkled the top with some toasted sesame seeds, you could also use some toasted almonds roughly chopped. The gingery, cinnamon spice is lovely with sweet honey, spicy black pepper and soft onions. It is making me want to cook it again just writing this, I might have to wait until tomorrow...

Lamb, mint and pinenut meatballs

Middle Eastern type meals are the ones I really love. All their spices and flavours, long stews, fresh salads, tangy yoghurt, toasted flat breads, saffron, almonds, pomegranate salads, dried fruit and meat combinations, grilled fish, mint teas, honey soaked pastry... The list goes on...

We took a trip to Istanbul last Autumn and just ate and drank and tasted and smelt interesting and lovely things the entire time. Highlights were grilled mackerel fillets in a piece of fresh bread from a man fishing and grilling by the river, sitting on the harbour on the Asian side eating sticky baklava watching huge cruise ships, hot sweet milk flavoured with orchid root after a complicated ferry trip up the Bosphorus, amazing sesame flat-breads, grilled lamb, smoky aubergines and dips in a very smart kebab house of sorts, grilled chicken and yoghurt drinks on plastic stools in the Spice Market... I loved every second of it and the list of places to visit in that part of the world is steadily growing... Damascus, Syria, the Bekaa Valley...

This recipe brings a few of those flavours and spices together. Starting with the spicy tomato sauce so it can simmer away while you do everything else. Chop half an onion finely and a clove of garlic, then cook them in a tablespoon of olive oil on a low heat until they are soft, about 10 minutes. Then add a tin of tomatoes, a pinch of chilli flakes and some salt and pepper and allow it to simmer gently until you need it. Keep stirring it now and again to make sure it doesn’t stick.

Chop the other half of the onion finely, along with a few sprigs of mint and another clove of garlic. Add this to 500g of lamb mince. This makes enough for 2 to 3 people. Add half a teaspoon of cinnamon and half a teaspoon of allspice and another pinch of salt and pepper, and mix everything up thoroughly. Roll the mince into little balls about the size of a ping pong ball and roll them around on a plate you have covered in olive oil.

Add all the meatballs to a roasting tray and put them in the oven at 180°C for about 15 minutes. Give them a shake half way through. They should just be browned a little but not too much, you don't want them to dry out.

While the meatballs are cooking measure out 200g of couscous, put it in a pan that can go in the oven and add the same volume of boiling salted water, so 200ml. A teaspoon of salt will be sufficient. Leave it to rest with the lid on, to absorb the water for 10 minutes.

When the meatballs are at the correct stage of brown add the tomato sauce and mix them all together, put them back in the oven for another 15 minutes. At the same time you can take a fork to your couscous and break it all up, it will have become solid as it has absorbed all the water, you need it to be loose in little grains and full of air. Add a large glug of olive oil and mix it through. Put the pan in the oven with the lid on and leave it in for the same amount of time as the meatballs.

I made a sweet cumin yoghurt to go with the meatballs, which is really delicious. It came from The Salad Club originally, but I can't find it on their website, and I kind of make it up a bit differently each time now until it tastes right. Add 4 tablespoons of yoghurt to a small bowl, to this add about 1 tablespoon of olive oil, a heaped teaspoon of ground cumin and a heaped teaspoon of caster sugar. Then whisk this all together. Add a pinch of salt and pepper too.

It is really good on a BBQ-ed lamb kofta, or a lamb skewer, with some spicy tomato sauce, smoky charred aubergines, pitta bread and chopped salad. I'm longing for summer BBQ's on my little bucket BBQ in the yarden...

Take the meatballs and the couscous out after about 15 minutes. Chop a couple of knobs of butter into the couscous and allow it to melt through. It will be soft and steamy underneath and crunchy around the edges, mix it all up evenly.

 

Serve a big mound of steamy couscous topped with meatballs and tomato sauce, some fresh chopped mint scattered about and a big spoon of sweet cumin yoghurt. Buttery couscous, spicy tomato sauce, rich minty lamb and sweet spiced yoghurt...

 

Lamb, mint and apricot couscous

Cold lamb often isn't as good as many other cold left over meats. It's probably my favourite meat, but I often don't know what to do with the leftovers. This is a really quick way to use it up with little effort. It works for supper, or as a packed lunch in the week.

Chop up half an onion and a small clove of garlic and cook in a splash of olive oil for ten minutes. Turn the heat off and add some couscous, about a 100g for two people. Add water or stock to just cover it, no more, put the lid on and leave for ten minutes.

Chop up your left over lamb, a handful of mint, and handful of dried apricots. Dry fry a few blanched almonds in a pan and chop these up too. Then just toss it all together with a squeeze of lemon juice. You can have it still warm or cold for lunch the next day. It's very tasty and very easy.

Green herb couscous

I'm recovering from a slightly excessive night in Barn Asia. It's a South East Asian restaurant in Newcastle city centre, and the food was very good. We had huge tempura prawns, shaking beef, a delicious pork and rice dish and tiny cinnamon doughnuts with a strawberry compote. Alongside this was a bit too much red wine so I feel the need for vitamins today. I need something green and this Ottolenghi couscous is about as green as you get...

Slice the onion in half and then into thin slices. Cook it in a tablespoon of olive oil and a big pinch of salt. Cook it slowly for about 10 minutes or more until it is really soft and turning golden brown. Add half a teaspoon of ground cumin and cook for another few minutes.

While the onion is cooking you can get on with all the other stuff. Put 150g couscous in a bowl and cover with the same volume of water or stock, I used chicken stock, I think it gives it more flavour. Cover with cling film and leave it to sit for about 10 minutes, until you've done everything else really.

You really need a food processor for the herbs, I only got one in the last year and it's brilliant. If you don't have one, you are going to need quite a lot of patience and good fine chopping skills... Or you could make something different... You need to wizz up 20 grams of parsley and 20 grams of coriander, it's about the size of the little bags you get in most supermarkets. Then add about half that amount of dill and mint. I've made it with various combinations of herbs and its still good even you're missing some of them. Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil so its like a loose paste that is very green...

Fork through the couscous and stir through the herb paste. Chop up 3 or 4 spring onions and add them. Chop up one green chilli into fine slivers and add also. Stir through the salty cumin onions.

Roughly chop up a few big handfuls of rockets and stir through, and finally toast off some pumpkin seeds in a dry pan and scatter them into the couscous.

I think this is so tasty, the sweet salty cumin onions really add something special, along with the crunchy pumpkin seeds. It is so green and herby, I don't think I've ever added quite so many to a dish before. I've served it as one of a few salads at a bbq before, on this occasion just with some grilled chicken...