Lamb Tagine

Eat tagine and you too could look like this.
Morocco Mole, popular sidekick of Secret Squirrel and also the first indication you've got malignant melanoma after spending too long in the sun in Marrakech

You can't do any recipe of North Africa or the Eastern Mediterranean without mentioning the name of arguably the most trendy cook of the moment, Yotam Ottolenghi. He has a reputation for delicious food which is simple and rustic. However, he also has a tendency to use authentic ingredients in his recipes which, although they may be common in a souk in Tripoli, are not so easy to come by in the UK outside of a few small, wanky, over-priced delis in Notting Hill. For example, you have more likelihood finding a 70s male celebrity without a sex-pest-shaped skeleton in his closet than finding freeze-dried organic gerbil spleens down your local Co-Op. Anyway, I've mentioned him now, so onto my own recipe for lamb tagine.

A tagine is the name of the cooking pot which is essentially a glorified casserole dish with a lid shaped like a slightly squashed witch's hat. The dishes that take their name from the pot are usually mildly spiced stews that are cooked long and slow. This is actually doing an entire cuisine a huge disservice since, if cooked well, Moroccan food is fucking fantastic.

As well as being famous for its subtle, aromatic, spicy flavours, Moroccan food also uses a lot of dried fruit. Now, forgive me for riding rough-shod over centuries of culinary culture, but I largely think that dried fruit has as much place in a savoury dish as Clostridium botulinum. This goes doubly for dried apricots which, though commonly used in Morrocan tagines, are the dessicated haemorrhoids excised from the infernal arseholes of the devil's own herd of Apocalyptic wombats, in my opinion. I mean, if you want to add fruit, why not go the whole hog and stick in a packet of Fruit Pastels while you're at it and maybe serve it up with custard?

Anyway, the upshot of this preamble of dissing the Yot and admitting how much I despise dried fruit in main courses means this recipe is about as authentically Moroccan as a fez made from polyvinylchloride in Taiwan and purchased on Blackpool seafront. You want authenticity, piss off to Agadir and eat there. Meanwhile, this recipe tastes fucking great and it's well worth the time and effort to make it.

INGREDIENTS
2tbsp olive oil
500g cubed lamb
1 medium onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic
100g mushrooms sliced
2 preserved lemons,
150g fresh tomatoes, peeled then halved
2tsp paprika
1 tbsp cumin
10cm cinnamon stick
1 bay leaf
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped
pinch of saffron
vegetable stock cube
500ml water
1 red pepper chopped into sticks
1 courgette cut into sticks

Spice: the final frontier

RECIPE
Heat the olive oil in a hob- and oven-proof casserole dish and fry the meat to seal it. Remove it with a slotted spoon and add the onions to remaining oil to soften. Add the spices and garlic for about a minute, mixing to make sure they don't stick to the dish. Throw in the mushrooms and fry for another couple of minutes.

Add a little of the water to a cup and mix up the stock cube.

For the preserved lemons, cut them in two and scoop out the middle with a spoon. Discard the flesh and finely chop the skins.

Return the lamb to the dish and add the preserved lemons, tomatoes, water and the stock cube mix. Bring to the boil, mix well then layer the pepper and courgette on top of the rest of the stew. This means that the vegetables steam rather than boil and totally disintegrate over the long, slow cook.

Cover and put into the oven at 145°C for 2-3 hours

Tagine ready to go in the oven

Note the vegetables layered on the stew. Also note this is a Pyrex casserole dish and not an actual tagine pot. I'm not that much of a foodie wanker

This serves two people easily. Dish it up with rice, bread or couscous, like the recipe I'm writing next  for orange couscous.


NOTES
Preserved lemons are available from supermarkets. They are not the same as fresh lemons. They look like this:

You could put any combination of vegetables in this. Well, OK, not any combination. Lettuce would be a mistake, for example and cabbage would be a bad idea (cabbage is actually generally a bad idea in any situation, to be fair). However, carrots work well, as does aubergine, green beans or squash.

In best Rick Stein style, I could twat on about how I tasted something like this recipe, as cooked over a bottled gas stove in individual pots, in some street-side cafe in Marrakech a few years back. A place which had a spice shop round the back where I bought a large bag of saffron at a really good price, but that's really not the fucking point of this blog, is it?

Shepherd's Pie with garlic and rosemary mash topping

To paraphrase erstwhile football hooligan and current market gardener-cum-podgy, cheekie-chappy-apples-and-fackin'-pears Masterchef judge, Greg Wallace, "food don't come any more rustic than this!". I mean, how could it? It's named after someone who raises sheep for a living; who smells of lanolin and moss on a daily basis and for whom ticks are sexually transmitted.

Of course, the dish is also a British classic and piece of piss to make, as well as being cheap. That's probably why it's popular in pubs because they're often too tight to invest in the pricier ingredients needed to make better quality food and or invest in culinary training of their staff. Of course, in most good old British pubs, it's often a second rate version of the dish, as cooked on an industrial scale by some big catering multinational. The meat will be mechanically recovered; comprised mainly of lips and assholes; and probably not entirely ovine in origin, such that it could legitimately be called "jockey's pie". Saying that, industrially-produced shepherd's pie is an ideal accompaniment for that great British beer, Carlsberg, as brewed under licence in the UK in some massive industrial scale plant in the middle of fucking Wales. Food don't come any less rustic than that.

This version is easy and so much better than some crap from the freezer or chiller counter at your local supermarket.
Serve with vegetables and you can feed four adults

500g minced lamb
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
1stick of celery, finely chopped
1 medium carrot, finely chopped
250g mushrooms, chopped
half a tin of tomatoes
200ml water
1 beef stock cube
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 bay leaf
sprig of fresh thyme
1tsp mint sauce
black pepper
1 tbsp Worcester sauce

500g potatoes. peeled and cut into chunks
Leaves of a sprig of fresh rosemary,finely chopped (around 1-2 tsp)
2 garlic cloves, crushed
Freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp olive oil
Splash of milk
ground paprika

Fry the mince in a pan, pour it into a sieve and drain off the fat. Lamb really is fatty so there will be shitloads of grease in the sink. Add oil to the pan and add onion and garlic. After a couple of minutes, when the onion starts to go translucent, add the celery and carrot. Sweat for 10 minutes then add the mushrooms. Continue to fry (or sauté if you prefer foodie wanker terminology).

for another couple of minutes then add the tomatoes and water. Crumble in the stock cube and add the tomato puree. Add the thyme (strip the leaves into the pot), bay leaf, pepper, mint sauce and Worcester sauce. Stir well and leave the lot to stew for an hour.

Meanwhile boil the potatoes for 20 minutes or so. While these are boiling, fry up the garlic and rosemary in a couple of teaspoons of the olive oil. Drain the spuds and put them back in the pan. Start mashing them. Add milk and olive oil, salt, pepper and the rosemary and garlic and continue to mash. If you're feeling energetic, use a whisk as the texture gets smoother to get rid of lumps.

Add the mince mixture to a casserole dish and spoon on the mash so you cover the top of the meat. A this stage some of the TV chefs would probably tell you to pipe the mash onto the meat because it looks nice. Personally I'd say fuck that for a game of soldiers as it all goes down the same way. Just smooth it so it makes a single layer without any gaps. If you want to be vaguely poncey you can do that fork thing to make little peaks and sprinkle on a bit paprika to make it look poncier still. Bake in the oven at 160 for 45 minutes so you get a nice crispy skin on the mash.

Pie ready to go in the oven.

Calpol is optional

NOTES
As I mentioned for other recipes, replacing the water with red wine makes the meal tastier. This is all well and good, but if I open a bottle of wine I want to drink it and not put it in my dinner.

Like most good cookery pundits, no recipe would be complete without some advice on what to ask from your butcher. Ask you butcher to ask the abattoir worker to give the sheep that is to become your mince a damn good shagging because it really makes the meat tender. Actually, that's not strictly true, since mince doesn't need tenderising, but it's nice to try to brighten the day of someone who kills animals for a living.

Courgette in tomato

What can you say about courgettes? They're green and phallic, like a verdant winky, disembodied from its Martian owner in some horrendous intergalactic Bobbit incident. They're small marrows with a French name, except in the USA and Italy where they call them zucchinis. They are also quite tasty.

After an opening salvo of dishes which are New World, in-your-face, chilli-laced and full of dead animals to start the blog, this is a simple, fresh, vegetarian dish that works as a side dish as one of the two veg of a Sunday roast dinner or on its own as a pasta sauce. It's the sort of recipe that Rick Stein would twat on about in a flowery manner, relating how he had seen it made from vegetables fresh from Monet's garden by some elderly matriarch in Provence one year when he was a student. It's at  that stage in his programme when you're screaming at the telly "Just shut up and cook the fucking recipe, you pretentious prick!". I got my courgettes from Sainsbury's.

INGREDIENTS
1 medium courgette: topped, tailed and sliced
Half a red onion, finely choppped
Two cloves of garlic, crushed
Half a tin of tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato puree
2 tbsp or more olive oil*
Pinch of Salt
Black pepper
Small bunch of fresh oregano, finely chopped (or a pinch of dried)

RECIPE
Pour the oil in a pan and heat. Fry (or sautee if you're of the foody wanker persuasion) the onion and garlic until the onion is transparent, about a couple of minutes.

Throw in the courgette and fry for another 10 minutes until they start to get tender.

Add the tomatoes, tomato puree, oregano and salt and pepper.

Let it stew for 30 minutes or so, until the courgettes are cooked, and serve.

NOTES
You could pep up the dish by adding a splash of lemon juice but taste before serving as it might need some sugar to offset the tartness. Also, like any dish, this would be improved by a good slug of white wine.

Herbs
Oregano goes well with tomato, but you could use thyme. 

*This is what Nigel Slater might call "a glug". Now, I'm not aware in which system of mensuration (no, not that)  the "glug" is a unit. Presumably it's from the same descriptive system as "a tit of milk", "a turd of mashed potato" and "a fart of lettuce". Whatever, it's definitely not an SI unit. This is in contrast to the "slug", as mentioned for wine above, which is (SI standing for "Sweary Implementation" in this case).

Mince Wonder 1: Chilli con Motherfucking Carne

You've never had chilli like this.

The name literally means "chilli with meat" which sounds about as appealing as sex with William Hague while your Mum watches. On the other hand, put an exotic spin on the most mundane dish and it will sound so much more vibrant. Carne y dos verduras sounds a lot more interesting than meat and two veg, alternative name for male genitalia not withstanding. You could say, maintaining the same comparison and in keeping with the Latino theme, "chilli con carne" sounds as appealing as sex with Jennifer Lopez. Anyway, literal meaning aside, my version of chilli con carne has grown and evolved over years to become the masterpiece it is now and would be my signature dish if I were running a restaurant.

It's a little known fact that chilli con carne isn't actually a true Mexican dish, but Tex-Mex, which is a bastardised version or, as some twatty restuarants bill themselves, a "fusion" (to-MAY-to/to-MAR-to) of Mexican food with that from north of the Rio Grande. This is because it contains meat and a significant tendency to increase your BMI to morbid obesity levels. Your average Mexican peasant couldn't afford meat and carrying an additional few stone of adipose tissue doesn't help with tilling the fields. It also generally contains fewer pulses so is also less likely to have the effect of making your friends avoid standing downwind or sharing a lift with you after a meal of this cuisine, though not so much in this instance. Since this is a bastardised cuisine I don't see any need to stick to authentically New World ingredients so this recipe includes Bisto, British beer, balsamic vinegar and soy sauce.


This is enough to make 4 or 5 adult-sized portions

INGREDIENTS
500g beef mince (low fat if you're a ponce like me)
1 tin of tomatoes
250 ml beer (good, dark British ale. Not pissy lager, not even Mexican)
1 tbsp Bisto powder or similar (see notes)
1 large onion, roughly chopped
1tbsp tomato puree
2 big tsp whole cumin seeds
2 big tsp oregano
2 big tsp ground coriander
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 beef stock cube
1 tbsp Worcester sauce
½ tbsp tomato ketchup
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tbsp olive oil
One large red and one large green pepper, or combination of colours if they're smaller chopped chunkily (yeah, I just made that word up, but you know what it means so get over it or fuck off)
2 or more fresh chillies (see later), finely chopped including seeds
Tin of kidney beans (See notes below)
Balsamic vinegar
Dark soy sauce
1 tsp ground cumin
A small piece of your immortal soul (optional, but don't expect your chilli to be truly great without it)

TIMING
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking time: Upwards of 2 hours


RECIPE
Brown your meat. No, that's not a euphemism, I mean stick the mince in a pan on the hob and heat it until it's cooked. Drain off the fat in a sieve. Tip it back in the pan and add the tomatoes plus half the beer and bring to a gentle boil.

Mix up the Bisto in a cup with a little remaining beer to make a slurry and pour it in and stir well. Add the onion (uncooked) and stir in the tomato puree. Add the spices and the stock cube and mix in well, adding the rest of the beer.

 The spices
From 11 o'clock: cumin seeds, coriander, smoked paprika and oregano

In a separate pan, fry the garlic in the olive oil for a minute or so and stir into the mixture. Add the peppers, chillies, beans and two teaspoons of balsamic vinegar, then let it stew on a low heat for at least an hour and a half, enough time for the onion to become transparent and peppers to become tender.

Taste it (the chilli, not the vinegar, you fuckwit). It should have a good balance of sweetness and tang so you can add a drop more balsamic or Worcester if necessary. Also, if it seems a bit wishy-washy (similar, I would imagine, to the aforementioned sex with William Hague, though far less unarousing) add a splash of soy sauce to give the whole stew more umami, the meaty flavour that is the recently discovered companion to salt, sweet, sour and bitter sensing tastebuds on the tongue.

You may need to boil off some of the liquid as it starts closer to soup than a stew, but also this helps concentrate the flavour. It should still be quite runny. Before serving add the spoonful of ground cumin.

In da pan

This makes easily enough for four people with some left over for lunch the next day. It serves well with  plain boiled rice or baked potatoes.


NOTES
Chillies
The clue's in the name: chilli with meat. This recipe needs to be hot, as hot as you can stand it. If you have a bowl of this and aren't sweating like an art dealer trying to shift the last few Rolf Harris pieces in his inventory on the day of the verdict, you've made it wrong. You may experience what feels like actual hellfire spewing from your arse the next day, this means you've done it right. The depth and complexity of the chilli heat and flavour increases if you use different types of chilli: fresh ones of different types (jalapeno, bullets, fingers, birds eye), dried (chilli powder, cayenne, chilli flakes, dried chipotle), chilli sauces (for example Tabasco, Cholula, Encona Hot Pepper sauce) or pickled chillies like jalapenos. Obviously, you need to make it as hot as the person with the lowest chilli tolerance you're feeding. For example, I need to tone down my preparation to accommodate my wife and toddler son and add more chilli to my own portion. On the other hand, if I was making it for myself it would have enough chilli to register the next day on the Beaufort, the Richter and the Bristol Stool scales as well as having a shit-load of zeros on the Scoville scale when you're actually eating it. Science fact: heat of chillies is due to a compound called capsaicin which is actually neurotoxic.

Oh, and also, remember not to touch your genitals for any reason after you've been chopping chillies unless you think thrush just isn't painful enough

Beer
It has got to be a dark, British ale because it needs the richness this comes with. If you use lager in it, you might as well piss in the pan. Cheap supermarket own brand bitter in cans does the trick but if I want to make it that bit more special I add Shepherd Neame Bishop's Finger.

Kidney beans
You can use fresh beans, though I've never bothered. The reason is because if you don't prepare them properly you will be ill, and not in the good "Oooh, that chilli last night was bloody hot!" way. They've got a poison in them that is related to ricin, as favoured by eastern bloc spies, would-be terrorists and Walter White Sr. It's kind of ricin-lite

Bisto
A British staple of many a kitchen, the original Bisto gravy powder makes great gravy with meat juices if you do a roast, but adds some well needed richness and helps thicken up the sauce in this chilli. This is what I'm talking about:

Supermarkets will also do their own version. If all else fails, improvise with some cornflour, more soy and even some Marmite or similar yeast extract.

DO NOT PUT CHOCOLATE IN THIS RECIPE!
Is it called chilli con carne y chocolate? No it's not. Neither is it mole and it's definitely not a fucking dessert. Leave the cocoa for the nighttime drink of nursing home residents. If you do put chocolate in this dish, I will find you and I will kill you.

Pulled pork

Not that long ago if you threw a shitty stick down the magazine aisle in Smith's you'd render at least three different magazines containing a recipe for pulled pork unsalable due to contamination with faecal matter. The recipes were everywhere. It's probably less popular now but I thought I'd give it a go because a: I've tried it in a restaurant and the way it melted in my mouth was like pig-flavoured chocolate and b: the name gives the potential to make more double entendres than you can shake the aforementioned shitty stick at, which is ideal for a blog such as this. Combining this with elements of the dish conchinita pibil (slow-roasted pork in banana leaves with orange), originating from the Yucatan in Mexico, and it is potentially a great way to do pork. This was one of my favourite dishes while we were on holiday there.
I fused a recipe from Simon Rimmer (another great opportunity for double entendres) and one for conchinita pibil to produce my version.

INGREDIENTS
Pork rub (ooer, matron)
1-1.5 kg pork shoulder (boneless, rolled. Needs to have plenty of fat in order to keep the meat moist)
1tsp ground coriander
1tsp ground cumin
1tsp dried oregano
1tsp smoked paprika
1tsp chiptole paste
2 garlic cloves, crushed
Juice of half a lime
1tbsp olive oil

Cooking liquid
2 medium onions, thickly sliced
3 cloves of garlic, sliced
1 large orange, juiced and husks retained
200ml cider
50ml white wine vinegar (or cider vinegar)
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

RECIPE
Dry off the pork joint with kitchen roll. You could use a hair dryer if torrential diarrhoea is your thing, but I'll stick to the paper towels personally.

Mix together the coriander, cumin. oregano, smoked paprika, garlic, chipotle and lime juice to make a paste and rub it into the pork.

Rubbed and ready for the fridge

Cover and put in the fridge and leave it overnight if possible, or for at least a couple of hours.

Put it in a roasting tin with the onions, the rest of the garlic and the orange husks.

Mix together the cider, orange juice, vinegar and Worcester sauce.

Pour the liquid over the meat, cover the tin tightly with foil and replace to the fridge for another hour or two

Remove from the fridge and put it into the oven at 140 to 150°C.

Roast for at least 3 hours like this.

Under the foil, 3 hours in

Remove the foil and turn the oven up to 220° for 15 minutes to finish the meat off.

Take out of the oven and allow to rest for 20 minutes

I admit this recipe takes a frigging long time, but that's the idea: cook it long and slow so the meat stays moist and tender.

Serve the meat by tearing it apart with two forks in the cooking liquid so it stays moist and bathed in the unctuous, tangy cooking liquor.

You could serve this as a twist to the pork in a Sunday roast, but it really  as something a bit more exotic with buns and coleslaw.

Ready to serve on a bun
(with homemade coleslaw and potato wedges)

NOTES
As I mention, you serve the pork by shredding it with a pair of forks. This is the somewhat disappointing reason it's called "pulled", because you pull it apart, and not because of some revolutionary cooking technique like "jerking", or even an obscene reference to Rebecca Loos. Anyway, the point is there's no need for any of that carving shit. In fact, I do wonder if the dish originated as something to cook for people who weren't allowed to have knives. I served it up with roasted butternut squash and  sweet potato wedges which meant the whole meal had a similar colour to Dale Winton (I believe the Dulux colour chart calls it "Genial Host Orange"), not that this ought to put you off.

One further tip: feel free to take the words "cumin", "paprika", "pulled", "pork" and "Rimmer" and you too can make your own schoolboy-humour cookery blog.