Beef and Orange Tagine

I mentioned when I did a previous tagine recipe that I really have a problem with sweet fruit in savoury recipes. I then completely had an arse-about-face moment and subsequently wrote up recipes for pineapple sambal and pineapple fried rice. However, that doesn't count because the sambal is a relish and the rice is an accompaniment. My blog, my rules. And that same rule is getting bent just a little bit more now with this with its actual orange content. Well, at least it's not apricots, prunes or raisins that not only don't deserve a place in any dish, savoury or sweet, but actually ought to be projected into the heart of the fucking sun because they are the very stones from the devil's own infernal gall bladder.

Regular guest star of this blog, Rick Stein, usually twats on endlessly about how he's made such-and-such a dish for years, after being taught how to cook it when he was staying at a chateau in France or something. Another famous chef, Nigel Slater, also seems to only cook things that he ate as a child just how his Mum made it. Recipes all done and dusted, all ingredients bought and prepared. However, in sweary cooking, you sometimes have to busk it a little, or, in the words of Blackadder, "Needs must when the devil vomits in your kettle". I'd planned on cooking up a nice lamb tagine but, could I find any lamb in my local shops? Could I bollocks! I bought some beef and decided to improvise this and it turned out quite well.

TIMING
Preparation 15-20 minutes
Cooking 3 hours

INGREDIENTS
2tbsp olive oil
400g cubed stewing beef
1 medium to large onion, roughly chopped
3 large cloves garlic, crushed
Zest and juice of one orange
1 courgette, sliced
2 large tsp ras-el-hanout
1 carrot, sliced
1 tbsp tomato puree
pinch saffron
250 ml water
1 chicken stock cube

RECIPE
 Heat the oil in a flame proof casserole dish or tagine on the hob.

Add the beef and brown before removing with a slotted spoon

Turn down the heat, add the onion and garlic to the pot and allow to sweat for 10 minutes.

Throw in the carrot and carry on frying gently for another 5 minutes

Add the courgette and ras-al-hanout for a minute return the meat to the dish then add the rest of the ingredients.

Mix well, replace the pot lid and put in an oven at 150 for three hours, checking every hour or so.

Add a little more water if the dish starts to get a bit dry.

Serve it up with something like couscous, with or without a nice Moroccan flat bread

NOTES
As I said in my preamble, I had planned to make a lamb tagine but I couldn't get any lamb. I got beef and then figured orange would go well with beef and worked from there. This recipe may actually work OK with lamb but I've not tried it.

Ras-el-hanout is one of those wanky-sounding spice mixes that are listed in ingredients of recipes like this when they appear in the Grauniad. I'm reliably informed that this means "top of the shop" in Arabic because it contains the best ingredients they sell in the local spice shop. In actuality it's essentially a variation on a mild curry powder, with an emphasis on aromatic rather than hot spices It's not that different to garam masala (yes, I realise that is another wanky-sounding spice mix, but it's a little less obscure), though if you do use garam masala, this dish will taste a lot like your regular curries.

You could blend your own R-e-H and there are lots of suggestions of which spices to use online, though I bought some from my fave Asian supermarket Mullaco which I swear by. Actually, given the nature of my cooking style, I swear by pretty much fucking everything

Whilst I actually enjoyed this dish, Mrs Sweary thought it was perhaps had a little too much orange, so you might consider halving the amount of orange zest. On the other hand I suspect Mrs Sweary is actually one of the crows from the Kia-Ora advert below. It's actually quite difficult to believe something like this was not only acceptable on UK TV in the 80s, and yet seems to be remembered with some fondness today. It's actually more racist that a UKIP member's wet dream. Whatever, the point is my beef tagine with orange is too orangey for Mrs Sweary. It's just for me and my dog.

I'll be your dog
More offensive black stereotypes than you can shake a burning cross at. But, hey, it's just to sell juice

Admit it, this the first cooking blog that has used the word "vomits" that you have read.

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?