Two-Hour Tagine

Today was my first day back at work and it started about 0400h when some of the contents of my stomach (bile, mostly) poured up my oesophagus and down my trachea and into my lungs, causing me to wake up spluttering and gasping for breath, shortly followed by the beginnings of an asthma attack - thankfully this one passed pretty easily but my chest has been tight all day and I've felt tired. I went into work quite late, enjoying the late morning sun as I walked up through the Hoe Park with the most beautiful view of the sea behind me - it really made me enjoy the walk compared to walking past the discarded sofas, dog-poo and mattresses on North Road West!

Today was mostly spent doing admin and the usual fire-fighting that goes with "Monday" in my experience.

I left work pretty late to make up for the late start, popped to Sainsbury's as I realised I had no peppers and so on and I wanted to use up what I thought was some lamb shoulder in a tagine. I got home and found it was actually boneless leg joint and really too good for a tagine but I had the idea in my head and that was that. I'm not going to post a detailed recipe as I kind of made it up as I went along but it's damn nice! Basically I just plastered the lamb in ras al hanout and left it for 20 minutes whilst I chopped onions, garlic, potatoes (La Ratte and Red King Edwards), sweet potatoes (Murasaki), some floppy courgettes from the bottom of the fridge, a green pepper and a couple of tomatoes...oh and a chilli... I threw the onions into my biggest cooking pot and meanwhile hacked the lamb up into 2" chunks with my meat cleaver (whilst thinking up "look at the size of my chopper" jokes...SUCH a child...) and put that into the pan too, then all of the vegetables and gave it a stir, then added a couple of cans of cherry tomatoes and two lamb stock cubes (the horridly high-salt Knorr ones). I made my usual tagine spice mix from peppercorns (and yes, long pepper catkins), ginger, turmeric, smoked hot paprika and cinnamon stick and added a tablespoon full of that, brought it all to the boil and then whacked it in the oven at 160C for 1h.

It was delicious and I feel a bit full now - there's enough for lunch AND dinner tomorrow too! Photos to follow. If I was doing it again, I would roll the lamb in honey before adding the ras al hanout.