Improvised Tagine like thing that works well if I've lots of guests, one or more of whome are vegan.

How I improvise a Tagine style of thing if i've got a bunch of gamers coming round goes like this:

Get more or less equal amounts of all of these things:

Butternut Squash, Sweet Potato, Carrots, any coloured peppers you like, Chickpeas, Tomatoes (a mix of tinned and real is best), Onions.

Drain the Chickpeas, rince, clean and slice the rest of the above into D20 sized chunks or slightly larger, except for the onions which want to be smaller.

Get smaller, but not insignificant amounts of these, maybe a small handful of each:

Figs, Apricots, dried or fresh, a combination of dried and fresh is good. Slice it all up. Garlic, crush some cloves of garlic, but at least one bulb you can just slice in half.

Throw all of the above into a flat tray so it stacks up to about 5cm and chuck flaked almonds in there as well. Fuck it, chuck some pomegranate seeds or other some random fruit in there too. It’ll probably work out fine.

Ras el hanout! – Turmeric, Cumin, crushed Black Pepper, Salt, Smoked Paprica, Cayenne Pepper. Slice a whole big chilli, remove seeds or leave them in if you like or some of the nice dried chilli flakes you can get in MMM in the Grainger Market in Newcastle. Some fresh bunches of stuff if you have it, like Thyme, Coriander or parsley. A Bay leaf or two is probably useful in an undefined way. Lots of spices shaken on top of this all.

Sorry, I don’t know how to be vegan: I’d also usually add honey and some butter. There are tricks that vegans know I’m sure. I have heard of fig paste? I think this might be a good idea.

Anyway.

Pour on hot water and vegetable stock. By now you’ve completely overdone the spices. Fine. Stick it in the oven such that the water starts to bubble then turn it down to about 150/160 for a long time – two hours plus.

At the end you want it not to be watery, so if it’s looking too watery after an hour and a half turn up the heat a bit. There shouldn't be pools of water at the end, stir it round a bit so the chickpeas can absorb stuff. If it starts to burn on top you can stir it about a bit or put tin foil loosely over the top. If you still end up with water you don't want to waste that so use it to make the couscous.

This feeds many, many people and serve it with couscous.

Stacey Whittle has demonstrated that the best way to do couscous is to have it with chopped mint and coriander and pomegranate seeds.

Level UP!

This may end up looking like a mess, particularly if you've burned bits of it or left it too long and it goes a bit gooey. You can fix this and win the game by wrapping scoops of tagine-esq in filo pastry parcels, sprinkling caster sugar and almonds on top and return to the oven to cook the pastry. Caster sugar: absolutely.

This will provide a good contrasting texture to keep things interesting while also allowing it to not look like a complete mess. That's helpful.

Carrot Muffins

I have successfully made muffins. Last year I tried to make banana and blueberry muffins, they didn't work out. The muffins were strangely rubbery in texture. This put me off making muffins for quite a while, until earlier this week when I realised that we had a lot of carrots about to go. Enter the savoury muffin, or at least savoury was the plan, this is actually really nice as a semi sweet too. I have decided to call them carrot and olive oil as you can very much taste the olive element in a very good way. Use good olive oil, it's worth it.

Carrot and Olive Oil Muffins

This recipe makes about 12 muffins depending on what size cases you're using.

You will need:

• 150ml olive oil
• 90g brown or caster sugar (I used golden caster)
• 1 egg
• 4 tablespoons milk
• 225g carrot, roughly grated
• A handful of sunflower seeds
• A handful of flaked almonds
• 150g whole flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Get a muffin tray ready, line it with paper cases. Preheat your oven to 190°C.

Put the oil, sugar and egg into a bowl and mix together, then add the carrot, milk, sunflower seeds and almonds. Stir the mixture well.

So that's your wet ingredients out of the way. In another bowl combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, coriander and salt. Now for the fun part, introduce the two, don't be too formal about it. Pour in the ingredients from the wet bowl and stir lightly, until just combined. You don't want to knock the air out of this mixture, you want to hardly stir at all. 

Pop a couple of spoonfuls of mixture into each muffin case. I filled mine level with the top of the case as they don't rise very much. I had visions of it overflowing everywhere as it cooked, this didn't happen. Cook for 30 - 35 minutes, you're looking for them to rise and spring back lightly when pressed. For extra security I also stuck a skewer in the middle of the largest one at this point to see if it had cooked through. If the skewer comes out clean then they're done. Remove them from the oven and let them sit in the tray for about 10 minutes before moving to a cooling rack.

Now enjoy.

Crusted Lamb : Part 2

So this is what it looked like:

Christmas does get in the way of things doesn't it?

Anyway, the lamb went in the oven for a long time on a low heat and came out pretty good: a little bit pinker in the middle than some of my guests were prepared for, but hey, that's what the end pieces are for.

So yes, it worked pretty well, the crust didn't really stick - as you can see in the picture, it fell off on one side, so a little better preparation and care beforehand might have helped.

Also, the stuff I put in the crust mix plus samphire ended up making the whole thing very salty, probably a little bit too salty to be honest, but that's easy to tone down, and I was a little unambitious with the almonds, too: more would have worked really well.

This will be better next time, but by no means a failure: it all got eaten.

Crusted Lamb : Part 1

Ok, so I've got visitors tomorrow, and it's going to be a moroccan stew and couscous in the tagine, but cooked outside of the tagine I wanted to do a crusted rack of lamb as i'd seen one done on a cookery show recently.

Couldn't find a recipe was the kind of thing I was after though, a sort of haphazard sweet and savoury moroccan affair. Also, the recipe's online don't seem to agree on which order to sear, apply crust, and slow cook and if you can at any point refrigerate. So I took advice from Alison and Ian Mayor, it seemed wise.

My crust ingredients are...

Dry things for crustiness:

Almonds, Pine Nuts, Breadcrumbs, Black Pepper, Salt, Turmeric, Paprica, probably some other things that came to hand. I can't remember.

Wet things for sticking the crustiness to the lamb:

Olive Oil, Mustard, Sun Dried Tomato Paste, Harissa.

I've hammered all that together, seared the lamb on both sides, but mostly the fat side then applied a paste made mostly of the wet things. Then poured the remainder of the dry things on top. This is what it looked like:

It's now wrapped in clingfilm and waiting for tomorrow in the fridge. I'll let you know how it goes.

My intention, is to serve it with slices of orange, samphire and balsamic. Not sure if that's odd, but it's what i'm going to do.