My family totally spoiled me for mothers day. I’m lucky just to have them, but they gave me a special day and some special gifts! In this post I commented about Monte giving me a lovely gift.

Monte gave me a tagine. And a coffee maker. The tagine is a very pretty thing and I like it very much. Apparently I have been raving about my father’s cooking and his tagine since I returned from Adelaide. Dad cooks with some sensational moroccan spices. Yum!

Tonight I cooked with my tagine for the first time. I based my cooking on Jamie Oliver’s recipe, which can be found here.

I did sway a bit from Oliver’s recipe because I didn’t have all the ingredients on hand. For example, I didn’t use fresh coriander, which would’ve picked up the dish a bit.

It was really delicious though. Here’s what I did:

Beef Tagine based on Jamie Oliver’s recipe
Ingredients
::600g diced stewing steak (Ernie)
::1/4 tsp each of: ground coriander seeds; ground cumin: sweet paprika; ground ginger; garam marsala; cardamom; cinnamon.
:: 1 diced onion
:: 1 can chickpeas, drained
:: 1 400g diced tomatoes
:: 2/3 cup pitted dates, chopped coarsely and soaked in water for 10 minutes.

Method
:: 3-24 hours before cooking, mix the spices and toss meat through. Leave meat in spice mixture in the fridge, wrapped in cling wrap.
:: in the base of the tagine, brown the meat in olive oil on the cooktop.
:: add onions and cook until softened
:: add chickpeas and tomatoes. Place the lid on the tagine and simmer on low-medium heat for 2-3 hours.
:: add dates and simmer for 30-60 minutes or until dish has thickened. If it’s too runny, you can take the lid off the tagine and simmer gently.

Traditionally you would serve a tagine with Cous Cous. We served ours with: surprise! Cabbage. The children also had rice with theirs.

Jamie Oliver adds fresh coriander and almonds. He also cooks the dish in vegetable stock. Mine had enough liquid without stock but a bit of stock powder mixed in with the juice of the tomatoes would’ve lifted the flavours. I don’t tend to cook with much salt.

Another idea is to cook this one the night before and reheat it. I think it would be even yummier after sitting around in the fridge for a day.

I also think the spices used can be varied. Moroccan flavours include several spices so you can’t really get it too wrong. You can buy Moroccan spice mixes around the traps and that’s probably work well too.

I found the tagine great to cook with! Thank you to my lovely family for spoiling me. I love the owls and the coffee machine and the tagine and I look forward to cooking many meals for you all.