Moroccan Lamb Tagine

Right, if I'm going to mess about with something like tagine I'm going all out and I'm going to make this as rich, whilst remaining as authentic, as possible. So I've researched a few recipes, a bit of history, checked up on a few individual ingredients and come up with my own recipe. I noticed that some of the recipes I found had ingredients that had obviously been thrown in for a Northern palate, and some omitted ingredients that really really should be in there. I've gone for a Moroccan lamb tagine recipe and tried to reflect Morocco's access to a wealth of spices and seasonings. Strictly speaking, preserved lemons are probably more often combined in chicken cuisines with olives. I've been looking for an excuse to make some for a while now though and lemon and honey or lemon and coriander seemed to kinda fit, also it would be a shame to waste the opportunity to work with such a classic Moroccan ingredient. I would have preferred to use neck of lamb because it's an awesome and often overlooked cut, but I couldn’t find any and shoulder did the job just as well. I'm not using shank in tagine though, as to me shank = a pot + red wine, onions, garlic, rosemary, cinnamon...

Ingredients
500g Lamb shoulder fillet
350g Tomato
1 large Onion
10 Dried apricots
small hand full of Sultanas (30g)
30 Blanched almonds
1/2 Preserved lemon
2 cloves Garlic
2 Chillis
1 tbsp Honey
2 tbsp Olive oil
1 pint Stock
1/2 tsp Saffron
2 tsp Cumin
1 1/2 Turmeric
1 tsp Ground cinnamon
2 tsp Paprika
a handful of Coriander leaves
a small handful of Mint leaves

Quite an impressive list, but I love this process of collecting and measuring out all the ingredients before I get started.

I put the oven on to 160degC to preheat and began by roughly chopping up my lamb into cubes about an inch or so thick and coating them in the cumin, turmeric, cinnamon and paprika.

I let this sit whilst I prepared the rest of my ingredients. This involved blanching, peeling and coring the tomato; I did this in a bowl so as not to lose any juice as I'll need that in a bit. The weight that will go in the actual pot will be 250g, I put 350g in the ingredients list to make sure I'd have enough after this. I diced the onion, thinly sliced the preserved lemon, minced the garlic and de-seeded and chopped the chillis.

I heated the oil in a pan and fried off the lamb making sure it was evenly coated in oil and browned all round before emptying it into my tagine pot.

Then I fried off my onions in the same pan until they had just begun to sweat and soften and poured in my tomato, juice and all, to cleanse the pan. I poured the onions and tomato over the lamb and then added all the other ingredients, minus the coriander and mint, finishing by pouring the stock all over and sprinkling on the saffron. I gave the whole thing a good stir, put the lid on and popped it in the oven for 3 hours. I think I stirred once in that time, more to satisfy my lust and curiosity for the aromas that were filling the kitchen than anything else.

I brought my pot to the table, tore up the coriander and mint leaves, threw them in the tagine and stirred them in before serving.

It was meltingly tender and incredibly juicy, it needs serving up with a bread to soak up all those juices. I suggest khoubz, which I'll post up the recipe for some other time.