Back to Finland -- but the cooking doesn't stop. We had some friends over yesterday, and I made a lamb and sausage tagine -- a sort of a Moroccan stew cooked in a clay dish covered by a conical clay lid; looks like this:
The nice thing is that you can get extremely creative with the ingredients; there's enormous room for variations and no real strict recipes. Here's roughly what I did this time -- and no, it's not entirely faithful to Moroccan cuisine:
Ingredients:
* Four small chorizo sausages (merguez would be even better; any spiced sausage works well, milder ones like bratwurst would probably work best with chicken)
* About 600 grams (a pound and a half) of shoulder of lamb, cut into chunks
* Half a turnip (about 300 grams)
* Three medium potatoes
* A lemon (Maghreb-style
pickled lemon would be even better, but I didn't have any)
* Two onions
* A garlic bulb
* A bunch of coriander
* A bunch of leaf celery (I'd have preferred flat-leaf parsley, but couldn't find any)
* A chunk of fresh ginger
* A half-tin of chick peas (dried and soaked chick peas would be even better)
* Olive oil
* White wine (definitely non-Moroccan here, but it makes it tastier)
* Ras el-Hanout -- means "best in the shop" -- which is a spice mix made with whatever is to hand; I used cinnamon, cardamom pods, black pepper, a bit of fenugreek, a dried chili, some cumin, a few threads of saffron, some turmeric, and some sweet paprika, plus a few juniper berries that I discovered in the spice cupboard. But this is anything but exact; I'd say that the cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, and turmeric are the only indispensable ingredients, and almost any Indian spices (used in moderation) work well in the mix. Coriander seed, mustard seed, fennel seed, star anise, green, pink, or white pepper, even vanilla... the main idea is that it's a complex and fragrant mix.
So.
Carefully wash the lemon, and cut into thinnish slices. Salt the slices on a plate and set aside. Pour a generous splash of olive oil into the tagine dish (no lid), and put it in a medium-heat oven to heat up. Add the chunks of meat, and switch the oven to "grill" mode (still no lid), to brown it.
While it's browning, cut the onion into thin slices and the root veggies into cubes about the size of a d6 or a bit bigger; peel and slice the ginger into thin slices, and peel the garlic cloves. Set the onion aside and combine the other stuff.
When the meat has browned on one side, turn it over, and add the onion slices to the dish. Toss a few times in the olive oil.
When the meat has browned on the other side and the onion is looking translucent, remove the tagine plate from the oven, and add the cubed root vegetables with garlic and ginger on top of the meat. If using dried and soaked chick peas, add them now too. Sprinkle the ras el-hanout, and pour a generous glass of wine on top of the whole, until you can clearly see the liquid at the bottom of the dish. Cover and return to the oven, setting the mode back to regular and lowering the heat to medium (about 175 C).
Cook for about an hour and a half. Check periodically to make sure the liquid hasn't all boiled away; add if necessary. (If it shows a tendency to boil away, the oven is too hot; lower the heat as necessary.)
Chop the sausage into chunks and add to the dish (don't mix). Then take the lemon slices, and arrange them on top of the meat, sausages, and veggies. Return to the oven, and cook for another hour.
If using tinned chick peas, add them now. Sprinkle with chopped coriander and celery leaves (or flat parsley), and cook for another half-hour.
Serve with couscous or burghul and, if you like, a salad -- Joanna did a fennel and cucumber salad with vinegar, salt, and black pepper; the traditional thing would probably be sliced tomatoes with fresh coriander, olive oil, and salt. Moroccans also serve this kind of thing with "harissa" -- a very hot chili paste. It's something of an acquired taste, though, so it's no big loss if you can't get hold of any.
If you don't happen to have a tagine knocking around the kitchen, the dish turns out quite nice in any old earthenware pot -- you might have to blanch the onions on a frying pan, though, because it's not all that easy to work inside a deep pot. Under extreme duress you could even do it in a cast-iron pot on the stove, rather than in the oven -- but by then it'll be more of a stew inspired by a tagine than something actually approximating one. Still good, though.
As to the "substitutions," you can use chicken or fish instead of the meat, or make a completely vegetarian tagine with e.g. eggplant and olives; you can add tomatoes (fresh or tinned) and/or tomato purée to make a very different kind of dish; you can use fresh herbs like thyme or rosemary instead of coriander and parsley to make another variation... your imagination is the limit. I love tagines, because they're dead easy to make, they never fail, and they always impress.
N.b. for Corwin -- you can use fresh, unsalted lemon slices as well. Won't be quite the same, but still quite close. That way this will be a completely salt-free recipe, except the salt in the sausages, which, of course, you can also omit (or substitute with chicken pieces).