February 2012

squash, okra & chickpea tagine with apricots & cherries

There are a couple of reasons why this fragrant tagine from ‘for the love of food’ is recipe of the month. The main one is because I’ve had two emails over the winter from intrepid reader/cooks of the book, pointing out that there is no instruction as to when the vegetables are added to the main body of the stew. Being smart cooks, both correspondents figured it out easily enough. Still, it needs fixing, so here is a corrected version of the recipe for you to cut out and paste into your copy of ‘for the love…’.

One other change to the recipe is the way the courgette is cooked before being added to the tagine. I’ve suggested here that it be flash-fried to give it a bit of colour while remaining crunchy, allowing it to finish cooking in the stew itself. The general idea of combining the three vegetables in this way is to have two of them slow-stewed meltingly into the tagine while the third – okra in this instance – brings a crisp, lightly cooked freshness to the finished dish.

Why squash, courgette and okra, though?, says ‘perplexed of Tooting Bec’. Indeed…good question from the back of the class there. The only true answer is simply that that is how it came out on the day I made it and wrote it down. It’s a peculiar aspect of recipe-writing, especially when it involves a dish you make variations on frequently, using whatever happens to be around the kitchen. And depending on who is eating it – children or chilli fiends? Then one day you set it in stone by putting it down on paper. Next day you go back to making random versions, change the spices and the vegetables, alter how long it stays in the oven, and whether the orange zest is finely grated and left in or done in large slices of peel that are removed at the end. That’s why the best recipe books are useful guides rather than instructions for scientific procedures.

I wrote a version of this for the Paradiso kitchen recently, titled “thingy, chickpea and whatsit tagine”. And maybe that’s how it should have been published too, though I’m not sure it would have got past the editor, who might have wanted to know how and for how long the whatsit was cooked, if indeed it was to be cooked at all.

When you pull the recipe apart, though, this is what it is: a chickpea stew in a Moroccan-flavoured tomato sauce, with two or three vegetables added, each cooked in its own appropriate way. I’m making it for dinner tonight, with some roasted cauliflower and carrots and some lightly sauteed green pepper stirred in at the end. I’ll be serving it with a dollop of yoghurt on top, harissa on the side and a warm naan bread. Or lemony couscous and a sprinkling of feta? Hmm…