Lamb tagine

Among the things I decided to make while I was doing all that cooking was a lamb tagine. Of course, that day was already full so I kept the tagine for day two, and we actually ate some of the lamb from the freezer. Yay us!

I actually chose the tagine recipe that I didn't mean to. I meant to make the one with the preserved lemons and olives, but when choosing quickly... oops.

So I had made this recipe with pears and shallots before, but I wasn't too excited with how it came out. I hoped it would be better this time.

I always forget how much work it is to debone the lamb shoulder steaks. But it really does. So after getting a stiff neck, I had a nice pile of lamb nuggets.

You sear the lamb in your tagine, add a ton of onions, ground ginger, ground cinnamon, water, and saffron threads. Then you cover it and let it simmer away.

While that's doing its thing, you blanch a pound of shallots for five minutes, dump the water and completely stain your sink which, happily, the cleaning folks have made white again. Then you peel the shallots, cutting the roots and tips with a paring knife against your thumb, from which you get a lot of cuts which do hurt when piled together like that, but happily, those are healing.

Then you halve the really big shallots and at the hour and a half mark of simmering, add them to the tagine.

From there, the tagine continues to simmer. You take three pears, slice them into about six pieces each, taking out the seeds, and saute them in butter. I swear I never remembered all this separate sauteing so either I blocked it out of my head or I just never did it. Anyway, once the pears are sauteed and a little brown, if they are soft, you add them to the tagine at serving. But mine weren't, so I added them to the tagine to cook and soften, about fifteen minutes.

At the same time, I had been cooking down some dried apricots with water to which I added a touch of honey and some butter. It goes nicely with the lamb.

All served up!

We had whole wheat couscous from Dekalb Farmers Market in the cabinet. So Josh made up a batch of that and it was time to eat! Pretty damn tasty, too. Lots of shallots. Maybe we could cut it down next time.