Lamb tfaya, nothing twrite home about

Our next book is Arabesque by Claudia Roden:

The recipe I chose has an unprepossessing title, 'Couscous with Lamb, Onions and Raisins', but sounded insanely delicious from the description: 'the special feature of this dish is the exquisite mix of caramelized onions, honey and raisins called tfaya which is served as a topping to the long-cooked, deliciously tender meat'.

The thought of all that, together with some couscous, and maybe some bread to soak up the meat broth, and a nice glass of red, spurred me on.

One immediately striking thing about the preparation of the dish is that the lamb is poached, not roasted. So you start by putting boned leg of lamb ($39 at McCaffreys!) into a Dutch Oven with water, and unusual seasonings: ginger, cinnamon, cloves.

This should cook for a couple of hours, with saffron being added half an hour before the end. I should say right now that two hours wasn't long enough; the lamb was still a little tough, and definitely not 'meltingly tender', or whatever the description was.

The tfaya was fun to prepare. Start by cooking down nearly 3 lb of onions with butter and oil:

5.00 p.m.

5.15 p.m.

6.30 p.m.

Soak some raisins:

Then add some honey, the raisins, and some cinnamon to the now caramelized onions:

7.30 p.m.

 Keep on cooking!

8.00 p.m. VERY sticky!

In the meantime, take the meat out of the broth:

Not very appetising...

And strain the broth:

One other crucial ingredient is fried almonds:

Too much! It's just a garnish!

So now for the all important preparation of the dish. Start with some lamb:

 Surround with couscous:

 Cover with tfaya:

 Sprinkle on a few fried almonds and pour round the broth:

It looks good! But the lamb was just not quite right. It tasted OK, but it was a little tough. The broth was very fragrant and the tfaya was indeed exquisite: like an explosion of sweet chutney. But I think next time I will use lamb shoulder not leg, and I will cook it for longer. The real giveaway was that we had some leftovers in the fridge which did not get eaten and had to be thrown away a few days later. Not a hit. But not a disaster either.

Moro x 2

A double header! I decided to take a week off work at the end of August and thought I might try making a soup for our lunches. It was time for this cookbook, a very special one for us:

Why is it special? Because it was one of the first gifts Katherine gave me! (The inscription is too rude to post here.) We've done recipes from it before, and they have always been rather unusual and introduced new tastes and combinations into our normal cooking routines. This time round was no exception. So, for the soup. I chose "Hassan's celery and white bean soup with tomato and caraway".

The key ingredient of this dish is CELERY. Take one bunch of celery, leaves and all:

Wait no, I'm getting ahead of myself. Start by heating up the cannellini beans:

 Then, while they're heating, cook the chopped celery with lots of olive oil:

Celery pieces are looking too big

Then crush caraway seeds:

And add the seeds to the celery, with garlic and scallions:

Definitely too big

Already looks good, huh? Cook until caramelised, add then add blanched, peeled, seeded, and chopped tomatoes:

  

Still too big

 Then add the beans:

They're not getting any smaller

But the best bit of all comes at the end. Serve the soup in bowls, drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice, accompanied by scallions and black olives, and pita:

Aren't the celery pieces too big?

We had the soup for a couple of lunches, and it was always good. But we agreed that I should have chopped the celery into smaller pieces: some mouthfuls were just too dominated by the celery. (You ended up just chewing away on celery for far too long.)

Anyway, the soup was just a teaser. The main event was another recipe, Chicken and Prawn Romesco:

The basic idea behind this dish is braised chicken thighs with shrimp, in a tomato and paprika sauce mixed with crispy garlic and crushed almonds. Take your seasoned chicken pieces:

and brown them:

Then slice the garlic:

 and brown it:

This dish requires many different elements, as you can tell. Next, you take onions and, yes, brown them:

Next it's the shrimp's turn. Peel and devein the shrimp:

Then brown them - no, don't brown them! The recipe actually calls for pre-cooked Atlantic prawns to be thrown in at the last minute. Well, you just can't get small shrimp here in the States. Who would want to eat them when you have Gigantic Jumbo King shrimp? To prepare them, I made a quick stock with the shells:

And then poached the shrimp in it:

Next, take some fresh tomatoes and peel them:

Chop, and add them, with the onions (and paprika) to the chicken, along with other nice things, including brandy and bay leaves, and some shrimp stock:

This is a very long recipe. Now for the most interesting part of the dish. Make a picada by blending almonds and the garlic:

In case it's not obvious, these are the almonds before going into the blender...

Then stir the picada into the dish, add the shrimp, cook some rice, cook some broccoli, and you're ready:

That was a lot of work. The result was a typical Moro dish: lots of lovely flavours which sit on top of each other and vie for attention on the palate but which don't integrate (and maybe aren't even supposed to). Definitely one to try again, I think, not least because we eat a lot of chicken and it's good to vary the way we prepare it!