Moroccan Out

An email from the library inspired this past Sunday’s dinner of a Moroccan Beef Tagine, or basically a beef stew with a hard hit of eastern spices. This stew blends together spice and sweetness that when topped over the nutty flavour of couscous was all kinds of tasty. The recipe is from Jamie Oliver’s Food Escapes, a recent addition to the Jamie Oliver collection where he travelled to Morocco, Stockholm, Venice, France, Greece and Spain in search of inspiration. I would say overall I was not overwhelmed with a plethora of recipes I want to try from the book, but there were a few that caught my eye. I am glad it was free from the library though and a lot of the recipes can be found online at Jamie Oliver’s website.

Now for the alterations:

If there is one herb that is not welcomed into this household it has to be fresh coriander. The somewhat soapy taste of the herb can add a fresh vibrancy to a meal but does not please everyone’s pallet. All of that to say I left out the coriander in this recipe. Substituting some fresh flat leaf parsley may also add that nice fresh hit.

This recipe calls for prunes. We did not have prunes, and to be honest I am not sure what part of the store they are sold in. We do however have a boat load of raisins, not enough for big boat but enough to fill a dingy. So to replace the sweet flavour the prunes would be adding I threw in some raisins instead.

Lastly the recipe called for a table spoon of ras el hanout spice, which the cookbook describes as a mixture of anywhere from 10 to 100 spices ranging from tumeric to smoked paprika. The mix of spices, outside of this foreign mixture of unknown substances, was more than enough to coat the beef and had extra to dump into the stew once all the liquid was added.

Recipe: Jamie Oliver’s Beef Tagine