Being the busy city dwellers that we are, it's been hard to find time lately to cook many 15 minute meals, let alone write about them. The summer has finally arrived in London and with it has come a variety of social events and al fresco temptations. I guess it's lucky I'm not doing 30 minute meals!
I did however manage to take advantage of a short window on Wednesday evening and chose this exotic lamb dish, primarily because it needed lots of tomatoes, of which our fridge is still rather full. In fact, incredibly, we had all the ingredients except for the meat, aubergines, pistachios and yoghurt - a sign, I guess, of how far I am into this challenge. There have been a few meals which I have already cooked which have basically been "cheats" versions of traditionally slow (or at least differently) cooked meals. My mind is drawn to the glazed pork fillets which I felt would have been much better with a slower cooked cut of pork, and the Chicken Dim Sum where, in my opinion, the 15 minute buns did not work. Here we have a "tagine", which would normally take a good 2 hours to cook. There's even a authentic Jamie Oliver version which I found online where he recommends infusing the meat with spices overnight.
So how, I hear you ask, could you possibly pull this off in 15 minutes?! Basically the meat is fried off on it's own, while the veg is cooked separately in it's own juices, with water and oil. Extra flavour is injected by saffron and preserved lemons. All of which basically means it's not a tagine at all - the tagine actually being the pot in which all the ingredients are stewed together. The cooking was fraught with the usual space related frustrations, but there was one additional difficulty, with the very first instruction of the book: our lack of a crucial piece of kitchen equipment. I resisted the temptation to ask a neighbour for use of their microwave and instead sucked up the extra half hour or so it took to cook the aubergine in the oven.
We end up with a big plate of cous cous, some chunks of lamb and some veg in a smoky, lemony sauce. It's ok but not spectacular. The lamb lacks flavour (it always does cooked this way regardless of how much garam masala you pound into it) but the veg is quite nice and fragrant. The cumin crunch is a surprisingly good accompaniment. Crucially though, it's not a tagine. It just doesn't have the same richness or depth of flavour. I'm sure Jamie would recommend cooking his overnight version if you have the time and I suspect it would be amazing - but I guess "16 hour meals" doesn't have the same ring to it...
Lolz gave the dish 7/10. Difficulty rating 6/10.
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