Difficulty Level Easy

When I used my new tagine for the first time, I got nervous about putting this beautiful clay pot right on the heating element of the stove, so I put it in the oven. This time I decided to be brave and I cooked it stove top and I think the vegetarian stew turned out better. It's conical top is designed so that it is cool at the top, so you get a constant cycle of evaporating and condensing which keeps the food extremely moist. For that reason, it's best if you keep the lid on as much as possible. When you put it in the oven, the entire top gets hot, so you lose the benefit of the tagine design. I also suspect that keeping your pot on a very low stove heat for an hour and a half uses much less energy than keeping it in the oven for that period of time. If you don't have a tagine, you can use a slow cooker as well.

I've read a lot of recipes for tagines since I got this pot, and the method is pretty much the same all the time, the difference is really just the ingredients and spicing you decide to use. You spread some olive or vegetable oil around the bottom of the dish and line it with a layer of onions, then a layer of potatoes. Then you put the rest of your ingredients together with a spice mix and pour that on top of the onions and potatoes. Add 2 or 3 cups of water or vegetable stock and cook over a very low heat for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. You can serve it over couscous, or rice, if you like. For this tagine I used chickpeas, red and green peppers, carrots, mushrooms and apricots, but the important thing was the spice mix. It's a wonderful, effortless way to cook, and the spices will make your house smell fantastic.

I looked for a recipe for Ras el Hanout, which is a traditional spice mixture in Moroccan food. It seems that it is like Indian curry, each cook has their own mix. I chose to use this recipe because I had all of the ingredients in my spice cupboard already except mace, which I left out. These are all easily obtainable spices while some recipes I found call for things like dried rosebuds and orrisroot, which sounds like too much work to find. I added salt to this, because we all agreed the the resulting tagine was delicious, but needed a bit of salt.

INGREDIENTS