Moroccan cuisine is rich with influences that betray the country’s history as a strategically important place, with distinct Arabic influences laid over more obvious North African traits. There’s also Moorish and European influence in there, too, pointing to Morocco’s closeness to Spain, and its position as a gateway to southern Europe. The tagine is emblematic [...]
I’ve had some success in the past with tagines of lamb or mutton, flavoured with the mysterious North African spice blend, ras-el-hanout. The tagine is suited well to this time of year, when long, slow cooking suddenly seems appropriate again. Ras-el-hanout is the garam masala of the North African and Middle Eastern world, a combination [...]
My regular Asian supermarket had a huge pile of chopped mutton shoulder, displayed in that haphazard way characteristic of those sort of places, so I took a kilo without really knowing what to do with it. I vaguely remembered Gordon Ramsey banging on about mutton (underrated, hardly used, etc) and doing something North African with [...]