Twelve-Vegetables Tagine with Couscous and Unnecessary Lamb Chop

Slowly the ranks are thinning out in winter vegetables…. Today’s dish contributes and is inspired by a recipe from “Vegetarian Cooking for Guests” by Celia Brooks Brown, a book that makes it easy to keep even larger parties happy meatless. If only those lamb chops hadn’t smiled at me so….

I use

• About 400g braised vegetables (for me it was broccoli, fennel, leek, carrot, bell bell pepper, parsnip, celery, sunchoke, zucchini, onion).
• 1 tsp fennel seeds
• 1 tsp cumin in whole grains
• a dash of olive oil.

I clean the vegetables and cut them into rough pieces. Then everything goes into a baking dish and cooks in a preheated oven at 220° for about 40 minutes (stirring from time to time. I remove the sunchoke pieces after a while, as they remain quite hard, and add them to the following sauce).

• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 tomatoes, peeled and in pieces
• 100g chickpeas (from the jar, because as usual I did NOT soak the dried ones yesterday)
• 3 dried figs, in pieces
• 6 dried apricots, in pieces
• juice and peel of one blood orange
• 150 ml red wine
• some vegetable juice
• salt
• a small cinnamon stick
• some olive oil

Garlic and vegetables are briefly sweated, then the liquid ingredients are added and the mixture thickens in 30 minutes. I added the vegetable juice afterwards because the dish seemed too dry to me.

10 minutes before the end of the vegetable cooking time I put

• 2 small lamb chops (100g each)

in the pan and fry them first hot, then continue over low heat. Towards the end I season with pepper, salt, oregano, thyme.

At the same time come

• 80g couscous
• 1 tablespoon currants
• juice and zest of 1/2 lemon
• a little saffron
• a little salt
• 2 tbsp pumpkin seeds

in 160 ml of boiling water. I take the pot immediately from the plate. It is enough if the couscous swells for 10 minutes.

Now everything is ready at the same time and can be served on preheated plates. The vegetable mixture harmonizes excellently with the fruity tones of the citrus and the dried fruits and the fennel seeds add real flavor spikes.

The lamb chops were also good, but we wouldn’t have needed them with such a variety of flavors. Well, as small as they were, it almost stays with the vegetarian dish ;)

tagine with 12 vegetables, couscous, photorealistic, very detailed, octane rendering