Moroccan Lamb Tagine (with PARSNIPS!)

On my birthday the UPS man delivered a big brown box shipped from Williams Sonoma. Found buried deep within layers of protective packaging was a beautiful hand-painted Tunisian tagine! My mother sent it to me as a birthday gift. While I was in Morocco I had high hopes of bringing one home with me, but decided against it--the conical lid is bulky and the chances of it making it home in one piece were slim. I did bring home a Moroccan tagine cook book though...now I can make some of those recipes! (I may need to pull out my Arabic-English dictionary though because my Arabic is a little rusty and the recipes are all in Arabic).

The tagine is a heavy clay pot used for slow cooking of stews. It's like a Moroccan crock pot! The base is round with low sides, and its lid is conical with a hole in the top. The conical shape is supposed to return condensation (and hence moisture) to the dish. "Tagine" or "tajine" refers to both the clay pot that is used to cook the dish and also to the food--the dish itself. As I typed that sentence I realized that the word "tajine" is similar to the English word "dish" which similarly has two uses which can refer to either the vessel or to the food within the vessel.

the many ingredients that went in the tagine, photo by Erik

Sunday night with the help of my friend Erik, I made my first tagine. I printed out a few lamb tagine recipes and combined them together to make my own Frankenstein-creation. I made one minor mistake that turned the meal into a monstrous creation. Because I was pulling from multiple recipes I should have thought about changing the ratio of spices to rest of ingredients. We only used 1 lb of lamb, and added in various other ingredients (carrots, parsnips, chickpeas, apricots, dates, and almonds). I forgot to take all of my additions, subtractions and substitutions into consideration when I was measuring out the spices. The dish was overseasoned.


It smelled wonderfully fragrant and rich! Maybe that should have been a clue (I am sick and extremely stuffed up, and so should not have been able to smell anything.) It was over-seasoned for me (the sick lady with an impaired sense of taste due to her missing sense of smell) which means that for the average person the spices were probably overwhelming to say the least. I was sad that I could not taste the flavor of the apricots, dates or even the lamb over the spices. It was a fun experiment and I learned a valuable lesson.

the plated tagine (and the tagine) photo by Erik

In addition to cooking with a tagine for the first time, I also had my first cooking experience with parsnips! I can cross another veggie off of my "to try" list. They look like white carrots. The texture of a parsnip is less crisp than it's carrot cousin and has a more stringy fibrous texture. I thought they weren't as sweet as carrots (but I was sick and with dull tastebuds). Erik thought the sweet flavor was reminiscent of coconut.

Nutritional facts:
Parsnips are a member of the umbelliferous vegetable group which possesses cancer-protective properties according to the National Cancer Institute. For about 100 calories one cup of cooked parsnip has 5.5 g of fiber, 58 mg of calcium, 45 mg of magnesium, 90mcg of folate and 573 mg of potassium.



Nutritional Information from:
Bowden, Jonny, and Jonny Bowden. The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth: the Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What You Should Eat and Why. Gloucester, MA: Fair Winds, 2007. Print.