Lamb Tagine Pie

A tagine is a Moroccan stew, usually a mixture of chicken or lamb (or goat if it's authentic Moroccan), root vegetables, fruit and spices like cumin and cinnamon.  It's a delicious dish, and one that lends itself well to a pie form.

This week I went with a supermarket puff pastry, mainly out of laziness. I'm looking at a couple of new pastry recipe, so hopefully next week I'll have something more on that.

To make the tagine:

Sauté a roughly chopped onion in some olive oil with a couple of chopped garlic cloves.

Add 2-3 lamb shanks or knuckles (this depends on the size of your pie, but one knuckle per small pie, or 3 for a large pie should be fine). Brown the lamb all over.

Stir in a teaspoon each of cumin, turmeric, paprika, ground ginger and ground cinnamon. Add half a teaspoon of white pepper, 2 teaspoons of ground coriander, and a pinch of saffron mixed with a tablespoon or two of warm water (if you can't find saffron it's not essential).

Stir it all up so the meat is coated with the spices, then pour in enough chicken stock to cover the lamb. Simmer it for about an hour or two.

Add a couple of chopped carrots and cook for another 20 minutes. Stir in some fruit - chopped dried apricots work well with lamb, or prunes, raisins, chopped pear... Go crazy with it, you'll be surprised what fruits work in a tagine.  You could also add some blanched almonds too if you want a bit of crunch.

Cook for another 10-20 minutes, then remove the lamb. Let it cool a bit then shred the meat off the bone. Turn the heat up on the tagine and let the liquid reduce and thicken a bit. You might find that it doesn't thicken enough to it in a pie - you want it like a gravy - so you could add some cornflour and stir until it's gravy-like. Add the lamb meat and stir it in.

Line your pie tin with pastry, spoon the tagine in and place a pastry lid on top. Poke a few holes in the lid, then bake in the oven for 30 minutes at 180 degrees, or until the pastry is all golden and puffy.