Chicken tagine with apricots, rosemary and ginger

My girlfriend brought me back a beautiful tagine from her holiday in Morocco last year.  You don't really need them - a heavy-bottomed saucepan will do the job - but it's a fun kitchen toy to have.  You can pick them up over here now for not much money, but it's nice to have a real Moroccan one.

If you decide to get a real tagine, you'll need a heat diffuser as well because the pottery would crack on an open flame.  These things are a useful tool anyway, especially if you like slow cooking, and they're only about a fiver on ebay or from your local kitchen shop.

I've only got one tagine cookbook (Tagine: Spicy Stews from Morocco by Ghillie Basan, ISBN 978-1-84597-478-7) so my use of it is a bit limited, but I decided to get it out to play tonight, mostly because we had chicken thighs and drumsticks left over from our housewarming party and they do well low-and-slow - which is what tagine cooking is all about!

Start by sweating a chopped onion in olive oil and a knob of butter.  Once that's started to go soft, add a chopped chilli, ginger and rosemary - fresh is generally nicer but I had preserved versions of ginger and rosemary in stock so that's what I used.  Throw in a cinnamon stick too.

Give it a bit more time to soften, then add the chicken - I've given us one thigh each, but feel free to be a bit more generous if you like.  You want to get a bit of colour on the skin, so when you first put them in press them down to the bottom skin-side down so that they get to fry in the butter and oil.

Everything takes time with a tagine, so there's no rush.  Just leave it alone, with the chicken skin-side down, until it's taken on a bit of colour.

Once it has, turn the chicken over and add about 75g dried apricots, chopped up into quarters, and a tablespoonful of honey.

Now season with salt and pepper, add a tin of tomatoes, and stir them in.

Put the lid on, turn the heat right down low and simmer for half an hour.

Serve over couscous.  The packet instructions recommend 75g per person but we think that's literally twice as much as you need.  75g between two makes enough to fill my stripy pasta bowls up to the white line, which seems like a sensible portion to me.

As you can see, I did spill a bit with this one...  in fact, I completely destroyed the kitchen.  I'm generally a fairly tidy cook but the tagine always seems to bubble over.  Worth it though, this was damn tasty!  Really nice mix of sweet and spicy, and slow cooking chicken on the bone makes for tasty tender meat.