Slow cooker lamb tagine with apricots recipe

Tagine is a Moroccan style stew, often made with lamb. Here's my version, adapted from several tagine recipes I saw. It's not as quick to put together as some but, if you're OK with getting up 10 minutes early, a good post-work meal for friends,

Be warned - it makes tons and only just fitted in my 6L/quart slow cooker with only 1 lb of lamb, You may need to halve it,

Ingredients for 6 generous portions:

6 medium potatoes, quartered
1-2lbs boneless lambm ideally cut into chunks
300g/1 cup rice
2 onions, finely chopped
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 large courgette/zuchinni, chopped
2 tins tomatos
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tin chick peas /garbanzo beans
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp cayenne
1/2 tsp ginger
pinch saffron
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1 lemon, cut into 1/8 ths and relieved of its pips
100ml/ 1/2 cup water
2 tbsp honey
250g / 1cup ready-soaked dried apricots
2 chicken stock cubes


Directions:

Crumble the chicken stock cubes over the bottom of the slow cooker. Tip over the tomatos. Add all the other ingredients and stir. Make sure the potatoes are fairly buried. Cook on low for 8-10 hours.Serve with a cous cous but don'tovercater as you already have spuds and rice in the meal.

Verdict:

I have a confession to make - I didn't make it like this. I doubled the spices just to see what would happen (having made exactly this recipe before). This made the flavours too punchy. Tagines can be spicy but should still be subtle and the extra spice killed the tastes of the vegetables and fruit which was a shame. The timing was right though and we enjoyed it, as did my toddler (yes, she's fine with spicy food). The lemons were particularly nice and just turned to litle mushy, not particularly tart slices of lemon peel. I think it could have had more apricots too.