Cooking: Tagine Style

Earlier I had posted that my friend Angel had recently gotten back from France and bought a nice tagine for us. I've been wanting to cook one for a while now and this weekend was the perfect chance. Now because I'm a complete noob with this, I didn't realize that there was so much involved in seasoning the tagine. According to instructions found http://www.maroque.co.uk/tagine.aspx here, I needed to soak the tagine. But damn, where the hell am I gonna do that? My kitchen sink isn't big enough, so Jusytn suggested the cooler. That wasn't big enough either, so we soaked it in a tub in our guest bathroom. It's kinda funny soaking pottery in a tub. We ended up soaking the tagine for an hour, but that's all the prep you really need to cook with it according to Angel's friend in France.

Angel came by a little while later to help me go grocery shopping for ingrediants. Onions, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and stew beef meat. We got home and prepped the ingrediants. Angel par-boiled the tomatoes to make it easier to peel the skin off. Everything else was cut into bite sized pieces.

The only thing to remember when cooking with a tagine is to have a heat diffuser and use very very low heat. The diffuser is a thing you put on your burner so that heat can be spread out evenly. First you add olive oil (Angel also bought us some fancy oil from France!)

Next you layer some sliced onions on the bottom.

We used a couple different seasonings that I can't even pronounce.

A layer of beef goes on top of the onions.

Season that liberally with salt, pepper and the seasonings.

Tomatoes and then potatoes go on top of the beef with seasoning and carrots.

We added about a cup of water to the tagine so everything could stew together, but I would recommend only adding 1/4 cup at most because everything gives off liquid. We ended up having to scoop a bunch of liquid as it almost overflowed.

After 3 hours, here's what we had. Not bad for my first time cooking with this thing, however I would've added more salt and pepper to each layer. It's supposed to be served with french bread, but next time I'll give it a toast and rub some garlic on for extra flavor.

Now for my weekend update. My company gave us Friday off for the long holiday weekend so I had a nice relaxing day to myself with no distractions. I slept in, watched TV and enjoyed life overall. Some of my friends came over to play GTA III with me and we drank and played all weekend. We also went to Ken's place for a party. *sigh* Sometimes, I really wish I could rewind time. It goes by way to fast.