Honey and Lamb Tagine

I love food shopping. I get to browse the aisles for new ideas for recipes. One of my favourite places to do this is M&S. They have all kinds of lovely food, both ready meals and ingredients. One of the things I found was a amazing sounding 'Red Pepper, Apricot & Honey Tagine Paste', so I thought "what the hell" and bought it to give it a try. 

The recipe on the back recommended adding it to a tin of tomatoes with some diced lamb but as usual I couldn't help messing with the suggested recipe. Tagines are great to make from scratch, but if your feeling a bit lazy, this is an awesome recipe. I am also pretty confident that you can substitute the M&S paste with any other similar sounding paste such as red pepper tagine paste. (I will also try some time soon to recreate this recipe without the paste, for those of you with out access to M&S.)



What you need for this is recipe is:

• 1 Jar of Red Pepper, Apricot & Honey Tagine Paste (or a similar sounding paste);
• 500g Diced Lamb;
• 1 Red Onion, Chopped;
• 1 Red Pepper, Chopped;
• 300g Passata;
• 2 Handfulls of Dried Apricots, Chopped;
• 2-3 Large tbsp Honey;
• 1/3 tsp salt; 
• 1/3 tsp Pepper; and
• Olive Oil.

What you need to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 160C (fan oven.

2. Coat the beef in the salt and pepper and a little olive oil then brown the meat on a high heat in a large frying pan. 

3. Add the tagine paste to the pan and coat the lamb then add the onion and pepper to the pan.

4. Turn the heat to medium and leave to simmer for 2-3 minutes until the pepper and onion begin to soften.

5. Add all of the rest of the ingredients into the pan and heat through. Then transfer all of the ingredients to an oven proof dish and cover with a lid.

6. Cook the tagine in the oven for 2 hours, stirring every 30 minutes or so.

7. Serve, I served mine with 'Mediterranean' couscous, and enjoy :).