Chicken k'dra with turnips
and chickpeas

"It is Berbers we have to thank for tangines and couscous. A tagine is a glorified stew worthy of poetry – aromatic and syrupy, zesty and spicy, or sweet and fragrant are just some of the words that come to mind." – Ghillie Basan, from Easy Tagine












The slow cooker has always had its place in the kitchen. The insta-pot, a fairly new popular phenomenon, turns out a nice meal in a relative flash. But what happens if we take away the technology and get similar results from a ceramic that has a thousand year tradition behind it? The tagine concept has been interesting to me for a long time. 'One-pots,' as the cooking language goes, have really come to exemplify for me the best of weeknight family cooking because it solves so many of the problems of the six o'clock rush – you get proteins, you get vegetables, you get it tender and it you get it as comfort food, usually fairly quickly, even if done in nothing more than a cast-iron either stop top or in-oven.  The wonderful cookbook Olives, Lemons and Za'tar, by Rawia Bashara inspired me to re-think the process of the one-pot by celebrating her own version of the chicken tagine, which I tried as a pan one-pot.  Although wonderful, there was something still quite tantalizing about the clay pot with domed hood and cylindrical handle that may or may not have a hole cut into it for steam release. I could imagine days at the desert bizarre accumulating turmeric, turnips and smen (a made butter that cookbooks say takes some getting used to), tossing them into the bottom of this authentically decorated pot and letting it steam its way to magic. Because of that circulation (similar, let's be honest, to the insta-pot), the tagine approach forces us to simplify once its on the stove. No need to stir and fuss, just let the lower seep to the upper and back down again, carrying along its way that bed of spices and vegetable aromatics along with it.

So I bought my near 3 qt. tagine and tried a chicken k'dra with turnips and chickpeas, a dish that is traditionally cooked in a large copper pot and packed with plenty of vegetables.  The recipe covered all the essentials, of chicken, onion, turnips, and chickpeas, seasoned by turmeric, garlic, coriander, and finally topped by parsley. Even though this was my first true tagine experience, I decided anyway to make a couple of additions that I thought might round out the texture and the salt – I added some pitted greek olives, both green and purple, and also added cubed eggplant over the top, where I new the soft texture could both hold its shape but also absorb the recirculating flavors.  Our gas fired stove top is potent and it took no more than 35 minutes for the k'dra to finish. As I lifted the hood a steam cloud rose up. Underneath was, to my excitement, a near replica of the picture of the same dish shown by Ghillie Basan in her easy tagine cookbook.  Take the tagine over to the counter, set the hood at an angle over the bottom bowl, and not only do you have a non-sticking one-pot, but one that is visually enticing. Spoon the thighs and essential stew over or near couscous and this might very well be as close to Moroccan one-pot cooking as the home cook can get. It got me to thinking that it would be very easy to consider using the tagine for virtually any meat, veggie and bean combination that suits your taste. A favorite beef stew set into the tagine comes to mind; meatballs; two large turkey legs and new potatoes? Insta-pots are fast, but I'm not sure they are as easy or interesting as the tagine.