Broad bean and lemon tagine

Very simple, lightly spiced. Is this Moroccan? It is cooked in a tagine and it does use preserved lemon, which are two hallmarks of Moroccan cooking. However the thyme is generally thought of as more Mediterranean than North African. The herb is however widely used across the region and in as comfortable in Middle Eastern cuisines as Italian and Greek. Who knows. Quit asking difficult questions and just eat!

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of shelled broad beans (*)
• 2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
• a few thin slices of red onion
• 2 tablespoons of light miso
• 1 small preserved lemon, chopped
  
• 1 teaspoon each of fresh thymes leaves, and fresh lemon thyme leaves. Chopped.
  
• black pepper to taste
• olive oil
• water

To do:

• If using frozen broad beans, bring them to a rolling boil for a few minutes first in small saucepan. Doing so will reduce your cooking time for the tagine in the oven by up to 45 minutes compared to what it would have been had you put the frozen beans straight into the tagine! Use the boiled water as stock in the tagine.
• Thoroughly mix everything, making sure the miso is dissolved evenly
• Add enough of the water to cover the beans
• Bake at inferno setting in a preheated oven for around 45 minutes (or about 90 minutes if you didn't thaw your frozen broad beans!)
  

* Broad beans are one of the few vegetables The VegHeads keeps in the house "snap frozen". The VegHead and SheWhoMustBeFed adore fresh broad beans when they are in season and we will happily shell them and then individually peel them - there's nothing like fresh broad beans lightly steamed or quickly blanched. However The VegHead once weighed all the discarded shells etc and confirmed the suspicion that when you buy fresh broad beans by weight you are paying for one third edible beans, and two thirds compost feed. And they're not cheap to begin with. So any other dish we cook using broad beans (which generally means a tagine) we use organic, snap frozen broad beans instead.

Broad bean hommous

SheWhoMustBeFed fffzzzzzz'd up the pressure cooker today, so it was the VegHead's duty to follow up with some hommous. Unfortunately, SheWhoMustBefed was doing three batches of beans; adzuki, chickpea and butter beans. The adzuki beans got done first, leaving The VegHead with an hour before having anything to do as the chickpeas weren't ready.

How to pass the time?

Fiddle...fiddle......fiddle.....

Decided to lightly saute the garlic and cumin for the hommous.

Then had time to think and so decide to use half and half chickpeas and broad beans.

Fortunately by then the chick peas were ready!

What went in...

• half a cup of cooked chick peas
• half a cup of blanched broad beans
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1/2 teaspoon of cumin powder
• olive oil
• french walnut oil
• 1 tablespoon of tahini
• 1 tablespoon of water
  
• juice of 1/2 lemon

Doing....

• very lightly saute the garlic and cumin in a little olive oil
• blend / bamix everything together

Broad bean and aubergine tagine

Very tired last night after a busy weekend so this was perfect. 10 minutes to prepare, about an hour and a quarter to cook...

Ingredients:

• cup of broad beans (must admit I generally use frozen broad beans if I am putting them in a tagine. The fresh ones are WAY too expensive to use as an ingredient in spicy dishes. Fresh broad beans in season deserve to be respected through being lightly blanched and their flavour enjoyed to the fullest unadulterated)
• cup of chopped aubergine
• 1 small preserved lemon - chopped (if you make your own preserved lemons then one quarter of one lemon)
• 1/3 cup of your favorite olives
• 1/3 cup of olive oil
• berbere or harrissa paste (note to self...need to post those recipes up!)
• handful of chopped parsley and also coriander
  
• 1 courgette. Slice in quarters length-ways, and then halve those quarters cross-ways
• water

How...

• Preheat oven to scalding. Preferable preheat the tagine too while you get everything else ready
• If the broad beans are frozen, defrost them in some boiled water for 5 minutes as doing so will reduce baking time by about 20 minutes
• Mix all the ingredients except for the courgette and pour into tagine
• Arrange the eighths of courgette in a clockwheel around the top. Drizzle each lightly with a little more olive oil
• add water until just below the level of the tagine base.
  
• Bake the covered tagine for 60 to 75 minutes or until the water is mostly boiled away.
  

Serve with cous-cous