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.