Friday, October 26, 2012

French Fridays with Dorie - Chicken Tagine with Sweet Potatoes


Today´s recipe for the French Fridays with Dorie Group is Chicken Tagine with Sweet Potatoes. A Tagine is a Berber dish from North Africa, that is named after the special earthenware pot in which it is cooked.




Tagines are slow-cooked stews braised at low temperatures, resulting in tender meat with aromatic vegetables and sauce. Dorie´s recipe calls for chicken to be browned first and then to be stewed with onions, sweet potatoes and pitted prunes (which I omitted).




The other ingredients of this dish are some wonderfully aromatic spices. You will need saffron (I bought some wonderful Spanish saffron), ground cinnamon, some cayenne (which adds just the right amount of spicyness), star anise (which smells heavenly while cooking away in the stew) and a bay leaf (I still have a lot bay leaves left on my plant in the garden). I do not own a real tagine pot to cook this stew and used a regular cast-iron pot but I found these adorable Mini Tagines, put some of the spices that I used in the little plates and placed them on the table as decorations – besides I loved the smell that emanated from these little colorful porcelain dishes.




Since I always make my own chicken stock, I used that as the stewing liquid and it made for a nice jus when I served the finished dish over rice. The only change I made to the dish was to omit the pitted prunes, the wonderful honey that was also part of the ingredient list, added enough sweetness to this dish for our taste.




The cubed orange-fleshed sweet potatoes harmonized well with all the spices in this dish and were a colorful addition, even after having bubbled away in the chicken stew for quite some time, they retained their wonderful bright color.




In summary, the Tagine was well worth making, it smelled wonderful and intriguing while stewing but not all the little taste testers agreed, two of them happily munched away on the rice. After dinner we turned our attention to the dessert.




Since I had bought some fresh spices for this dish, I decided to bake an Oriental Spice Coffee Cake for dessert. The cake recipe calls for spices such as cardamom, ground cloves, cinnamon and saffron. But you also need to add freshly brewed strong coffee, light brown sugar, orange zest, pistachios and dark chocolate. I decided to use Lindt Excellence Orange Intense, which added even more wonderful orange flavor to this wonderfully moist cake.




This was an intriguing dinner recipe and a new dessert recipe – lots of spices, lots of wonderful smells and a very harmonious dinner indeed! To see how adventurous the other Doristas felt this week when preparing the Chicken Tagine,  please click here.




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18 comments:

  1. Wow, what a gorgeous meal! Sounds (and looks!) absolutely marvelous! I love those little tagines, they really are adorable. Nice job!

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  2. I have to say I find your spice cake much more intriguing than the tagine. I should have adjusted the spices more to my taste and I probably would have enjoyed the seasoning more. I'm guessing but you didn't follow the recipe exactly?

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  3. That spice cake sounds fabulous Andrea, really, I´m pinning it right now! And your tagine came out perfect, beautiful pics. Those mini tagines are adorable!

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  4. The mini tagines are adorable, Andrea. That cake is scrumptious too! High five to another prune-skipper!

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  5. Beautifully done and those mini tagines are charming.

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  6. Those little tagines are the cutest! I love how you decorated the table with the spices. I'm envious of an actual bay tree in your garden for fresh bay leaves. Not something we could have around here. Too cold in the winter. (You'll be happy to know that I used my own honey for the first time in this dish!)

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  7. Your photos are just so beautiful. I love the little tagines! I am glad that you also enjoyed this dish even without the prunes. I also have a bay tree in my backyard and it is wonderful to be able to pick fresh leaves.

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  8. Your tagine looks wonderful. I'd love to try making it!

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  9. Looks like a lovely and warming meal. As I type this it is snowing here in Frankfurt (!?!?!?) and so your meal looks all the more tempting. No idea what's going on. We rarely get any real snow in Frankfurt period, much less in October! I would actually love it if we didn't have to drive to Wolfsburg today to visit the in-laws. Luckily we just had our winter tires put on this past week.

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  10. Beautiful pics! I love your little mini-tagines! I don't know how often I'd use them but now I'm feeling like I need a few....

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  11. your tagines are SO cute!! :) love the sound of the cake you made, very intriguing! Glad to see that it was mostly a hit at your house too!

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  12. Cute little tagines. And the cake sounds perfect for this meal.

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  13. I can't believe the little tagines, I've never seen those before! your prune-less chicken tagine looks lovely, but your cake took center stage for me!

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  14. Andrea, you're photography is really lovely! Your tagine and your coffee cake look delicious. I'm going to try Dorie's coffee cake for my next cranberry cake search recipe. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll let you know how it goes.

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  15. I love tangines. They are well worth the time to make. I love your take on one. What a lovely recipe.

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  16. I love your little red tagines - so cute! I've never cooked in tagines before but I saw them at the store the other day (big version). The chicken with sweet potatoes look so delicious!

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  17. Andrea, This is the first time I've known your little taste testers to turn their noses up at anything. I am guessing that they just didn't like the flavoring/aromas that the spices gave off. Am I the only American who left the skins on the chicken breasts? I see you did and I just felt they added some more flavoring to the dish. Your Oriental Spice Coffee Cake really intriques me. I like the orange zest and pistachios on top of your cake. Hopefully my Life is slowing down, stabilizing and getting back to my new normal so I can try some of your wonderful recipes. I sorta dropped the ball after making your cookies.

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  18. What an interesting sounding cake, and it looks beautiful! I didn't like the flavor of the saffron in the tagine, but I'm thinking it might have been because the saffron I used was old (and relatively inexpensive). Maybe saffron is one of those ingredients that you just have to splurge on. I'm glad you liked this one.

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