This lamb dish is cooked with spices and dried apricots - typical of many Moroccan dishes. The aromas from the pan are fragrant and mouth watering and the experience a welcome change to the stew with winter root vegetables. This would be served with simple boiled rice and perhaps a green salad but it I prefer to serve it with couscous. Now available in a form that can be made in around five minutes it’s a time-saving option. The slight sweetness of couscous compliments the dish well and if you wish to, you can add chopped herbs or vegetables to it to make it more interesting.

Gone are the days when dried fruit required a good deal of soaking. If you use the kind that are already semi-reconstituted then add right at the end of cooking time to simply warm through, they will otherwise disintegrate.

Ingredients - serves 4

600g diced lamb
seasoned plain flour
1 large onion
2 red peppers
1 head of fennel
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
pinch of saffron strands
3 tbsp olive oil
600 ml chicken stock
100g dried apricots
salt & pepper
lemon juice to taste

Method

Halve and slice the onion. Trim the fennel and halve and thinly slice that too, and trim the peppers and slice. Now toss the diced lamb in seasoned flour and brown in the olive oil over a high heat, turning often. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside. Add the onion, peppers and fennel to the pan and fry off in the same oil for 5 minutes until browning lightly.

Add the ground ginger and cinnamon, stir into the vegetables and return the lamb back to the pan. Pour over the chicken stock and stir in the saffron, season with salt and pepper, and bring to the boil. Lower the heat to the barest simmer and cover, stir occasionally to prevent the flour from cooking to the base of the pan, and simmer for an hour. Add the apricots to the pan and cook a further 15 minutes or until they, and the lamb, are tender. Take a taste and adjust the seasoning and add a little lemon juice to enhance the sweet/sharp flavour of the apricots. Serve over a bed of steaming couscous in warmed pasta bowls.