Marrow madness

A Moroccan tagine, marrow muffins and more

Moroccan tagine with dried apricots

Makes: dinner for 2
Takes: 45 minutes

Ingredients

5 smallish carrots
400 g marrow or courgettes
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
light cooking oil
1 tin of chickpeas (400 g)
12 dried (sour) apricots
2 T olive oil
2 T maple syrup
1 cinnamon stick
1 t cinnamon powder
1 t cumin
1 t ground tumeric
1 t dried chili flakes
10 cardamom pods
pepper & salt
parsley

Method

1. Place a terracotta tagine (or a Dutch oven with a lid) onto your stovetop on a low heat with a small amount of cooking oil.

2. Roughly slice onion and allow to slowly cook (without browning) in tagine for around 5 minutes.

3. Presoak 8 of your dried apricots in around 50 ml of boiling water.

4. Prepare your marrow. Remove soft, pithy seeds and also consider removing outside skin if it is particularly hard. Chop into batons around 4cm long and 1 cm thick.

5. Wash carrots and cut into similar-sized batons.

6. Add carrots and marrow to the tagine, layering them on top of the onion, with the cinnamon stick and 4 chopped dried apricots and some hot water to prevent the onion from sticking. Place lid on and leave to steam on a low heat.

7. Prepare spices for the apricot sauce. Remove the seeds from the insides of the 10 cardamon pods. Discard pods and grind seeds to powder (in a mortar & pestle or coffee grinder), mixing with 1 t cinnamon powder, 1 t cumin, 1 t ground tumeric, 1 t dried chili flakes and pepper and salt.

8. In a small blender, mix the spices with the 8 pre-soaked dried apricots, along with around 2 T olive oil, 2 T maple syrup and additional hot water. Remove the lid of your tagine, spoon most of this mix over the vegetables and quickly replace the lid so not too much steam escapes.

9. Cook tagine for a further 30 minutes until vegetables are tender. Around 10 minutes before serving, drain and rinse a can of chickpeas and add to the tagine. Combine the vegetables gently with a wooden spoon then replace lid to continue cooking.

10. Serve with brown rice, couscous or flatbreads, topped with chopped parsley and olive oil. Or do as we did and accompany with an easy spinach salad with a few oranges or paper thin slices of raw marrow tossed through, topped with pomegranate seeds and keep a bit of the apricot sauce aside to mix into a quick dressing with some lime juice and oil.

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Marrow muffins

Makes: around 9 medium muffins
Takes: 30 minutes

Ingredients

100 g oat flour
100 g almond flour
20 g coconut flour
60 g wholemeal flour
50 g chopped pecans
1 t baking powder
2 eggs
150 ml cooking oil of choice
juice and zest of 1 orange
300 g grated marrow (remove seedy part removed before grating)
75 ml maple syrup
spices: 10 cardamom pods, bashed open and the seeds ground to a powder (or 1-2 t ground cardamom), 1 t ground cinnamon, 1 t ground cloves, 1/2 t ground ginger

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 180°C and pre-grease your muffin tins (or use non-stick silicone moulds).

2. In a large bowl, mix dry ingredients. The key thing is that you want around 280g of flour-like ingredients, mixed with the spices, the baking powder and the chopped pecans.

3. In a separate bowl, mix wet ingredients: 150 ml cooking oil of choice (I used a mixture of sunflower and coconut oil), two eggs, juice and zest of 1 orange, 75 ml maple syrup. Stir in the grated marrow.

4. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and fold gently until combined. Spoon into waiting muffin tins and cook for around 25 minutes until a fork inserted into one of them comes out clean. Allow to cool before inverting from the tin.

5. To serve: top with cream cheese icing, or do as we did and top with a dollop of greek coconut yoghurt, along with toasted coconut flakes.

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The story behind the recipes…

Family come to stay with us from the South of Belgium. A weekend at the beach, bringing a real spade to build the biggest sandcastle you’ve ever seen, a seven year old boy standing atop, waiting for the sea to come in and wash it all away. They bring with them a gift from their garden. They’d been away on holiday and come home to find their modest courgette plants had turned into Jurassic monstrosities, the giant leaves hiding hulking, yellow-striped long tubers. Now one of them was sitting on our kitchen bench. It sat there for a week. I avoided looking at it. The marrow they gave us was more than half a metre long and weighed more than two kilos. A mammoth of a marrow.

Finally, another weekend. This weekend, I said, this weekend I will tackle the marrow. My usual recipe books were not replete with ideas. Courgette, yes. Courgette flowers, baby courgettes, all gentle flavours and soft touch. Our marrow was on another scale. It demanded slow-cooking, a context where its tough exterior could slowly yield, where it could sweat out its juices uninterrupted.

I’d been thinking about making a tagine for the newsletter for a while, but the right moment had never struck. Now it had. The alliteration, cheesy as always, played in my head all week. I’m just mad about Saffron. Saffron’s mad about me. They call her mellow marrow, ooohhh.

Sour dried apricots make real apricots quiver in their tracks. Strewn through a tagine, they go soft and gooey, simultaneously sweet and tangy to the bite. I knew I wanted to include sour apricots in my tagine. Then leafing through Ottolenghi’s Flavours, I came across a recipe for roasted carrot salad with chamoy. That lightbulb moment. Take the chamoy, add moroccan spices, turn it into a sour sauce for the tagine.

Here’s a true story. I went to Morocco because of a movie. Actually, not a movie, just a few scenes of a movie, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers’ Left Alive, which were filmed in Tangiers, in Northern Morocco. There was something about the shots of the city, still, at night, the waves breaking against the shore, the seeming emptiness of the city. I could tell you so many stories about Morocco but here is one and it is a not vegetarian friendly. We were sitting outside on a terrace in a restaurant in the heart of the medina in Fez, in the epicentre of its hurling streets. I ordered a pastilla from the menu. My friend charmed the waiter, as he was wont to do, calling him “mec, mec”, until they were as chummy as old school friends. Finally, he told him that what he really wanted, was to try a tagine au chameau. The waiter shook his head reluctantly, no, they don’t serve camel. But my friend persisted, we weren’t in a hurry, he said. Finally, the waiter nodded his head slowly. Behind him, we saw a small boy exit the restaurant in a hurry, careening off down one of the narrow streets. Five, ten, fifteen minutes went by and he came back, still running, carrying a plastic bag of meat, the blood leaving a hansel and gretel trail behind him. My friend relished his camel tagine, while sitting opposite, I crunched through the layers of my pastilla. Crisp pastry, spinach and cheese, twirled into a spiral, topped with a pattern of icing sugar and cinnamon. Why am I compelled to tell this story? There was something both grotesque yet real about that moment. There was no escaping the origin of the food. It was immediate. The fresh meat hanging there in the air as we walked through the medina.

Tagines do not have to be meaty, not by a long shot. But without the meat, you have to think about what gives the vegetables their flavour. Is it the spices alone? My take on Ottolenghi’s chamoy is an attempt to inject a layer of flavour and interest into a veggie tagine. Give it a try. Use courgettes if you don’t have a marrow. Use any vegetables you like.

If you don’t feel like tagine, make the muffins (inspired by a BBC recipe: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/marrow-pecan-cake-maple-icing/amp). Like carrot cake, the spices make the muffins here, especially the freshly ground cardamom. I’ve also played around with making the muffins (almost) vegan (there are eggs). A note on the flours. I’ve got into making my own. It works with lots of different things - whole oats, coconut and almonds. It is much cheaper to grind up almonds than to buy the tiny bags of almond flour, and it will taste a lot fresher as well. I use a small coffee grinder, but it also works in a larger blender. It won’t be as fine a grind as a store-bought flour, but at least for this recipe that won’t matter.

A final word for our marrow. We’re still working our way through. We chopped a good proportion of it into a giant vegetarian lasagne, the tomato layer with an umami sauce made with miso and dried porcini mushrooms and puy lentils, layers of ricotta, oyster mushrooms, sweet potatoes and grilled marrow. There are a few portions frozen in the freezer for days when I just don’t feel like cooking (yes, I have those too!)

Thanks for reading this week and a big shout-out to all the people who have recently subscribed, I’ve had a spike in subscribers as my Mum shared the newsletter on Facebook. Thanks Mum! Welcome everyone.

Amelia.