Vegetable Tagine with Nuts

We love food from all over the world and exploring as many cuisines as we possible can. So, this time we are venturing into North African cuisine and making Vegetable Tagine with Nuts. A traditional Moroccan dish that's incredibly delicious, flavourful and super easy to make. 

North African cuisine is packed with flavours, texture and many different ingredients. Also, it is very easy to veganize many of their traditional recipes. They use a ton of vegetables and spices to make their amazing food. This will sort us out when it comes to flavour! The food is delicious, heartwarming, and packed with nutrition. 

Moroccan tagine is the first dish I had from North African cuisine. At first, I was a bit confused with what tagine really was. I soon discovered that, both, the actual meal and where it's cooked are called tagine. 

Tagine, the pot where you cook tagine the dish has a very unique shape. Once upon a time, most North Africans were nomads and they needed an oven to carry with them. This clay pot has a lid in the shape of a cone and the base is wide and shallow, the heat gets distributed in the same way as an oven. 

These pots are great to have in the kitchen, but if you don't have one you can just use a regular saucepan or a wok with a lid. The important thing is that you allow your veggies to simmer with the spices for a good while. We need everything to be perfectly infused with all the amazing spices we are adding. 

We're using a few different spices to get the warm hearty flavours you can find in the beautiful streets of Marocco. You might have some at home and the rest are easy to find. We need fresh ginger, cinnamon, harissa, maple syrup, and ras el hanout.  

Ras el hanout might be the one you need to go buy but be sure to not leave it out. This is a magical blend of spices of traditional North African cuisine. It's hard to pinpoint the exact recipe and the ingredients that make ras el hanout since there are so many different versions. 

Each shop, family, and region will have their own blend of Ras el hanout. But among the most common ingredients, we can find cardamom, cumin, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, allspice, ginger, chili pepper, coriander, peppercorn, paprika, fennel. The list is quite long.

Since there are so many different ingredients in this blend I prefer to buy it premixed from the store. But this is one of those things you can easily make at home if you have the time. The flavours and aromas are definitely much more potent when you do it yourself. But for practicality, I always recommend just buying the premix. 

Tagine, the dish, is fairly easy to make. It takes a bit of time since, as I mentioned before, we want to let it simmer for long enough. But as soon as the aromas invade your kitchen, you will not mind the wait one bit!