Here's looking at you, kid - wild goat tagine

It was unexpectedly tricky to come up with an appropriately punny title for this post. The classic "I like kids but I couldn't eat a whole one" was used by Michael Smith for his Great British Menu winning goat tagine (which is actually what inspired this, but when I read his actual recipe I didn't fancy it). And Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall co-opted "The kids are alright" for the recipe I did end up mostly following.

So here we are, with my third choice of pun.

Having been inspired to make a goat tagine, I actually had a bit of a hard time getting hold of the meat. Then Blackface sent out an email saying they had a few boxes of wild kid meat available, and Bob's your uncle. I now have quite a bit of goat in the freezer, so there will be a curry and something else coming in future posts. And of course, I usually think I am going to like tagines more than I do - many of them end up being inedibly sweet - so I needed to find one that had a little sweetness but a good balance of flavours.

I mostly followed this tagine recipe, but I left the meat whole on the bone and cooked it for much longer. I also didn't pay an enormous amount of attention to the quantities of spices he used and just added them in quantities that felt right. And instead of adding apricots and almonds to it, I used this trick from youtube of simmering the apricots in a sweet syrup ( I used honey not sugar) and stuffing them with walnut halves.

The meat just fell off the bone. If I was serving it to company I would have dished it onto a big platter and surrounded it with sauce, but it was just us and I wasn't prepared to dirty another dish. So I just broke it into chunks with a couple of forks and stirred it back through the thick, aromatic sauce. I served it with a thoroughly bastardised version of this pilaf recipe, using my current favourite ingredient, canned artichoke hearts in water instead of pretty fresh artichokes, and leaving out the olives and almonds and using shreds of preserved lemon peel as well as fresh lemon juice.