Name: Apricot and chickpea tagine
Prep time: 12 min
Total time: 35 min
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients: 2 pack Chickpeas (tinned); 100 g Apricots (dried); 1 pack Chopped tomatoes (tinned); 20 g Onion (dried, flakes); 5 g Cumin (ground); 3 g Cinnamon (ground); 3 g Ginger (ground); 30 g Almonds (flaked); 30 ml Olive oil; 20 ml Lemon juice (bottled)

Apricot and chickpea tagine

An established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients. Every substitution is documented below.

How long it keeps

About 6 months, set by Apricots (dried).

Indicative, for planning a build before you buy. The answer for a pack you already own is the best before date printed on it, and that only holds if it has been stored as the label says.

Serves

Burners

Pans

Water

0.3 L

Active

12 min

Total

35 min

Ingredients

Sweet spices with pulses and dried fruit, which reads as strange only if you have not eaten it. The cinnamon and ginger are not making a pudding: they make the cumin taste rounder.

Almonds toasted dry in the pan, two minutes, out.
Oil, dried onion three minutes. Cumin, cinnamon and ginger for twenty seconds only: ground spices in a dry-ish pan scorch fast.
Tomatoes in with the chopped apricots. Cook down 12 minutes; the apricots soften and start giving up their sugar into the sauce.
Chickpeas with half their liquid. Simmer 15 minutes, crushing a third against the pan.
Lemon juice off the heat, almonds over.

Chop the apricots smaller than feels necessary. Whole they stay as separate sweet lumps; small they dissolve into the sauce, which is the whole point.

Serves 4 with couscous or flatbread.

What this was adapted from

Moroccan tagine: the slow-cooked sweet-savoury stew

a tagine and two hours of slow cooking → a lidded pan and twenty-five minutes

A tagine cooks low and slow so the fruit breaks down into the sauce. Dried apricots chopped small get most of the way there in twenty-five minutes -- the sauce is thinner and less unified than the real thing, which is the honest cost of the fuel saved.
preserved lemon and fresh coriander → bottled lemon juice and toasted almonds

Preserved lemon is the signature of a tagine and has no substitute. The dish leans on more acid and the texture of toasted almonds instead, which changes it into something simpler rather than something pretending.