Chicken tagine with dates, peaches, green olives and cashews

I bought dried fruit from the Veldskoen farm stall outside De Doorns recently. I love our Cape dried fruit, and using them in cooking, particularly chicken dishes, although they can be paired (peared?) with red meats too, and go particularly well with pork. And spices.

The dried fruit I chose were figs and cling peaches. The choices of dried fruit available in our stores have broadened lately — I’ve seen distinctive apple varieties such as Pink Lady — and have long believed we should be using dried fruit in cooking more than we do.

I haven’t used the dried figs yet (though I’m plotting a ground beef dish with them) but decided to use the dried cling peaches in a tagine. This tagine.

It was the first time I’d got the tagine down from its shelf since moving to Cape Town last December. Logically, it needed to wait for winter, although I don’t mind food cooked in a tagine in hot weather either. But other factors delayed all sorts of recipes, and here we are in the second half of the year already. I feel like I blinked and missed a load of stuff.

I’d also bought medjool dates, superbly luscious, soft ones when biting into them. And I’d acquired some plump green olives with a filling of anchovy paste. There’s something about anchovy that adds a strange “something” to a meat dish. They’re intriguing when pushed into slits in a leg of lamb, for instance.

I always seem to have baby onions at the moment. They come in much larger quantities than anyone would use in one dish — do you want more than four or five of them on your plate? — so some are likely to wallow, ignored, in a crisper or vegetable rack.

I suppose we could plant some of them in the garden and see if they multiply. But then there’d be even more.

So this tagine dish developed out of all of the above, and some deboned, skinless chicken thighs I’d bought. Checkers is being very useful in this regard – you can buy deboned thighs without having to pay Woolies prices for them.

Talking of which: What’s going on with Woolies’ lamb prices? On Sunday I bought lamb chops (elsewhere) for R180 or so per kilogram, after leaving the nearby Woolies in a bit of a froth after seeing the price per kg of the chops I was about to buy at the till.

R319.99 a kilo! What! That’s outrageous. So I was duly outraged, and sort of politely stormed out, if one can politely storm, split infinitive and all. Who cares about splitting infinities when one is politely storming out of Woolies? Okay, I do, but I got over it.

I paid R179.99 per kg at Checkers for perfectly good chops, and even that is more than I’d have paid in the Karoo (depending on which town).

Let’s make a lovely tagine to calm ourselves down.

Tony’s chicken tagine with dates, peaches, green olives and cashews

(Serves 4)

Ingredients

Olive oil, as needed (sparingly)

8 deboned, skinless thighs

12 baby onions, peeled

200ml dry white wine (I used chenin blanc)

12 green olives

12 medjool dates

12 dried cling peaches

1 tsp each of ground cinnamon, garlic, coriander, fennel, ginger, and paprika

½ tsp each of ground nutmeg, white pepper, and turmeric

Zest of an orange

Chicken stock, to cover (I used an Ina Paarman sachet in 250ml water)

Salt to taste

About 16 toasted cashew nuts (toast them in a dry pan)

Chopped coriander leaves, to garnish

Method

Peel the baby onions.

Mix the spices in a small container such as a ramekin.

Choose a large, spacious pan with a lid. I used a Le Creuset buffet casserole.

Start by seasoning the pan with the baby onions: add a dash of olive oil to a pan, then the baby onions, and tilt the pan this way and that while they brown a little all over. This is just to give the pan a flavour of onion and their slight caramelisation before adding other ingredients. Remove the onions to a side dish.

Add a dash more olive oil. Fry the deboned chicken thighs on both sides, and add to the side dish.

Pour the wine into the pan and work the bottom with a wooden spoon or silicone spatula to scrape up every bit of caramelisation and its flavour.

Return the chicken and green olives to the dish, add the cling peaches and medjool dates, and pour over the chicken stock, just enough to cover.

Season with salt and stir in the spices and orange zest.

Simmer gently until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce has reduced. Because the thighs are deboned and skinless, the cooking will not take very long. About 20 to 25 minutes should do it, with the lid off so that the cooking stock can reduce a little and consequently thicken.

I found no need to thicken this sauce with cornflour as it thickened of its own accord by reduction.

Toast the cashews and chop the coriander leaves.

Scatter the cashews and coriander over the food in the casserole and take it to the table to serve directly from the pan.

If you’d like a starch alongside, I recommend couscous, but we enjoyed it just as it is. DM

To buy a copy of Tony Jackman’s Retro Karoo Food (Penguin Random House) signed by the author in gold, send an email to him at tony@dailymaverick.co.za
Or buy it through the Daily Maverick shop.

Tony Jackman is twice winner of the Galliova Food Writer of the Year award.

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks.