Family Dinner: Cooking a Moroccan Chicken Tagine with My Daughter

Cooking is one of my five-year-old daughter's favorite activities. She loves to help at each stage of the process - browsing cookbooks to find a recipe and seeking out the necessary groceries at the preparation stage, and even more so, serving as an enthusiastic sous-chef during the cooking itself. Unlike bike repair or assembling IKEA furniture, cooking is also an activity where a five-year-old can make a truly productive contribution, and the satisfaction of working together to create something real that the family can enjoy together makes the experience of father-daughter cooking especially meaningful.

This week we decided to tackle a Moroccan chicken tagine with couscous. It is a dish that has been close to my heart ever since my days as an undergraduate student doing research for my thesis in Rabat, Casablanca, and the smaller towns of the Atlas Mountains. My favorite formulation of the dish complements the moist, spiced chicken of the tagine with the intense citrus of preserved lemon peels and the elegant brininess of green olives.

We undertook the tagine as an after-school project for a weeknight dinner, and it took about an hour and fifteen minutes all-in. Since part of the fun of a father-daughter cooking project is to enjoy the journey itself, we did not rush.

Getting Started

After my daughter and I got home from her school, we started with the preparatory work so that we could let the chicken marinate for a while. We first set out all of the ingredients on the counter, collecting the spices from the pantry and unpacking the other grocery shopping (the ingredients list is at the end of this post). Whenever we cook, my daughter adores measuring, mixing, stirring, and retrieving items from the cabinets. If it requires bowls, spoons, measuring cups, or tongs (especially tongs!), then it is her bailiwick.

We began with the garlic. She and I worked together to remove the peels from the garlic cloves, and then I took up knife duty to chop the peeled cloves finely. My daughter thoughtfully took out a small bowl into which we deposited the minced pieces.

We then lined up all of the spices, got the quarter-teaspoon measuring scoop out, and set up a bowl for mixing the spices. We counted out the right number of scoops for each spice - one for the saffron, two for the ginger, two for the cumin, two for the turmeric, and four for the paprika - and my daughter carefully leveled off the top of the scoop and then dumped each into the mixing bowl. She enthusiastically stirred them while I unwrapped the chicken.

Now it was time to rub the garlic and the spice mix onto the chicken. I took the lead on this one, putting the pieces of raw chicken into the bowl and rubbing them around until each was thoroughly covered with spice and there were no more clumps of spice and garlic clinging to the bottom of the bowl. She got out a cover for the bowl, and we put it into the refrigerator to marinate until the next phase of the project.

We enjoyed an hour of playing with the water table in the backyard while the chicken marinated. If you are doing this project on a weekend, then you could leave the chicken in the refrigerator for a few more hours.

The Cooking

With about an hour to go until dinner time, we resumed our project. First things first, we turned on our atmospheric music. Putomayo's Cairo to Casablanca  served the purpose beautifully and inspired both my daughter and me to move to its beats as we prepared the dinner.

We started with the onions, working together to peel off the outside layers, discard the resulting debris, and clean our countertop workspace. Slicing the onions was daddy duty; once I had cut them, my daughter took over with transferring them from the cutting board into a staging bowl.

Now it was time for the serious cooking to begin. We used a cast-iron Dutch oven from this point forward since we do not have the traditional tagine dish. My daughter helped me to measure out the olive oil, and I fired up the stove. I placed the marinated chicken pieces into the warmed pot, browned the outsides of the chicken pieces for about ten minutes or so, and then set them aside on a plate (they would have more time to finish cooking later).

Next up were the onions. We dumped the large bowl of onion slices into the pot and proceeded to stir them over low-medium heat slowly for fifteen minutes until they were soft and golden-brown. My daughter set up her stool safely back from the hot pot and went to work with her long wooden spoon, ensuring that the fragrant onions rotated through regularly from top to bottom and all around, each slice cooking perfectly.

While she stirred the onions, I sliced the olives into halves and got the preserved lemons ready. We only needed the peels, so I cut each lemon into quarters, removed the pulp, and then sliced the remaining peels into millimeter-thin strips. In between stirs, my daughter used the tongs to hand me one lemon quarter at a time (did I mention that the tongs are a favorite of hers?)

When the timer notified us that the fifteen minutes were up, we used a larger pair of tongs to transfer the chicken pieces from the plate back into the Dutch oven. We then added the olives, the lemon peels, the chicken stock, the lemon juice, and a stick of cinnamon.

It was now the turn of Tolstoy's twin soldiers - Patience and Time - to complete the dish. We covered the pot, set a timer for half an hour, and let them go to work.

With thirty minutes to go until dinner time, my daughter and I set the table with utensils, napkins, water glasses, and a book to read (we had one chapter left in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe).

The couscous was the last thing remaining. My daughter had been especially intrigued by it ever since we had first found the box at the grocery store (perhaps because she knew that there would be measuring involved in its preparation), so she was eager to get it out. She took the one-cup measuring scoop, and I held it above a bowl while she used a soup spoon to fill the scoop carefully to the top. We did so twice, leaving us with a bowl filled precisely with two cups of dry couscous. I brought two cups of water to a boil in another pot and added a splash of olive oil, and then we emptied the couscous bowl into the water. She mixed the water and the couscous together quickly with a long spoon, and then we turned off the heat, covered the pot, and left it for five minutes (the numerous timers and abundant opportunities for counting add a lot of fun to this project!) When the five minutes were up, we got out forks and fluffed up the couscous to disperse the clumps and give it a light, airy texture.

Moments later, the chicken was ready (I cut open one of the thicker slices to ensure that it was cooked thoroughly). We spooned helpings of couscous onto the plates, layered on the chicken, olives, and onions, and ladled the sauce over it all. We brought the plates to the table, and dinner was served.

Bon appétit and استمتع بطعامك!

Ingredients

I found these ingredients at our local Kroger and a specialty French market in Nashville called The Little Gourmand.

• Spices
  • 1/4 teaspoon of saffron threads
  • 1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger
  • 1 teaspoon of sweet paprika
  • 1/2 teaspoon of ground cumin
  • 1/2 teaspoon of turmeric
  • Salt and pepper at your discretion
• ~2.5-3 pounds of chicken (we used skinless and boneless thighs and breasts from the grocery store)
• 16-20 green olives, pitted and sliced into halves (we used the entirety of a jar of lemon-stuffed green olives that we discovered at our specialty shop, but any pitted green olives will work)
• 5 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
• Peels of 3 small preserved lemons thinly sliced and with pulp removed (we found these at the specialty French market)
• 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
• 3 medium onions, thinly sliced
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 cup of chicken stock
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 2 cups of couscous