Tunisian Tajine (Tajine Maadnous)

As with any omelette-like dish, there are a whole lot of different ways you can make this tajine.  I'll go into the details about the various ingredients and options below, but first I want to talk a little bit about the technique, and in particular how I cooked the potatoes.

Most of the Tunisian tajine recipes I found call for the potatoes to be cooked separately and then added into the eggs before baking.  I chose to switch things up a little bit by cooking the diced potatoes directly alongside the chicken in the initial steps of the recipe.  This gives the potatoes a bit more flavour, and the starch they release helps to thicken the mixture and give texture to the finished dish.  This method is a bit faster, as you don't have to pre-cook the potatoes, but it's also a little more technically difficult, as you need to make sure to cook off enough of the water to yield a thick roux of sorts.  When the potatoes are cooked in this fashion, the finished tajine has a softer, starchier texture, without the springy chewiness you sometime see in baked egg dishes.  Make sure you don't add too much water to the pan at the beginning; it can be tempting to think that the potatoes need more water, but remember that we're trying to end up with a fairly dry finished mixture.  If you add too much water initially, you'll be forced to cook it down, which will result in mushy, overcooked potatoes.

If you're worried about cooking the potatoes this way, you can always precook them by dicing, boiling and draining (but not rinsing) them.  The final texture will be a little 'eggier' but still lovely, as the leftover potato starch still does its magic.  Likewise, if you have leftover cooked potatoes you want to use up, you can chop them up and use them in the recipe by adding them in towards the end.

We've all know the old parsley (or cilantro) conundrum: you need a couple of sprigs, but you can only buy a big bunch, leaving you with more leftover herbs than you know what to do with.  So what should you do with it? Why, you should make tajine maadnous, of course!

As I mentioned above, 'maadnous' means parsley, so it shouldn't come as any surprise to know that parsley is a big part of this dish.  I used the better part of a large bunch of flat-leaf parsley, but the exact quantity isn't really important.  If you like parsley a lot (and I do), you want to use a lot.  If you're worried that it might be a bit too much parsley for your tastes, tone it down by as much as half.

Now, it's not tajine maadnous without parsley, but you can call it whatever you want and use different greens too.  Cilantro (coriander) is another great option, and another ingredient that many of us often find ourselves trying to use up.  I've seen some recipes that call for spinach, and you certainly could give it a go, but you'll want to pre-cook and very thoroughly drain it, or you risk ending up with a watery finished tajine.

Unusually for me, I've only listed "cheese" as an ingredient in this recipe, rather than something more specific. This is because ultimately you can use any number of different cheeses.  I used a 50/50 mix of mozzarella and Emmental, but just mozzarella would work fine too.  Ultimately, there are plenty of options you could go with, though I would recommend sticking with relatively mild cheeses that melt nicely.  Avoid particularly sharp, bold, or aged cheeses, as the strong flavours don't play all that nicely with all the spices.

Cream cheeses are another fairly popular option, and I think that goat cheese would be a good choice too, though I haven't tried it yet.  Interestingly, you'll find many Tunisian recipes that call for Laughing Cow (La vache qui rit) cheese wedges.  Highly portable, shelf-stable, and pleasantly mild, Laughing Cow cheese has long enjoyed quite a bit of popularity in North Africa, and is often used as a go-to cheese in recipes like this one.  It's not an ingredient I ever have on hand, but it's an authentic and popular choice.  The cheese is much too soft to grate, so individual pieces can be chopped into chunks and mixed in.  You can mix soft cream cheeses into the eggs thoroughly, or leave them in little chunks to yield little pockets of cheesiness in the finished tajine.

Tajine is a perfect recipe to play around with, and you can change it up quite a bit depending on what you have on hand and/or what you think would work. I like this fairly simple tajine recipe because it lets the spices and the parsley really take center stage, but there are a number of variations that are worth mentioning.

Hard boiled eggs - Yes, more eggs! Chopped hardboiled eggs are a popular ingredient to include in tajine recipes.  Some like to cut the pieces up fairly small, while others like to use halved or quartered eggs for a bigger impact.

Meats - No chicken? Lamb and tuna also make great choices! Ground lamb would be easiest, but if you have tender leftover lamb from a roast (for example), that would be wonderful too.  Firm, good quality canned tuna would probably work best, though you could always cook fresh raw tuna too.  While I haven't tried it myself, I think that an oily fish like mackerel would work nicely too, especially with some tomato paste and harissa (see below).

Tomato paste - Try adding a couple of tablespoons, but be careful not to overpower the other ingredients.

Harissa - The quintessential North African spice paste is very much welcome at home in tajine! Try adding a little to the spices that you use to cook the chicken, or just stir some into the mixture before baking.  If you're not sure how much you want to use, start small and serve extra on the side.

Black olives - I've never been big on them myself, but fans will love the pungent, savoury kick they add.  The 'meatiness' of black olives also makes them a popular option for vegetarian tajine variations.

Spices - I know that long lists of spices can make a recipe look a little daunting, but the spices used here are all pretty common and easy to find.  If you happen to have a particular ras-el-hanout spice blend that you quite like, you can use it to replace some, or even all of the spices (except for the salt).  Do be cautious with this method, as some ras-el-hanout recipes lean much more heavily into spices like nutmeg or cinnamon than others, which could change the final dish up quite a bit.  If you're in doubt, try leaving in most of the cumin, coriander, turmeric, and salt, and using about 1 to 1.5 tsp of ras-el-hanout to replace the remaining ingredients.

Now technically speaking, tajines pretty much always have meat in them (often, but not exclusively, chicken or lamb). But with a dish this big on plant-based flavours, I think it's definitely worth trying out vegetarian options.

You could simply omit the meat of course, though that would obviously require changing up the recipe methods a little.  Still, we're talking about omissions rather than additions, so it shouldn't be too tricky.  I would be more inclined to substitute a nice dense and flavour-absorbing ingredient like cauliflower or broccoli.  Try using about 1 lb (450 g), diced into bite-size pieces.  A chicken-like meat-substitute would work nicely too.