* Slow Cooker Moroccan Lamb Tagine

I JUST BOUGHT A SLOW COOKER!!! Oh yes I did. I've been rebelling against this one purchase for yeeeeaars. Rebelling. Truly.

I love cooking gadgets and cooking gimmicks but until recently, a slow cooker/crock pot was at the bottom of my list. Purely because I honestly believed the only thing you could cook in it, was Chicken Chasseur.... This is because as kids, whenever we saw that mum had got the crock pot out, we knew it was chicken chasseur for dinner, and don't ask me why, but we'd spend the whole day dreading it. Possibly because mum got the crock pot out A LOT. I think we ate almost as much chasseur as we did bolognese!

I no longer have an aversion to chicken chasseur, and have in fact, included a recipe for it within the walls of this blog - however, up until recently I've had no designs on owning a slow cooker. None whatsoever. That's until I started up this blog in an endeavour to make our food a tad more interesting for us to eat - we'd fallen into a food rut. Since starting Abbe's Cooking Antics, I've spent a lot more time surfing the net, looking at what people are cooking and eating, and I had no clue that there were quite so many things that you could cook in a slow cooker... cheesecake for example (really?!?).

So, I gots me a slow cooker to slowly cook stuff in and what do I do? I don't cook a slow cooker recipe... meh... too easy... I adapt a stove top recipe that I've never actually cooked before. There's a time adapter/conversion thingy at netmums.com that converts times of oven/stove top based recipes to slow cooker temperatures and times. Brilliant.

Coincidentally, Genie at Bunny Eats Design, has invited me to join in a monthly link up party - Our Growing Edge - designed to connect food bloggers and challenge/inspire them to try new things and share the end results. I think this is an amazing idea, especially for someone like me that occasionally needs a push to experiment. I really can be quite lazy when it comes to trying new stuff. I do tend to stick with what I know works! This month's link up is hosted by Sonya at and more food and the recipe I'm submitting for it - is this one because...

It was lush.

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Slow Cooker Moroccan Lamb Tagine Recipe

Serves 4

Prep time - 10 minutes
Cooking time - 6hrs (or thereabouts)
Total time - 6 - 7 hrs

You will need
A slow cooker (ha ha)

Ingredients
450g/1lb lean lamb mince
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 heaped tbsp plain flour (gluten free flour works fine here)
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground ginger
300 ml/7 fl oz hot lamb stock
1 tbsp runny honey
1 x 400g/14oz can chick peas, drained
Salt and freshly milled black pepper
100g/4oz ready to eat apricots , halved (or chopped if you're trying to hide them from your hubby)
2 large handfuls baby spinach - chopped (optional)

Method
Quickly dry fry the lamb mince in a non stick pan, drain off the excess fat and spoon into the slow cooker. Add the onion, flour and spices and stir to coat the meat. Then pour in the stock, honey, chickpeas and seasoning and give it all a good stir.

Cook on low for about 5 hours.

Add the apricots and cook for a further hour, stir in the spinach (if using) and allow it to wilt - this takes about 2 minutes, if that, before serving with Lemon and Parsley Couscous.

EAT

Recipe adapted for slow cooker (and us) from Simply Beef and Lamb

NOTE: I added the chickpeas at the beginning because I like mine to be a bit more butter than bullet. If you like your chickpeas to feel like little lumps of lead, add them half way through instead.