Very Moorish: Chicken with pasta and spicy carrot puree

One of my favourite pieces of cooking equipment is my Le Creuset tagine, which was a gift a couple of Christmases ago as a replacement for an earlier tagine which ended up with the lid stuck to the base following an attempt to cook rather more lamb tagine with apricots and honey than it would really hold. I don't use it nearly often enough, but I remembered it this morning when we were thinking about what to have for dinner, and reached for my copy of Claudia Roden's Tamarind and Saffron to look for inspiration.

We decided that the recipe for chicken with pasta looked interesting, and as the deli in the Covered Market yielded the requisite small rice-shaped pasta that was what we had. The chicken is simmered slowly in water with garlic, cardamon, cinnamon and ginger, and then the pasta is cooked in the resulting broth with the cooked chicken added and warmed through just before serving. As I was only cooking for two of us I used chicken supremes instead of the whole chicken suggested in the recipe, but still simmered them for an hour. We were both impressed by the result (despite the cognitive dissonance of eating something that looked like rice but tasted like pasta!); it was a nice soothing meal for the end of a long week, delicately flavoured rather than being overwhelmingly spicy.

As a side dish we had spicy carrot puree, also from the Claudia Roden book; mashed carrots with olive oil, vinegar, harissa and cumin.