Name: Vegetable Tagine With Grilled Corn
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 35 min
Total time: 45 min
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon olive oil; 1/2 large onion (diced); 1 large zucchini (cubed); 2 cloves garlic (diced); 1/2 teaspoon cumin (ground); 1/2 teaspoon turmeric; 1 each bay leaf; 1 small cinnamon stick; 16 ounces chopped tomatoes (or 1 can); 1 cup water; 7 ounces butternut squash (peeled and cubed); 1/2 head cauliflower (cut into florets); 2 tablespoon golden or maple syrup; 4 ears corn (shucked); vegan butter spread (to taste); salt (to taste)

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This simplified vegetable tagine served with grilled corn showcases those warm Moroccan flavors. What’s more, this savory stew requires only one pot! While we would traditionally cook this aromatic stew inside a tagine pot, we tailored our recipe to use a standard pot as found in most kitchens. To make the most of our complex and fragrant sauce, we like to serve our tagine with warm flatbread for dipping.

How To Make This Recipe

We start by preparing our produce and aromatics. Then, we assemble our spices. Most tagines bring a heady blend of spices that balance sweet and savory. In our tagine recipe, we use a very simple mixture of spices that are easy to find in your local grocery store.

Because the vast majority of our community members do not have a traditional tagine pot readily available, we tailored our recipe to be made in a standard lidded pot or a dutch oven. If you’re lucky enough to have a ceramic tagine, however, feel free to use it for this recipe. Just be sure to downshift the heat to medium-low for the stew portion of the recipe. You’ll want to place an inexpensive diffuser between the tagine and the heat source to keep your ceramic from cracking.

Simmer Vegetables

Now that we have our mis-en-place, we heat our pot over medium-high heat. Once warm, we briefly sauté our onions in a drizzle of olive oil. To layer in those complex flavors, we add our garlic, zucchini, butternut squash, and spices. We sauté this mixture for just a minute using a little more oil to prevent sticking.

Sauté those aromatics.

Now, we’re ready to start adding our chopped vegetables. We start by adding our chopped tomatoes with liquid and stir. Next, we pour in a cup of water and cauliflower. From there, we let our vegetables simmer over medium heat while stirring occasionally. Keeping our pot partially covered, we allow our vegetables to simmer and soften. After about 20 minutes, we remove our vegetables from the heat and add in a little maple syrup. We also remove the cinnamon and bay leaf.

Simmer vegetables in spiced broth.

Grill Corn

Next, we grill our corn. We begin by preheating our grill pan over high heat until piping hot. Then, we add our shucked corn. We’re looking to char our corn, but we don’t want to burn it. So, we continue to turn each ear as they cook. Overall, this process takes somewhere around 10 minutes.

Char those ears of corn.

If you prefer, you can use an outdoor grill. Or, you can simply steam the corn if you don’t have either a grill pan or a grill on hand. Once our corn is nicely charred, we like to spread it with a little non-dairy butter and season with salt.

Bring It Together

Finally, it’s time to bring our final dish together. We pour our tagine into four serving bowls and add a half an ear of corn to each dish. We serve the remainder of the corn family style in a bowl. Sometimes, when we’re looking for a little extra protein boost, we garnish our stew with slivers of toasted almonds.

Divide tagine and corn into bowls.

We’re ready to eat. To make the most of our complex and fragrant sauce, we love to serve our tagine with warm flatbread for dipping. Or, we serve our stew over a fluffy bed of couscous.

We’re ready to eat!

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Recipe Card for Vegetable Tagine

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