"From my grease splattered hands", to paraphrase Charlton Heston .

I can also justify owning a tajine, the conical-shaped terracotta cooking pot synonymous with Moroccan food. I can think of at least five dishes to cook in it. That all of those dishes contain the word "tajine" in them is neither here nor there. I also received the tajine as a gift and cooking up the mechoui a few months ago has put me on a minor Moroccan food kick.

SBS's multiple tajine recipes left me with an awkward choice, but I went with the more recent chicken tajine with preserved lemon and olives recipe, mostly because my Mum had dropped by about three kilos of preserved Meyer lemons, and there is nothing better that you can do with them.

As a first impression of the chicken tajine recipe from Food Safari, it is always a good indicator that the recipe will work out if you can't stop eating the individual ingredients as you're cooking. I know that it is morally indefensible to snack on the chunks of salty preserved lemons and eat spoonfuls of the chermoula spice paste straight.

You can't stop me.

After eating my fill, I quartered up the chicken. I find butchery relaxing. Once you get the hang of it, where to make the cuts seem obvious and automatic. I mixed the pieces into the marinade and left it for five hours.

The generally accepted theory behind the tajine's conical shape is that it preserves moisture in the cooking process as the tall cone cools the steam from the food in a neat trick of thermodynamics. I have absolutely nothing to prove this is the case in a conclusive manner, except the observation that the base of the tajine was at boiling point while the top of the cone remained a few degrees above ambient temperature. This observation hardly makes me the Moroccan culinary equivalent of James Joule

The terracotta base insulates the food and seems to distribute the low heat evenly. I imagine that if you cooked with the tajine over a low, open fire that the dish would begin to soak up the smoke flavour and further intensify the warmth of the dish. Very little water is required – the quarter of a cup that goes into the recipe was more than enough, with a few drips boiling over the edge of the tajine.

When you lift the cone of the tajine at the table, a genie of steam and spice escapes into ether. The chicken comes from it warm and unctuous, the spices mixed evenly throughout. I'd burnt a few minor chunks of the tomato to the bottom of the tajine, but this seems to have made no difference to the dish.