A mélange of the Cape's dried fruit with green olives, toasted cashew nuts and the spices of the Cape of Good Hope and North Africa makes for a chicken tagine full of perky flavours.

I bought dried fruit from the Veldskoen farm stall outside De Doorns recently. I love our Cape dried fruit, and using them in cooking, particularly chicken dishes, although they can be paired (peared?) with red meats too, and go particularly well with pork. And spices.

The dried fruit I chose were figs and cling peaches. The choices of dried fruit available in our stores have broadened lately -- I've seen distinctive apple varieties such as Pink Lady -- and have long believed we should be using dried fruit in cooking more than we do.

I haven't used the dried figs yet (though I'm plotting a ground beef dish with them) but decided to use the dried cling peaches in a tagine. This tagine.

It was the first time I'd got the tagine down from its shelf since moving to Cape Town last December. Logically, it needed to wait for winter, although I don't mind food cooked in a tagine in hot weather either. But other factors delayed all sorts of recipes, and here we are in the second half of the year already. I feel like I blinked and missed a load of stuff.

I'd also bought medjool dates, superbly...