Hot weather lamb tagine

It's been hovering around 30º here in London. Which is great if you live somewhere built to maximise airflow, or have air conditioning. Of course, my flat features neither, so the last thing I felt like doing was turning on the oven for three hours. 

Of course, that's the beauty of pressure cookers – turning slow-cooker recipes into weeknight doable recipes. And not requiring the oven to be on. I have never quite managed the melt-in-the-mouth texture that you expect with these kinds of dishes except in my pressure cooker. I am much too prone to forgetting to check on my slow-cooking casseroles/whatever and they invariably get a layer of dried out meat on top that no amount of turning around in sauce later will fix. 

A quick google for 'lamb tagine pressure cooker' turned up this lovely recipe for Pomegranate & Date Lamb Tagine. I urge you to go take a look at the recipe. I'd offer the following observations:

• If you're feeding a small person, this is a good meal for everyone. I go into more detail on how to adjust for little people over on my mum blog, Mummy & Monkey.
• I found this a bit too sweet and would have maybe halved the pomegranate juice and either added stock or just water. This coming from a person who loves sweet and meat together.
• The recipe describes browning the meat in batches, which is all well and good but if you have a baby and a small terrier playing tug of war through your legs and maybe left getting dinner going until you were too hungry and cranky, if you just throw all the meat in there and it stews a bit but doesn't really brown it's fine. The sauce covers any less-than-appetising looking meat chunks, and the pressure bit of the pressure cooker covers many sins. Just don't do it for too long. 
• As I hacked off chunks of lamb leg, I lost steam as I got closer to the bone. So I figured, whatever, and tossed the inexpertly cleaned bone in with meat hanging off it. That was the best course of action because when I cracked open the pressure cooker, all the remaining meat fell off and I'm sure that bone added a bit more flavour. 
• I picked some chocolate peppermint from my garden to finish this, and it was such a perfect match I had to mention it. I've never seen it sold in bunches, but mint is so simple to grow, I'd highly recommend planting one of these – try Jekka's Herb Farm. Remember, mint is a bully in the veggie patch or herb garden, so plant in a planter and then put that in the ground, or keep it in a container. It also makes lovely chocolate mint syrup, which in turn makes loooovely cocktails.