Recipe ideas from Michelle Darmody

If you have any leftover dried fruits from your Christmas baking, there are many ways to use them up, in savoury as well as sweet cooking. 

Dates, figs, and raisins are all used to wonderful effect in many Middle Eastern dishes, tagines and stews often use the sweet pop of slowly-cooked dried fruit to offset other richer flavours.

They work particularly well in many slow-cooked dishes where fresh fruit would just fall apart.