Really long one on food!

Sorry, this is a long one.

I am in a food lover’s heaven. Not just Moroccan food in general, but the locals, my family in particular, make incredible food.

Today for example, I started with the usual crepe/pancake, folded square, hot with olive oil & honey. We worked at home today and grandma made a fabulous, though thoroughly regular, lunch. Roasted green pepper & tomato salad with lemon & oil, followed by a spiced cauliflower & chicken tagine (sort of stew) that was fabulous (eaten with crusty bread), followed by the best oranges. While I was working, something baking smelled wonderful, Zahra was making anise bicotti. (Grandma & Nezzha do most of the meal cooking, but Zahra does the baking: yesterday she made a homemade cake for tea - we don’t have supper ‘til about 8:30, so usually have tea [they have coffee] and snack at teatime 5-6pm, then last night at dinner, after the artichoke beef tagine, we had crepes she had also made that day, and it was actually mardi gras! don’t know if she planned it).

Anyway, lunch was great. Supper usually begins with soup, but tonight was different, we had pasta (tiny noodle balls) cooked in a spiced broth and topped with a special mixture of chicken, followed by mint tea.  To top it off, Zahra had made a ‘squidgy chocolate pudding’ from a British calendar with a different steamed pudding for each month.  This was pudding #4. It was a lot like a lava cake.  Yum. And this was a normal day!

The meals we had in Essaouira were memorable as well. The first night we went to a small, beautifully decorated restaurant owned by a friend of Kamal (Abderrahim’s friend who showed us around). It had no more than 10 tables. Morocco being a Muslim country, alcohol is forbidden. However, it exists, is sold in stores and in some restaurants that have a license. The owner brought us all tea glasses and then slipped Kamal a bottle of wine under the table, he quietly poured it into our tea glasses and got rid of the bottle because the owner would face a heavy fine if wine was caught in his restaurant. Then the meal started by them bringing us a tray of little dishes, things to dip into with bread.  Roasted red pepper salad, tiny spicy lentils, eggplant stuff, spicy bean dip, sort of like hummus, teeny herbed green beans, slivered beets with lemon and of course lots of olives. Then I had an avocado tomato salad with argan oil, a very rare, high quality flavorful olive oil from the region. It had a very unusual flavor. I had fish for the main course, called ‘la lotte’, with a tomato based spicy sauce. It was fabulous, as was everyone else’s. Later we went to a rooftop place to hear some local music and the other picture here shows you some of the ‘snacks’ they brought over.  The thing in the foreground was very unusual, a piece of smoked ham, with fig puree and a strawberry on top! Strange but good. Lots of olives, and the other thing is tiny toast with roasted, spicy meat on it.

The following night, we were meant to go to Kamal’s just to say hi, but he and his girlfriend had prepared an entire meal. Homemade phillo pockets with olives inside, grilled-herbed lemon chicken skewers and the most amazing salad I’ve ever seen: as you can see from the picture, it was a huge dish filled with rice, potatoes and at least 12 different cooked vegetables and eggs. A feast. [Luckily for me, my room is up two big flights of stairs, class is on the third floor, and I do lots of walking and even the occasional run.]