What I Ate In Morocco
What I Ate In Morocco
My husband and I have a soft spot for Morocco. We love Africa altogether, but there’s something about Morocco that you love and hate with equal measure, and makes you want to go back for more.
Morocco is a vibrant country full of paradoxes. It has strong traditions and modern joie de vivre. It also has a diverse landscape of bustling cities, mountain ranges and arid deserts.
I especially love the aromatic and spicy food. Here are some the dishes we tried.
Tagine
Let’s start with the basic and most frequent option in restaurants and eateries across the country. A tagine is a clay, triangular cooking pot that gives its name to a myriad of dishes. It is a stew-like recipe made with a bed of meat and covered with potatoes and vegetables. It often includes a blend of spices such as saffron, cinnamon and turmeric.
Kefta
A form of tagine that has a mind of its own. This is usually served sizzling hot (literally) and is a sort of meatball and tomato stew, infused with garlic, fresh coriander and parsley, cinnamon and ground coriander. Just before the dish is ready, eggs are cracked into the sauce and cooked to perfection.
Harira
This dish looks unappetising but really is so hearty and delicious. It is a soup that is rich with tomatoes, lentils, chickpeas and lamb, and then finished off with a squeeze of lemon juice and some chopped coriander to balance out the flavours.
Needless to say, most dishes are served with delicious oven-baked, disc-shaped crusty bread, which they call khobz (or kessra), a striking resemblance to the way we say “kissra hobz” for bread in Maltese.
A typical Moroccan meal begins (and ends) with mint tea, a blend of green tea, sugar and fresh mint. You would then move on to a mixture of hot and cold salads, followed by a lamb or chicken tagine, or couscous topped with meat and vegetables. Moroccans tend to eat with their hands, using bread as a utensil.
