Morocco by Mouth

This is the post that should have happened back in May when I came home from my North African adventure with Katie. I had high hopes in the culinary department thanks to intrepid friends who had visited before me. I expected to eat camel meatballs every day and cous cous with various toppings and basically be snorting saffron all the time. Moroccan food is good, but most of the stuff you encounter on the beaten tourist track isn't THAT great. Things turned out to be pretty expensive, and most of the time, the more we spent the more mediocre the food was. So lesson learned. It usually pays to eat street food. And whatever you can get made by non-restaurant folks is a big bonus. Beautiful cous cous was cooked for us and served by a nomad family in the Black Desert (pictured below) and the best tajine was made by the family that ran a guest house in the Dades Valley where we spent the night crossing from Merzouga to Marrakesh.
Tajine, which is both the name for the distinctly Moroccan cooking dish in which the food is made and the food itself, is an assortment of lightly seasoned vegetables and usually a meat (chicken, lamb, beef). It is cooked on a ceramic plate underneath a ceramic chimney like cone. In restaurants it often came overcooked, as if the vegetables had been boiled beyond recognition and then plated back on the tajine just in time for service. It tended to be bland, but during the first week it was everywhere, and we ate it a lot. Cous cous was essentially the same as tajine but the veggies and meat arrived atop a mound of the little granules. Harira was also a common find. A traditional Moroccan soup that is tomato based with lentils and garbanzo beans. It was a favorite of mine and was especially good in Chefchaoen a small, rainy mountain town where a piping hot bowl ran us about $1.00. Although we never encountered camel meatballs, we did see this at a butcher shop in the Fez medina.
Halfway through the trip we were a little tajined out. We made the the discovery that Morocco has about as many Italian places as traditional Moroccan spots. We went on a pizza and pasta binge that lasted more than a few days and spanned a few cities. Most of the pasta was only ok at best but we found a few spots where it was LEGIT. One was in Essaouira and was a Sicilian restaurant run by a guy whose mother was Sicilian and father was Moroccan. That place was turning out some amazing food. Katie and I went two nights in a row. Their complimentary bread basket came with a plate of assorted goodies: creamy goat cheese, roasted eggplant, anchovies, and olives. I can't remember the name of the place at the moment, it might have been something like Mama Siciliana, I'm pretty sure that Mama was in the title. I'll try to figure it out. Here I am with the owner (on left) and head waiter who treated us to limoncello shots after closing.
The very best gem, I suppose, counts as street food. Although the cook was not technically a street vendor. While wandering through the maze that is Fez' old city, we happened upon this guy cooking up tasty sandwiches. He was frying eggs on a griddle alongside little potato cakes. When cooked he mashed them up together, stuffed them into a pita pocket, drizzled, a spicy chili sauce over the whole business, and then sprinkled it with cumin. That was a really good find. And for Morocco, the man had a pretty immaculate kitchen.

Another huge bonus was Fez' donut guy. This man wheeled a cart near the entrance of the Medina in the afternoon and rolled donuts and fried them to order. The best part was that you got to dip your hot oily donut in sugar yourself. Katie and I were way into it. We went so far as to buy four of them at the same time and each take down two, one after another. Below Katie gets busy and happy. Moroccan street food is definitely where its at. From sandwich carts, to dried fruit and nut stands, to orange juice vendors (all found easily at the main Plaza in Marrakesh, probably the most intense place I have ever been). But you want to be careful who you buy from. You can tell who has the freshest goods by taking a cursory lap before committing to a vendor. We found some pretty putrid looking mounds of kefta (mystery meaty balls) and lots of candy vendors whose carts were better off as beehives thanks to the swarms inside the case. Yikes.