Morocco: tea and tagine

Those of you who follow my blog will know I have a bit of an obsession with North Africa. I’m not sure why: my blood is as Northern European as the lovechild of Ulrika Jonsson and Ewan McGregor; I’m a feminist, an atheist, a social alcoholic; and I love – I mean love – pork. Muslim countries were just not designed for people like me. And yet Morocco has been on my List Of Places To Go Before I Die for approximately the last decade. So off I went, my first two-week holiday in eight years.

Needless to say, there was an awful lots of tagine and couscous around, which we were taught to cook in the photogenic village of Ait Benhaddou (whose Kasbah has been featured in dozens of Hollywood films) by a character known amusingly as Action. Seriously. He’s proud to have been an extra in no less than ten movies, and is clearly quite the exhibitionist. ‘I already have three children,’ he told us, as he posed for the camera: ‘one Action Boy and two Action Girls. But that’s enough – no more Action.’ If you say so.

Dinner (and lunch, and pretty much any snack you could mention) is always washed down with a glass of jaw-achingly sweet mint tea – or thyme tea, or whatever herb tea they happen to have handy. And those aforementioned snacks usually comprise a tooth-decay-inducing gamut of pastries. Well, if you can’t drink I guess you’ve got to get your sugar hit from somewhere…

There was also camel (which goes surprisingly well in a burger with plenty of cumin, chilli and coriander) as well as olives (I am officially off olives for the rest of October), harira (a spicy, bean-based soup that has as many recipes are there are Moroccans cooking it) and of course pastilla (a sweet-and-savoury flaky pastry generally stuffed with pigeon or chicken and almonds).

Much of what we ate was region specific: grilled fish in the coastal town of Essaouira, for example, and stuffed Berber bread and omelettes made with tomato, cumin and onions in the Atlas mountains, where many of the Berber tribes live.

But I guess I was rather hoping for something else: something that years of poring over cookbooks and watching TV cookery programmes hadn’t taught me, something surprising, something I’d never even heard of. As we dozed down the road from Marrakesh to Essaouira, our guide rather curiously shouted, ‘Quick! Get your cameras out – there’s goats in trees!’. We stumbled off the bus, wondering what was so exciting about tree-climbing goats, and then discovered something even more curious. The goats having eaten the nuts from the trees, the next step is to sort through the goat pooh for the kernels, which are then turned into oil: Argan oil. Well, it’s certainly a novel approach.

Just down the road, we visited a cooperative where women work to turn these argan pits into cooking oil, cosmetics, pastes and healing remedies. Having tasted the oil (it’s like a cross between sesame oil and toasted almonds) I picked up a bottle, plus a tahini-style paste made of argan oil, almonds and honey. I have no idea what I’m going to do with these yet, but I’m always game for trying something new.

Flicking back through my diary, I realise I haven’t told you about the breakfast pancakes (sort of like a cross between English crumpets and that sour Ethiopian bread), the endless dates on the palm trees, the Moroccan wine (which is, indeed, produced despite its diminutive target audience), the nus-nus coffee, the chaotic bartering at the souks, the Nomads cooking dinner in a sandstorm in the Sahara… perhaps you will go to Morocco and taste for yourself. Insha’Allah.