Moroccan Cooking Class, Pt. I

The sister of one of our Moroccan friends is a professional chef and she hosts cooking classes every Sunday. Each week she prepares a selection of dishes for up to 15 participants, sharing instructions and cooking tips along the way. The classes last all day, but you get to taste every dish (and take some home) at then end. While J was studying, K took a taxi to the neighboring town of Temara to participate in her first cooking class. The theme for the week: Moroccan Cuisine. The perfect class to start off with! **WARNING: NOTHING about this class is vegan...in fact, it was every bit the opposite of that. Very meat-heavy. If this might bother you, I'll spare you the details and you can skip this post!

According to the Facebook announcement for this particular class, we would be preparing the following dishes. To help you out, I've put my translation of the dish in italics.

• Tajine d’agneau A la tomate maasal et mdarbal - Slow-cooked lamb with tomato sauce and eggplant

• Coquelet au nijel et les échalotes - Cornish game hens with nigella seeds and shallots

• Skhina - A Jewish-Moroccan stew made of meat, meat, and more meat, with some potatoes, chickpeas, and garlic

• Rfisa royal - A showstopper! Chicken served over a bed of shredded paper-thin pastry with lentils and fenugreek, topped with dates, figs, and eggs.

• Harira - Popular Moroccan soup that I can best describe as having a taste similar to minestrone, with the texture of chicken noodle.

Now, prior to the class, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what 90% of the dishes were. Ok, let's be honest...even AFTER the class I still didn't know what the dishes were. Thankfully, they set up a WhatsApp group for each cooking class, and everyone shares their photos and videos afterwards. By piecing together my photos and the 75+ other messages I had (plus maybe a little help from Google), I at least understood what I ate that day...all of which was incredibly delicious (J agreed - he got all the leftovers)!

So, I attended this cooking class. All the other ladies have a notebook and pen with them...because, Chef Ilhame and her team prepare the entire meal from start to finish while the attendees watch and write down the ingredients, instructions, and anything important she says. Whoops. But they are all very kind and one of them gave me some paper. Now, it's also a local cooking class, so of course it was conducted in Moroccan Arabic (Darija). This meant I would understand approximately none of it. Accurate assessment. Luckily, I've followed a lot of cooking shows in Arabic (thank you Arabic Sesame Street!!!), so I was able to understand most of the ingredients. And because I could watch how she was preparing the dish, I understood probably 50% based on non-verbal cues. A few of the women spoke a bit of English, and they translated some things. While waiting for our dishes to cook, those who spoke Modern Standard Arabic chatted with me and I did my very best to hold some sort of conversation with them. They were all extremely welcoming and friendly! And they got a kick of out watching me trying to understand anything Chef Ilhame was saying.

Now, you might be wondering if I can recreate any of the dishes we made...most definitely NOT if I use the recipes I wrote during class ;) For your entertainment, I've included a picture of my notes below. I wrote the very first word in Arabic (عجينة), which means dough. And that was as far as I got with that. I then switched to only writing the ingredients in the order I heard her say them, or watched her add them to the recipe. As she bounced from dish to dish, I had to create a numbering system so I knew which pieces went with which dish. By the end of the class, I had resorted to simply writing whatever she was doing so it at least looked like I knew what was going on! And honestly, even though I failed miserably with the language, I had a fantastic time at this class and have already signed up for next week's lesson: Catering Table Dishes.

I'll leave you with one of my hand-written recipes, typed out according to what I wrote and what I remember :) I hope you do NOT try to make Harira using this recipe, but if you do...let me know how it turns out, haha.

Harira (Moroccan Soup)

-Chickpeas

-Lentils

-Salt

-Ginger

-Onion

-Turmeric

-Ibzar (which I now know is a spice similar to Garam Masala, thanks Google)

-Smen beldi (a fermented butter)

-Oil (olive oil and rapeseed oil)

-Vegetable bouillon cube

-Water

Mix all of the above in a large pot and cook it over low heat (that sounds about right).

Next, combine tomato paste and pureed (and strained) tomatoes in a bowl. Add them to the soup mixture, along with more water (about 2x the amount of liquid already in the pot). Return to heat.

Combine water and flour in a blender to create a thickening agent for the soup. This will get added towards the end.

Add pasta (sharia) to the harira, followed by the flour/water mixture and stir constantly. End of recipe...

Insha'Allah, you've got a delicious Harira soup ready to go!