moroccan food

I was excited about the food in Morocco. I love cous cous and I was looking forward to discovering different ways to cook it and spice it up. Boy was I disappointed. According to the guide book, Moroccans love making traditional food at home. However, when they go out to eat, they want to eat Italian, Spanish, and French food. So how am I supposed to get a hold of some good Moroccan food?? Here is what we experienced...



Walking through their open-air market places showcasing mountains of spices, one would expect their food to be tantalizingly full of flavor. The flavors do stand out from the general blandness of English food, but they are not too exciting. Most meat and vegetables come to the table bright yellow and all tasting the same. Many restaurants offer a variety of choices, including pizza, pasta, and under the heading of 'Moroccan' give you two choices, both with either beef or chicken: tagine or cous cous.Tagine is a stew of veggies and meat with yellow spices served and probably cooked in pottery that looks like a pointed hat. It's usually pretty good. The cous cous looks like the same thing only it's served on a plate with a separate plate of cous cous.

Each meal begins with bread, butter and olives and ends with mint tea. We heard great things about the mint tea, but had a variety of experiences. It was always served in a silver tea pot and clear glasses and poured from way up high to make it bubbly. A couple times it tasted like someone put their cigarettes out in it and one time quite a few ants were also trying to get a taste but had failed miserably. Towards the end of our trip it got better, tasting clean, sweet, and minty just like it should. I think this improvement was in part due to letting the tea settle and in the other part due to better quality restaurants.

Most restaurants had seating outside which contributed to visitation by a gang of beggar cats nearly everywhere. These cats were skinny, and many of them young, so of course we shared our chicken with them!

In Marrakech we saw quite a few butchers like this one where live chickens are kept in cages on the back wall and slaughtered and sold right there in front of you. I can't decide if this is healthier because it's so fresh or less so because of the close proximity of excrement and flies. However they did have a sink for rinsing the chicken off before they sold it.  The picture quality is bad because I had to grab it quick as some guy across the street was saying something to me in French about not taking photos. I wasn't exactly sure what he meant, so I just got out of there.

 
This monk fish was delicious and as you can see, Jay is enjoying his paella. While you are eating, people are desperate to get your money. Kids come by with roses or tissues, guys come by selling sunglasses or excursions, musicians play horrible made-up songs and then hold their hands out, and sometimes acrobats come along and do flips and then collect change from everyone.

When we didn't feel like being hassled, we resorted to eating pizza in our room and watching the only English television channel BBC news or a movie on the ipad. Pizza Hut seemed to be one of the only restaurants who didn't have a sweet talker stationed outside to try to entice you.

Overall it was an interesting culinary experience, and I guess I will just have to make up my own cous cous recipes!