Tajine – Berber Moroccan Meatball Stew
Tajine with Couscous (recipe at About.com) Tajine is a Berber dish from North Africa, that is named after the special earthenware pot in which it is cooked (refer to Wikipedia). Moroccan meatballs taste a lot better if you’re not interested in authenticity. The meatballs were a very big hit (the biggest hit next to dessert), but the guests had not tasted my normal meatballs cooked in canned tomato pieces with the Parmesan cheese built right in.
Traditional Berber Moroccan “Harira” Soup
Harira (recipe at Chowhound) Substitute “rice flour” rather than regular flour for gluten-free.
And, I can’t stress this enough–don’t add a cup of rice as a substitute for a cup of vermicelli.
Moroccan Salads
Assortment of Salads (recipes at Recipes for Moroccan Starters)
Ful (fava or broad beans in tomato sauce)
Aubergine Puree – puree is babyfood by any other name even if it is eggplant. People will love babyfood as long as you call it puree.
Carrot Salad
Taktouka (cooked tomato and roasted pepper salad)
Olives for garnish
Morocco
Moroccan Music
Morocco for Kids
Why? It seemed a good way to learn geography and I like to cook for lots of people as long as I don’t have to clean up after them. I didn’t make this part of freeskool because you never know how many people will show up to a freeskool class, and nobody ever RSVPs. But we have a wonderful culinary adventure club so I knew a lot of people who were very adventurous and loved to learn.
Adventurous is very important because if there are two typical dishes for a country and one calls for chicken and the other calls for pig nose snot stewed in calf udder, I’m going for the latter at least a good third of the time, depending on the availability of the ingredients.
If you think this is a good idea, I would strongly recommend not cooking everything at once but doing maybe one dish a day. I wouldn’t be able to do this if I didn’t have several very good friends that allow me to drive them crazy.
Thanks also to Cheryl for doing her best to turn low quality pictures into food porn.
My original idea was to have maps for everyone, put them in a folder that everyone could bring and color along. In practice, only my daughter colors in the map – however, everybody else brings wine so I can’t complain.
Gluten free is a bit of a pain, most gluten-free food that is supposed to resemble gluten food sucks. My goal has always been to make food that my non-gluten free friends would like just as much as regular food, and to eat as little processed food as possible. That means that sometimes I have some strange substitutions. But sometimes things work out very well – like with my new favorite waffle recipe (I had to put it in even though it has nothing to do with geography because it’s really that good).
Enjoy the trip!
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