Eating well in Morocco

When we entered Morocco from Spain in late January, our fridge and food cabinets were stuffed full. Our thought was that we would bring enough food with us so that we could get our bearings and figure out shopping before we actually needed food. We did our first veggie shop in Mohammedia, not because we needed food, but because we couldn’t resist the fresh offerings. Especially the avocados.

I don’t know what’s happened to avocados in the States, but I haven’t had a good one there in years. Maybe I buy them at the wrong store, or maybe I’m just not willing to pay the high price for really good ones. Either way, I have sorely missed good avocados.

Morocco has fabulous avocados, the big, fat, perfectly ripe, creamy specimens that I can just eat with a spoon. And that’s what I’ve been doing, eating luscious avocados without any adornment and it’s been heavenly.

Buying fruit and veggies goes something like this: I walk up to a local stand, the proprietor hands me a plastic tub and I go about making my selections and putting them in the tub. When I am finished, the guy removes the avocados, as they are a slightly higher price than all the rest of the veggies. Everything else stays in the tub and is weighed, then the avocados go on the scale and the two prices are combined on a calculator, which is shown to me so I know what to pay, which is usually something like four or five bucks (40-50 MAD, or Moroccan dirhams). The fruit and veggies here are dirt cheap. The big fat avocados average about a buck each. It seems almost criminal to pay so little, but that’s how it is in Morocco. This is one of the reasons why thousands of motorhomers flock to Morocco for the winter, because it’s inexpensive to live here.

The produce here is not clean, in fact, much of it is still as it was when it was pulled from the earth. So I set up a two-stage cleaning system. First, I rinse all the dirt and whatever off, then I put everything in a big tub with lemon water to soak for a few minutes before giving it a final rinse. This seems to be a good system for most things. Lettuce and spinach are the most difficult to clean because they can be loaded with sand. We’ve had more than one gritty salad, so I gave up and started eating chopped vegetable salads like tomato, cucumber, onion, etc. Here, that’s called a Moroccan Salad.

There are two grocery store chains in the country, Marjane and Carrefour. We stopped at Carrefour briefly to pick up some Moroccan wine, but otherwise haven’t shopped there. Locations are limited to the larger cities, and we’ve only shopped in Marjane once so far. The stores can be quite large, but they don’t have the stock to actually fill the shelves. In the Marjane we visited, there were three or four sections with long shelves filled with nothing but Laughing Cow cheese. A similar section was all yogurt. So it might look like they have a lot of stuff, but not always, as the shelves are repetitive. Which is fine, because our preference is to buy local from the small shops in town. When I lived in Libya, this is how we shopped. The name of each store usually corresponded to the color it was painted. We’d buy food from the Green Shop and household goods from the White Shop and so on. There was a guy named Haddi that would come by our house to sell veggies and Pepsi. He used to take my little sister, Shannon, on his rounds with him. If I recall, he started out with a donkey and a wagon, but soon upgraded to a truck. I was thrilled to see the fruit and veggie guy come through our campground in Marrakech (see top image), it brought back such fond memories.

At Marjane we purchased some red sausages that we later found out were spiced (not spicy!) turkey. I decided to prepare them one evening for dinner and by the time I got them cooked through my kitchen looked like a crime scene. The color of whatever spices were in those sausages, combined with the fat, flung across the kitchen shades like blood spatter. I was convinced I had ruined our shades, but Steven miraculously got them cleaned up. In the end, that sausage was incredibly delicious, but we didn’t buy any more!

In Tafroute I went to the meat market, which is quite an experience, and ordered a whole beef tenderloin to be picked up the next day. It weighed just over six lbs. and cost $42. We plan to buy another one just before we leave, because you cannot beat that price! One thing we have not purchased is chicken, mainly because in some places you have to pick out the one you want, which is still alive in a cage, and then they butcher it for you. I am not naïve about where my dinner comes from, but that doesn’t mean I want to stand there and make small talk while it’s happening. Fortunately, we brought chicken with us from Spain, which we got in a proper package!

On lazy days and travel days when we didn’t want to cook, we ordered dinner delivery, usually from the campground, but also from the lady who showed up at our door while we were boondocking and showed us photos of our options on her cell phone. (In these instances I can’t help but think some budding entrepreneur is missing an opportunity out in La Posa South.) In Morocco, you can get almost anything without ever leaving your rig. Many campgrounds deliver fresh bread first thing in the morning, so there’s breakfast sorted most days! We are getting so spoiled!

Our dinner delivery of choice is one tagine and one couscous. Tagine is a quintessential Moroccan dish of spiced meat with vegetables, or just spiced vegetables, cooked and served in a conical earthenware pot also called a tagine. Meat choices include beef, chicken, lamb, goat or dromedary. That’s camel, which we didn’t try, but I know of others who did and liked it. I can’t recall for sure, but I think fish was also an option on the coast. My favorite tagine was one we had in Tagazoute which was chicken, almonds and honey. And sadly, Steven and I shared that dish and we both immediately wished we had ordered two! It takes a long time for them to be prepared, so ordering another just wasn’t in the cards. I guess it’s good to be left wanting more. My second favorite was the lamb and prune tagine that I cooked myself at the cooking class in Marrakech. Mostly it was the almond-stuffed prunes I loved, I could have eaten a ton of those (probably to my later detriment, but let’s not go there).

Couscous is a favorite dish from my childhood, but the Libyan version is so different, and so much better, in my opinion, than the Moroccan one. In Libya, couscous has more of a tomato broth base, and has a ton of veggies and garbanzo beans and sweet potatoes, or pumpkin, which is my favorite. It is simmered for hours with an aromatic blend of spices. We used one in particular called Bzaar, which is a combo of ginger, cinnamon, black pepper, nutmeg, turmeric, cloves, coriander, and caraway. It’s not a blend you’re going to find at Whole Foods or Penzeys, sadly, but perhaps at a Middle Eastern store. Making Libyan couscous began by spreading newspaper on the floor and preparing all the veggies. Onions were sautéed, turmeric was added, and everything went in the pot layer by layer according to how long it needed to cook. Honestly, it always smelled so good and tasted even better. With memories like these, Moroccan couscous was a bit of a disappointment to me but Steven loved it.

Another uniquely Moroccan dish is the Pastilla. Honestly, I had no idea what this was and didn’t order it for a while, as I was trying all the tagine dishes. When we finally grew tired of those, we ordered Pastilla. It was kind of a shocker of a dish, something completely unexpected. The filling was delicious spiced shredded chicken, wrapped in a dough similar to phyllo, then baked. So far, so good, right? Then once done, it is generously sprinkled with cinnamon and powered sugar! It was like dinner and dessert rolled into one! I had a hard time figuring out whether or not I liked this, I mean, I ate it all, but when I thought back on it I just couldn’t decide! We shared one the next day with our friends Karen and Myles and it was pretty good, so I think I do like it, although I would like it so much more without the sugar. I love cinnamon in savory dishes, but powdered sugar? Not so much.

And then there were the restaurants. We ate out a few times, like in the square in Marrakech, along the Atlantic shore in Tagazoute, and enjoyed luscious orange crepes in Tafraout. In Mergouza, we ordered a Berber omelette, which is similar to shakshuka, one of my favorite dishes. It was delicious! Desserts are simple, bananas and oranges.

Suffice it to say we have been eating well in Morocco. We are now into our sixth week here and I am running out of time to decide on my food and spice purchases before we leave the country. I will stock up on avocados, for sure. And I plan on procuring a good supply of Ras El Hanout, a Moroccan spice mixture used in tagines and more. Oh, and a tenderloin. Beyond that, I’m not sure. So many decisions, so little space!

NEXT UP: Our last week in Morocco.

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