A Night in Casablanca: Part II, the FEAST and a Sweet Morning After

An intense week of planning and prepping for J's celebratory Moroccan feast finally came to its end; by the time Saturday morning finally came around, I was calm and focused on the task at hand. My house was clean (save the sink-fulls of dishes I'd still have to do throughout the day) and everything that could have been prepped ahead of time, was cleaned, cut and marinating in the fridge. Falling asleep Friday night, I felt like I was about accomplish something big that I had prepared for well.

Saturday started at 6am when my alarm welcomed me to the beautifully sunny morning. Saturday started again at 7:30am when I finally heeded my third alarm's (the rooster-sounding one) call that I get out of bed now. :D (It's ok, I plan things that way ...)

The first and most important task was to make myself some coffee. Ahhhh, sooo good .... then it was time to start the traditional Moroccan bread! The dough recipe was highly yeasted and composed of whole wheat and all-purpose flours. It also required me to take my first crack at kneading; I was pretty worried that I was adding too much flour during the kneading process (because the dough was very sticky), but after rising for an hour the loaf seemed ready to bake. This is where pictures in cookbooks become essential – I was comforted that my loaf at least looked right. This is also where you need to double check your recipes, because as I placed my loaf-filled cast-iron pan into the oven I thought, “it’s really weird that this recipe is so different than my past loaves, how will the loaf cook in 12-15min in a 220* oven?” A quick glance back at the page and I realized that 220* CELCIUS was indeed the correct temperature. Too bad my oven (and brain) doesn’t function in metric units. {sigh} … the bread survived another 10min on the counter as my oven temperature increased to 475*F. When the time was up, I tapped the bottom of the loaf and it sounded hollow so I knew it was done.

During the hour the dough took to rise, I drove over to the Sunnyvale Farmer’s Market. It was my first time to this location and I was surprised at not only how many vendors there were (in comparison to the HUGE Sunday Market in Mountain View), but the variety there was – including a delicious crepe vendor who made me one of the delicate pancakes with butter, sugar and fresh lemon for breakfast! Amongst my wares, I purchased 3pints of fragrant and ripe, in-season strawberries (you’ll see why later in this entry), 5lbs of sweet seedless oranges for my Orange Blossom Salad, 10 lovely vine-ripe tomatoes for my Tomato and preserved Lemon Salad, a 1/2lb of lychee nut because I’ve never had them in their natural form (mmm).

While the bread was baking, I segmented oranges for the first time. It is a process that makes me sorely wish my knife skills were better – and that I already owned my dream set of Wustof cutlery. The orange segments and juice went into a bowl with a few teaspoons of orange blossom water. The bowl was covered and chilled in the fridge for the rest of the day. The combination of fresh citrus and floral essence created a scent that was exotic and magical.


While the bread was cooling, I par-boiled and peeled the tomatoes. I’ve peeled tomatoes for sauce before, but this technique was a little different because the tomatoes were not supposed to be left in the boiling water long enough to have them cook. A race against time, 30 seconds in the boiling water gave way to a few minutes in an icy bath. The tomatoes did not peel as easily as I would have liked, but were eventually skinned, chopped and tossed in a bowl with a slivered red onion. I went on to rinse, pat-dry and slice my preserved lemon rinds, scooping out the slimy flesh and gently wiping away the loose pitch under a stream of cool water.

The following concern had seeded itself in the back of my brain: what if I just don’t like the preserved lemons?? I was preparing a meal that utilized the special ingredient in 3 dishes, what if it became the sour note of the night? I nervously arranged and tasted a forkful of the tomato, onion and lemon combination. A wave of relief, then exhilaration, immediately overcame me! It was like lemon heaven in my mouth– the perfect amount of saltiness and bright, lemony flavor. It was all that the blogs and articles I read promised and more!




Being more confident with the ingredient’s potential and more familiar with its flavor profile, I added extra to the tomato salad and decided to prepare a flavored oil for the bread with extra virgin olive oil, ghee, minced preserved lemon and black pepper. As the lemon rind is softened in the pickling process, the minced rind was mostly spreadable. The oil was one of the highlights of the night.

I took a break around 12:30pm to enjoy a salami sandwich and a glass of prosecco in the sun outside AG Ferrari Foods. I also picked up some fresh mascarpone for my planned strawberry application (more information to come).

Back at the house, I cleaned up my earlier-made mess and prepared myself to make another. I chopped the ingredients I’d need to add to the lamb once I started the tagine a bit later and I set the table. I decided to use my kitchen work-bench instead of my traditional dining table because I liked the idea of me and J finalizing and sharing the home-cooked meal in the kitchen. I had orange blossom water ready to warm over a tea light and arranged a vase of herbs.

By 5:30pm I was ready to start browning the lamb – a technique I have NOT mastered. My lamb was indeed dry going into the hot, oiled tagine, but a pool of liquid appeared and prevented the caramelization I was hoping to encourage. {sigh} I followed the rest of the recipe, softening the onions and adding the garlic, turmeric, cumin and ginger. I returned the lamb to the pot, added fresh parsley, cilantro, lemon thyme and some water, then covering the mixture to simmer for a few hours. I uncorked the red wine, tossed the tomato salad in lemon-paprika vinaigrette and removed the previously marinated olives from the fridge to reach room temperature. I cut and arranged the bread, covering it in damp paper towels to remain fresh until J’s plane landed.

J arrived on time and hungry at 7:15pm. I was calm, pleased with my preparation and excited to enjoy a meal I knew would be delicious.

The courses progressed as planned. The first bottle of wine was poured and glasses were clinked. The Austrian wine was alike to chardonnay (not the heavily-oaked California variety) in its texture and flavoring, but was especially suited to highlighting the lemon in the dishes of the first two courses. J LOVED the marinated olives, which maintained their firm texture and absorbed the preserved lemons’ brightness while remaining mild. (We had to re-jar some of them to ensure leftovers for her parents to sample the next evening.) The heavily scented oil gave the mostly flavorless meant-to-absorb-flavors bread a perfect purpose.


I completed and served the two salads: finishing the Orange Blossom Salad with slightly toasted, sliced almonds, slivered dates and fresh mint and the Tomato and Preserved Lemon Salad with chopped cilantro and parsley. The pictures do not do the flavors justice. Both were unique, one sweet and the other savory, one chilled, one room-temperature but were tied together by their citrus accents. The wine went beautifully with both and I was happy that the different acidities of the dishes never clashed, but fit smoothly with each other and the wine.

After the salads were shared, I boiled water for the couscous and added the fresh peas and preserved lemon to the tagine. The entree needed to cook just long enough for the peas to soften, but we continued to nosh and comment-on the first two courses until we had finished the first bottle of wine. :D The peas lost some of their vibrant color during this time, but the smell of the braised meat and spices was extremely agreeable. I tossed the couscous with some ghee and spooned the Lamb, Pea and Preserved Lemon Tagine over it.

My verdict? The tagine’s spicing was spot on. The marinated lamb (not called to be marinated overnight in the recipe, but suggested by Katia) had beautifully-layered flavor but did not come out as tender as some of the fall-apart braised meats I’ve enjoyed in the past. J and I discussed how the lamb was indeed tender but fell-short of my expectations, hypothesizing that the issue was timing. Although I cooked the lamb 30min longer than the recipe directed, I have a feeling that the heat distribution and conduction of a clay tagine is different than the Dutch oven used in the cook book. Overall, it was a fabulous dish and the couscous served well, soaking up the delicious juices.

The Rhone wine that I served with the main course was worth $25. Full-mouthed, fruity [but not like an in-your-face Zin] and medium-bodied, the red had the loveliest, lingering flavor of smooth black pepper. It paired very very well. (Ok, you're right ... the picture has me holding a glass of wine that is obviously not red. But I needed a paragraph to pair this picture with, and this will have to do.)

For the final course, I topped the almond-paste stuffed dates I had arranged earlier that week with orange zest and brewed a pot of Moroccan mint tea (tea courtesy of Casablanca Market in Mountain View). J’s addition of [many] spoonfuls of sugar really suited the delicious tea that perfectly ended the fantastic and wildly successful Themed Cuisine II meal. :D


While we went to bed very full and very happy, I was obliged to plan for us a special Sunday-morning breakfast: a homemade tart with fresh strawberries and a lemon-mascarpone cream accompaniment. J suggested (an example of one of the many reasons I love her) that we have champagne with the meal, served with the leftover strawberries. I happened to already have my previously-purchased bottle of AG Ferrari Prosecco in the fridge! The tart was very very good and made the house smell amazing. The shared bottle of Prosecco was great, too :D

Naked Almonds All Over the Room: A Night in Casablanca, Part I

As "planned" over a month ago before Themed Cuisine Week I: Ethiopian, the time for Themed Cuisine Week II: Moroccan is coming to fruition. Literally. My preserved lemons have been pickling for 5 weeks and are ready to make their way into a 4-course, wine-paired dinner. No expense spared to celebrate J's super-successful first year of Grad school (1/2 way done!).

I've been utilizing my newly-established South Bay Area resources to plan and execute this meal (prep has started a full 6 days before the big event.) Casablanca Market in Mountain View has not only provided the traditional tagine - the vessel in which I'll cook the main course - but also the expertise regarding cooking technique. Katia was more than helpful and she explained to me over the phone how I will use the clay pot to not only braise, but brown the lamb. I met a lovely woman at a local Italian gourmet market, AG Ferrari Foods in Sunnyvale, who shared with me a multitude of cheeses (including the revered barrata, served 3-ways), tastes of open wine and local food knowledge Friday night as I snacked on Italian treats at one of their sidewalk tables. Her husband owns a wine store in Santana Row at which I spent an equal amount of time (the next night) drinking more wine, snaking on more Italian antipasta and quizzing the staff on wine recommendations for the difficult-to-pair arrangement of dishes I'll be serving on Saturday. I left with two bottles, a discount and a smile :)

My dish selections are sourced from two fantastic cookbooks: Cooking at the Kasbah and The Food of Morocco. (Thank you, J, for the first one!) So you want a preview of the menu?

Our Night in Casablanca:

Preserved Lemon Marinated Olives

Traditional Moroccan Bread

Tomato and Preserved Lemon Salad

Sweet Orange and Date Salad

Lamb Tagine with Peas and Lemons

Couscous

Almond Paste-Stuffed Dates

Wine #1: An Austrian native, Grüner Veltliner is a grape that is making its way into the glasses in wine bars and restaurants world-wide. The grape is capable of creating a complex, full-flavor white wine with not only citrus notes, but a balanced sampling of spice. This lends it to pair well with heavily-herbed and hard-to-pair meals. Impressively, in recent international blind-tastings, secretly-submitted Grüner Veltliner varietals have been mistaken for and ranked among Europe's top-ten chardonnays. It's a conniving little grape :D

Wine #2 (for the main course): Sourced from the Rhone region of France, Clot de L'oum's La Compagnie Des Papillons (translated: company of the butterflies) has shared characteristics of its three grapes: Carignan, Grenache and Syrah. Here's a "professional" wine description for you since I know basicially nothing about French wine: "With bittersweet cassis, wet stone, licorice, lead pencil, game, and alluring floral elements emerging on the nose (these wines perpetually need to “breathe”) it offers a plush, refined palate with no superficial sweetness but impressively layered with black fruits, minerals, herbs and meat. Infectiously juicy throughout, it nevertheless finishes in anything but simple fashion, with impressive salt, stone and graphite minerality, subtly sweet cassis and blackberry fruit, and deep meatiness." mmmm ... hope it works out :D

I've spent a few days now planning shopping lists and planning the prep/cooking timing. Yes, I was proud to already own every spice called for in the recipes (save one special one I'll use to marinate the lamb per Katia's recommendation) and thanks, Dad, I learned from your intensely brooded-over Xmas Eve schedules. Sunday night, I started one of the steps towards our dessert - the homemade almond paste.

So how do you blanch almonds, Google? Take those raw almonds to the hot tub ... they'll be easily coaxed out of their coats, jackets and dresses. (Ok, fine, that's not how Google told me to do it ... but it's surely how it seemed to play out.) Let me tell you, naked almonds are feisty!! In a pan 1/2-filled with boiling water, you "blanch" the almonds for about 30sec, then drain them. The skins separate from the nut and with a little pinch, they slide right out ... and onto the floor. Or they fly across the room and under the table. Or they *ping* into the bowl with such force that they bounce right back out and into the recyclables. Maybe I just need practice. :( Needlesstosay, 1.5lbs of almonds later, I had a bowl of pretty, naked almonds.

These newly-shorn, white beauties took a whirl in the food pro in batches until they were finely ground and were then mixed with a combination of butter, superfine sugar, a touch of almond extract, and the special ingredient, orange blossom water (a wonderfully floral and exotic ingredient I happened to already own thanks to a trip to a local Pakistani market.) The resulting paste is much less sweet than the almond paste you'll find in stores and the flavor is layered and delicate. Friday night, the paste will be colored bright green, balled and stuffed into pitted dates {drool} from the farmers market, then garnished with orange zest. There is some seriously delicious and decadent dessertage happening here!

Being that the process was unique to this meal - and the fact that I have three jars of them - I will be utilizing the preserved lemons 3 ways:

1) Marinated Olives: Castelvetrano olives will be marinated for two days with cilantro, preserved lemon, parsley, cumin, garlic and red chilli. Castelvetrano olives are new to me; the prettiest shade of [almost] spring green, they are medium-sized, round, firm and very mild. The guy at Whole Foods was more than welcome to let me try one and helped me cheat the system by giving me the juice to add after they weighed the container at the front counter (and provided a leak-free container so that I wouldn't leak while riding my bike home). They are really wonderful and are a nice change to the very-salty, mushy olives you can find anywhere.

2) Tomato and Preserved Lemon Salad: Fresh, skinned tomatoes are chopped and tossed with fresh herbs, a dash of paprika and thinly sliced preserved-lemon rind. Now, I'm only speaking from Googled descriptions and my imagination, but the pickled citrus should add an almost floral, intensely-lemony, caper-like saltiness. I'll use it sparingly.

3) Lamb Tagine with Peas and Lemons: You really can't ever go wrong with braised lamb. But dress it with farmers-market-fresh peas, assorted fresh herbs including mint, cilantro, parsley and lemon thyme, robust spices like cumin, ginger, turmeric, coriander and garnish with a bright, citrus-y/saltiness? You just might have the main course that is served on special occasions in heaven ... we'll find out on Saturday.

Ok, that's enough for now - more will come after the meal is cooked and eaten.

Boats of Oats!!!

Ok ... so you have to trust me on this one. I'm on an oatmeal kick. I've been eating it most mornings for a while now, simply-made with some dried fruit. But this week I've been craving MORE oatmeal and it has started sneaking its way into my dinners as well. It all started with good clean ingredient-time-use-juggling banter in the "breakfast for dinner" vein (with two nights of SUPER AWESOME double-yolk eggs, a bit of cheddar and smoked salt over the chewy oat), but tonight I took oatmeal onto another plane - giving it a true place on the dinner table.

Picture this ... and picture me and my hand gestures emphasizing just how cool this meal is to me:

Ginger-infused, thick-cut, organic, rolled oats - made so very slightly al dente with minced fresh ginger - created the fragrant, slightly-chewy/slightly-creamy, savory bed for a sauté of red bell pepper, broccoli, onion, carrot and sesame seeds with a dash of chili sauce. (It seems also to have created a bad run-on sentence...) On top: a yummy yolk-poppable egg, a drizzle of soy sauce, sliced water chestnuts and pickled ginger. OMG ... I should go make more RIGHT NOW!

Ok, I'm done :) Thank you for your time!

Gabe's Graduation