Hiking in Atlas

Before going hiking, we had a nice breakfast at the hotel. It started with tea and olives. Then, they brought bread (something like Hawaiian sweet bread) along with two jams, honey, butter, and homemade olive oil.

                                                The homemade olive oil was really nice.


Then, they brought a fried egg. It seems like just a normal breakfast dish. But they sprinkled cumin on top. Very Moroccan. Cumin can be a bit overpowering. But I noticed Moroccan cumin is less pungent than ones I'm used to in the US. We discussed it at breakfast. Probably what we get in the US is from India. During the cooking class, we used tons of cumin on each dish. But it wasn't as "cumin-forward" as some Indian or Middle Eastern dishes.

After the breakfast, we headed to the Atlas. The tour guide said the hotel would prepare a lunch. And this is our lunch box....

I wasn't surprised that the lunch is tajine. But I was surprised that we are taking it in a super hot tajine pot.... This is how we carried our lunch in the car.... The driver said this is normal. If we had brought charcoal, we could have cooked the tajine in the Atlas.

By the way, the stuff blocking the tajine pot from shifting during the drive is a bunch of pencils that I brought from the US. The tour guide suggested that I bring pencils or socks to give away to local kids because we were driving by small villages. She said that children in such small villages can't afford things like this. We gave away all the pencils at different locations. One lady with a small boy gave us a gesture of "wait" when we gave a pencil to her son. She started to pick up walnuts on the ground and gave them to us. That was a very touching moment.....



Once we arrived at rocky area with a nice creek, we decided to have a lunch there. We brought some utensils but we decided to eat like local people and eat it just with the flatbread we brought. The Moroccan driver demonstrated how to eat it. It's pretty much the same as how Indian people eat food with naan. It was a very nice experience.

Lots of vegetables, such as eggplant, zucchini and potato. The zucchini is stuffed with kefta. Very good.



It seems we are the only people staying at this hotel (not a big accommodation, it's only 10 rooms or so), probably because it's on weekdays. The hotel is in such a remote area with no foreign tourists. It's really nice that we can keep the entire inn to ourselves. But the lounge where we had dinner was very quiet - I wish I could have interacted with other local people.

Anyway, the tagine of the night is eggplant with meat (probably lamb).

This dessert is very interesting. It was very refreshing. Because the lounge was pretty dark, we couldn't tell what it was at first (it's interesting how much we can not tell what we are eating without vision). Then, we could taste orange juice. But it took a while to figure out what this is. It is grated cucumber! I never thought that these two ingredients make such a nice dessert. It may be my personal preference because I love cocktails with cucumber (which not everyone is crazy about...). But this was a new finding for me. It seems this is a creation of the chef. I don't think this is something traditional Moroccan.

Tomorrow, we are driving back to Marrakesh and then flying to Marseille, France.