I'm just by myself today. We discussed the menu and it looks a lot of food! I was so excited. Like yesterday, we went to the market for shopping. On the first day, we had something like eggrolls. The skin was neither filo nor eggroll, though. I just found out that is called warqa. It is thicker and more flexible than filo dough. It seems most Moroccan restaurants in the US use filo dough as a substitute for warqa. I saw how it's made at the market - very fascinating. They grab sticky dough (much stickier than pizza dough) and drop it onto a hot crepe pan. Most of the dough is still sticking to their hands and only a small amount of dough stays on the pan. This creates a paper-like thickness. After it's cooked, they brush a small amount of oil between each sheet to avoid having them stick to each other. Unlike filo dough, it doesn't get dried out so quickly.
Lamb Tagine
Spiced and seasoned lamb was covered by sliced sweet potatoes.
Grilled Sardine
Spiced and seasoned sardine fillets are placed on top of sliced oranges and tomatoes and grilled. Very nice. I thought the orange is for the flavor but I found out we are supposed to eat the fish with the orange slices.
Warqa with almond paste
This is warqa, cut into strips
Almond, sugar and butter paste are wrapped in to make a triangle shape
There could be a specific name for these sweets. But I forgot to write it down....
Bastilla
This is traditional bastilla with pigeon. Again, this is a super fresh pigeon which was alive a few hours ago... But these particular pigeons were pretty small.
The pigeons are fried in a pot with various spices and aromatics. Then, water is added and cooked until it gets really tender. After removing all the bones, the meats are shredded very finely
Shredded meats and reduced cooking liquids are wrapped in warqa and baked in the oven.
Topped with powdered sugar and cinnamon. Compared to bastilla I've had in the US (with filo dough), it was more difficult to eat with fork only (I used a knife). The warqa is much tougher.
Another application of warqa. The instructor let me choose the shape so that I don't think this is the traditional way of presentation. The filling is caramelized onion and golden raisin. When I was at culinary school, we had a final exam for international cuisine class. Every student was given 1/2 chicken and cooked an appetizer and main dish to represent the country that the student was assigned to (everyone had a different country). Mine was Morocco. The only criteria are to utilize the chicken as much as possible and create the dish to represent the cuisine's characteristics. Because the other ingredients are only things available in the kitchen, we couldn't create an authentic dish. Any fusion dishes were fine as long as they are identifiable as coming from the specific cuisine. Interestingly, I made something like this. It's very funny.
Beet soup
This is another very satisfying vegetarian soup, the liquid on the top is orange juice and melted butter
Moroccan Salad
This is the same Moroccan salad that we had on the first day.
Crepe
I guess this is the French influence. Pretty much the same as a French crepe but it's a bit fluffier so that it's closer to a Swedish pancake. We could have used any filling but this is just a plain crepe. We used vanilla sugar (for most sweets we made, also). It seems vanilla sugar is more popular than vanilla extract.
By the way, people in most parts of Morocco are heavily influenced by France and many of them speak fluent French (Moroccan law is written in French). But the northern tip of Morocco is more Spanish influenced (obviously because it's close to Spain). I would love to see how food in that region differs from the rest of the Morocco.
We prepared more stuff for tomorrow. I'm going to explain these dishes in tomorrow's entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment