The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [83]
“Why don’t they tell you when they’re about to do that?” I exclaimed.
I turned around and just caught a glimpse of Jordan’s camel doing the same thing, almost knocking her sunglasses off her forehead.
“Aaah!” she squealed.
One by one, the camels seated in procession just behind her began to stand up, shifting their riders forward in their seats. There were twelve of us backpackers in the group, each mounting camels for the first time. When the camel at the end of the line sat aloof, refusing to move, one of our Berber guides walked over to it and spoke gently to its face. He patted the camel a few times. Grudgingly, it rose.
Then we were off—into the dunes of Erg Chebbi, in the Western Sahara of Morocco, for a night of camping in tents under the stars.
It was January, and my good friend Jordan and I were in the middle of our ten-day trip to Morocco. Jordan and I had been trying to plan a vacation together for the last year or so, hoping to relive some of the traveling adventures we’d shared when studying abroad in Europe my junior year of college. Now that we were both living in New York and working steady jobs with paid vacations, we decided to pick a place where we’d never been before and just buy tickets. We finally decided on Morocco; it was a country and a culture that we knew next to nothing about. What better reason than that, we thought, for us to go?
After spending three nights in Marrakesh, Jordan and I signed up for a three-day trek to the desert, passing the rugged Atlas Mountains and sepia kasbahs famously made popular by Hollywood films shot on location in this exotic landscape. In our van were ten other travelers, between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two. They hailed from Spain, Australia, Quebec, London, Italy, Korea, and Japan. Two days into the trek, we were just like old friends.
The trip had been filled with stunning landscapes, architecture, and culture shock, but for me, it was also a fascinating gastronomic odyssey. From the start of my blog, I’d accepted that when I traveled out of New York City, and certainly outside of the country, I would allow myself to eat out for practicality. I took full advantage of this liberty while traveling through Morocco. There was nothing quite comparable to Moroccan food, I learned. It had dramatic extremes, from heavily spiced, slow-cooked tajine stews to fresh, barely seasoned vegetables and salads. Jordan and I had taken a casual cooking class while touring Marrakesh, and I already couldn’t wait to duplicate back at home the dishes I’d learned about.
So after a near-perfect vacation with Jordan-the only imperfect part being an accidental thirteen-hour layover in London’s Heathrow Airport, which was sort of fun and memorable in its own way—I came back to New York, going on less than three hours of sleep in the past twenty hours or so. But I arrived home in the afternoon, and I didn’t want to mess up my return to work the next day by going to sleep right away. Instead, I wanted to surprise Ben with a fabulous Moroccan meal when he came home from work.
I had to get to work quickly. It was three thirty by the time I arrived home, and I had to pick up some groceries first. I was set on cooking the same two dishes we’d made in our cooking class, the Moroccan menu staple, tajine chicken with olives and piquant preserved lemon, and a side dish or warm dip of roasted green bell pepper and tomato, called taktouka.
I didn’t have time to hunt down salt-preserved lemons in Brooklyn, nor the time to cure them myself, so I settled for fresh lemon instead. I wanted to serve the tajine with freshly baked bread, as was always done in Morocco. But there wasn’t enough time to turn out a loaf of no-knead bread, which needed to be set out overnight. So instead, I got to work actually kneading a loaf of bread—something I’d rarely done before. After eight minutes of kneading