Reading this week:

• Captives and Voyagers by Alexander X. Byrd

As I teased in my last entry my super amazing wife had signed us up for a cooking class while we were in Tangier. This was with Blue Door Cuisine and was a lot of fun! As part of the cooking class you can go on a market tour, which we opted to do. We met up with our guide Lena in the Grand Socco (we were easy to spot) and she took us off around the market. We went to spice shops and vegetable stands and a meat place and she pointed out all the traditional stuff they cook with as she bantered with the shop keepers. She also took us by the communal ovens which were neat. Back in the day it was a hassle to have your own oven so for bread baking they had these big communal ovens where you could bring your stuff to be baked. Communal ovens are going out of fashion these days but not entirely; they are fired with orange and olive woods which provide a special flavor you just don’t get at home. After the market tour it was off to the cooking class itself.

The class took place in the proprietor’s house, though the first floor is laid out for cooking classes with different work stations. In addition to Lena we met her two accomplices. First they walked us through making the bread to go with dinner, specifically khobz. It’s not a flatbread but it is a pretty flat bread. After we prepared the dough they were whisked off to the communal ovens to get that authentic flavor.

Then it was on to the main course, of course literally. The point of the class was to learn how to cook with the tagine, which is that ceramic oven thingy you see all over Tangier. We spent the rest of the trip trying to find one we liked to buy but never really did. Plus that is a lot of luggage space to commit to. A lot of the cooking was handed to us, i.e. we mostly just sliced and arrange vegetables and didn’t even have to clean the fish, but that of course was to make it more fun. They taught us how to arrange the vegetables in the bottom of the tagine so the meat doesn’t stick, and then we mixed together the marinade for the fish itself. We slathered the fish up with the sauce and arranged it just so and proudly stood by our creations which were then cooked over the stove as the tagine worked as an oven.

A note on our teachers there. They were phenomenal. Like Lena there not only teaches at blue Door, but also teaches English, is getting her Masters’, and takes care of her dad and brother. Women! They work too much and are underappreciated. But what I did especially appreciate is that when you are taking a class from homemakers they give you the real down-to-earth tips, like “a metal sponge is best for cleaning tagines” and the non-stick veggies tip above. The women also kept hinting to me that a man doing the cooking is very appreciated and I should remember to do it sometimes at home. I’ll try!

As we waited for our dinner creations to cook we had a lesson on tea. We had been enjoying mint tea our entire time in Tangier, including even at Café Baba, but here is where we really learned about it. Turns out there are a lot more spices in it than we thought. Well sometimes. Normally it’s just tea and mint but for special occasions there are like ten spices including cinnamon and cloves and all sorts of stuff. The women described their heirloom tea sets at home and how it really connected them with their families and were a tad disappointed at how little sugar we asked to get added. And then you boil it all together in the pot for a while instead of just like pouring already boiling water over the spices? That’s an important technique I wouldn’t have guessed. When it was ready we drank tea for a while and admired the items in the little shop they have (we got a beautiful embroidered, um, I guess like a pad for the teapot and a oven mitt except not a mitt thing so you can pick up your metal teapot without it burning your hand, beautiful at any rate, and also we got some tea). And then eventually it was time for dinner!

They brought over our tagines full of food and the bread we had made and some more tea and let us chow down in a lovely little dining room. It was of course too much food and they offered to pack up our leftovers. We insisted we didn’t have a fridge (this was fish we’re talking about here) but they insisted in turn we pack it up so we wouldn’t go hungry and so we set off with our food and eventually gave the leftover fish to a cat with some kittens near our hotel. So that was a lot of fun and if you’re even in Tangier you should do it too!