Food

There have been requests to hear about food in Morocco.

As most women know, we are the ones who most often have the job of food gathering for the family. This includes grocery shopping, farmer's markets, butchers, bakeries, etc.

Chicken:

As you know, downtown Dar Bouazza is a dirt road, kind of like a small dirt/rocky square filled with working men, rubbish, and wild cats. One day, I took 2 of my kids out to walk around the downtown in search of a bouncy rubber ball for Austin and found the chicken vendor. The chicken vendor had live chickens tied by their feet. Like all city kids, my children view these live chickens as something to pet and not as potential lunch.

The "store" consists of about 8 sq meters. Along the back wall are crates stacked with white live chickens. The counter wooden board running its length has a few meat cleavers stuck into it. Next to the men is a machine to defeather the chickens. There is no running water for the men working to wash their hands and they don't wear gloves. There is no door to protect the food from the dirt and grime located 1 meter from the stall. The children didn't seem to notice the cut off chicken feet littered along the ground.

I said to the kids, "hey, you guys want to buy a chicken?" They were in agreement. So, I ordered 1 chicken. The chicken vendor selected a chicken and weighed it live. The poor thing was squawking like mad. He put it on the dirty ground, placed his boot on his body, held his head in his right hand and sliced his neck with a knife. Then, he put him upside down in a plastic box to bleed him into an old plastic vegetable oil bottle. After a few minutes, he took him back out and started slicing him open. Things started flying out of his body. I was describing the biology of the bird to my kids as it was coming out.

"Look kids, those are his intestines, there's his lungs.." My daughter said, "Where's his heart? I didn't see a heart." I said, "don't worry, his heart already came out, it was attached to his lungs." She kept insisting that the chicken didn't have a heart. I told her it came out so fast, she just missed it. But she kept insisting. What can I do? It's already out, I can't show it to her.

Chop here, chop there, off fly the feet onto the ground. There goes his head. Another chop chop and there go part of the wings.

Then it was time to defeather the chicken. The kids seemed to be very interested in this process. They were leaning around the counter to try to watch the chicken in the machine. I explained to the vendor that the children have never seen this before, that where I'm from chickens come already processed so the children have never seen a chicken go from live to lunch, including myself. The men working were very friendly. They offered the kids to come around and watch them defeather the chicken. I tried to encourage them to go inside to watch. They both refused, but continued to watch from the side.

When the chicken was finally finished being "processed," the vendor handed me the chicken in a plastic bag. It was still warm. We walked home and on the way saw a couple of wild dogs laying about directly in our path. I coaxed the kids to cross the street. I was afraid the dogs would smell the chicken and come after us to try to steal it out of my hands. Well, maybe a little dramatic, but you never know.

When we got home, I wasn't sure what to do with the chicken. I tried to put it in the fridge and N told me that you shouldn't do that, the chicken needs to be cleaned first. So she soaked it in a bath of water, lemon juice and salt. That gets rid of the blood apparently. She soaked it for a couple of hours. An American from the suburbs of Chicago could have never guessed how to clean a chicken and come up with that answer.

N said she was going to make a wonderful tajine with the chicken and my daughter said, "I'm not eating that chicken. It didn't have a heart." Sure enough, when dinner time came my daughter refused to eat the tajine. I was worried she would stop eating chicken altogether, but she ate another chicken later as long as it came from the grocery store already processed. I made a mental note not to bring the kids to the chicken vendor anymore because it may be a little too much of a culture shock, though it is really intersting.

Fruit and Vegetable Cleaning:

All this time I was rinsing the fruit and veggies in the sink under water just like at home. Whoops. I went out to eat with some Americans and got an education. One uses iodine to clean all of her food. The others were using bleach. I thought, "surly that must be more toxic than anything that could be on the food." Or, perhaps not. They assured me that sometimes waste water is used to water the fruit and veggies. Personally, I have a hard time believing this. They also assured me that everyone has gotten sick from eating in restaurants.

The woman who works for us studied cooking at school and she worked a bit in different restaurants. She verified that improper things can happen in restaurants and you can't tell which ones based on the way they look. She said there were some places that she worked that she would never eat at. She said they don't always clean the food properly, or will use a pan that is still dirty and cook new food in it and not wash it properly. Kind of scary. There is corruption in Morocco as far as I understand and food inspectors can get paid off.

N told me the right way to clean fruit and veggies is to soak it in water with either salt, vinegar, or lemon. My favorite is vinegar. It only takes a tsp of vinegar. She said lettuce is another story. It can have worms in it, so sometimes she will pour in a capful of bleach to get the worms out. Those worms will make you sick. So far, we haven't gotten sick from food or restaurants.

Yummy Moroccan Food:

Avocado Juice - ground avocado mixed with milk, delicious
Tajine - any kind of stew chicken, beef, fish add saffron, oil, lemon and sometimes coriander. Usually with potatoes. Can have olives, or dried fruit added.
Pancakes - They make a specific moroccan pancake unlike anything I've ever had. Heat it with butter and honey. X loves this.
Mint Tea
Homemade Bread - okay, N makes the best homemade bread I've ever had in my entire life. It is made from a specific course flour. It's round and fairly flat. I love it with nutella.
Pâte Pastilla - N made this incredible dish out of this thin papery dough called pastilla. I bought it fresh at the outdoor market. She put chicken and ground almonds in it. When it was finished, she covered it in cinamon and powdered sugar. I was dubious as first, thinking oh my god, she just put sugar on a chicken meal. So I asked her if it was sweet?? She said it's both sweet and tangy, and it was. It was awesome.

Meat/Butcher

Remember the chicken vendor? The butcher is the same style shop, except hanging out front is a hook and on that hook is a giant slab of cow. Out in the heat, the air, the dust, the flies, the pollution. Not sure how long it stays outside, all day?? It is not refrigerated. When I say dust, I mean the dried dusty dirt roads that gets kicked up high into the air choking everyone and landing everywhere just 40 meters from the slab of beef.

I ventured to the local butcher with my son once in Dar Bouazza, I figured at some point I'm going to have to just go for it and hope he speaks French. It was fine. The meat looked fine. I needed ground beef so he took that meat on a hook, sliced off a giant slab and put it in the meat grinder. My son was fascinated. It was kind of cool and I didn't get ripped off. And, I didn't get sick.

Cooking Steaks rare is no longer on the docket for us. We just don't trust the beef here. I will only eat carpaccio in very good restaurants. I haven't tried any beef tartare, but again, I would only eat tartares in really good restaurants. Sadly my favorite things to eat besides all forms of chocolate desserts are carpaccio, salads and fish tartare.

Mutton - Lamb

People eat a lot of it here. Once as I was driving on a back road, I saw to my horror in the middle of Casablanca a large open "field" filled with sheep grazing. There was not one single blade of grass or greenery on this field, yet the sheep were grazing. What could they be grazing on you might ask?

Garbage. The lot was filled back to back with plastic bags of garbage. A woman came outside with her garbage bag, presumably from her kitchen, walked right up to one of the sheep that was grazing on the trash and emptied it right in front of him. Yogurt cartons, tin cans, plastic bags, leftovers. Everything you would normally throw out, dumped right there for him to eat.

Now when I eat meat I have to think about, what on earth has this presumably herbivore been eating before? Was it toxic? I see chickens always on the shoulder of the toll road eating. Not sure what could be edible there? I see people taking their cows out to graze on the fields of sort of grass and weeds, strewn with garbage. The amount of trash just out in the open is scary. People burn their trash here. Morocco desperately needs environmental awareness. So does the US by the way. We preach it, but fail to practice. The best country I've seen for environmental awareness is Germany. Kudos to the Germans for leading the way.