World Cuisine Tour 2020: Morocco

| 02-May-2020 |  In February 2020, when ground zero of Covid-19 in the US arrived within a few miles of my house, I was just wrapping up booking our May vacation to Milan and Geneva. Ironic. Fast-foward to May, we’re sheltered-in-place going on 8 weeks now, and obviously not vacationing in Europe anytime soon. Like our friends and colleagues around the world, generally sitr-crazy and craving adventure.

So, after 8 weeks of weirdness, working from home, getting random takeout rather than enjoying our usual Saturday brunch haunts, I’m wondering what to do with stay-cation. We’re really not very good at stay-cation – we’re travellers: go, see, do, and eat.  A-ha! Eat. So, the World Cuisine Tour 2020 came to be.
Day 1 takes us to Morocco – a country we’ve actually never been to, but I have a number of recipes for Moroccan cuisine that occasionally make their way to our table.  For this adventure, I picked a few new ones: kefta mkaouara, a meatball in a spicy tomato sauce, and khobz dyal zraa’, a crusty wheat bread.

Generally a pretty easy make, if you don’t mind some prep.  The sauce is mildly spicy, and very savory.  I used ground Waygu beef for the meatballs so they were super-tender. The bread was easy; the touch of honey a surprise. For a 50/50 wheat-blend bread, it was much lighter than I expected.
Pictured above with Pleepleus, we paired the meal with an Italian Barolo.  We went to Total Wine yesterday to pick up a variety of international selections to accompany this week’s menu.

Someday maybe we’ll get to Mor occo and see the legendary markets, the hodgepodge of old and new, and enjoy the cuisine.