Moroccan Dinner tonight

Partly because of my fascination with Mourad's "New Moroccan" cookbook, we are teaming up with the neighbors to put together a Moroccan dinner. If I can pull it off, I'll be making the first course, which is beghrir -- yeasted pancakes that are smooth and brown on one side and have lots of holes and are pale on the other side. These are rather different from anything I've ever made so I tried out Mourad's approach yesterday and it did not work out well. More about that later. ANYWAY second course will be Tunisian brik with Moroccan carrot salad and spiced green olives. As you guys probably know, brik is tuna and other ingredients cooked in a pastry shell. And the carrots are cut into big chunks and cooked until just tender, and given an intriguing spicy flavor in which cumin is probably the dominant smell.

The third course will be "North African Chicken" from the NY Times last Wednesday. Cooked with chickpeas and an array of spices.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/dinin ... ecipe.html

I'll be making Mourad's rainbow chard as a side dish with that course.

For dessert Louise is making kaab el ghzal, "gazelle's horn" cookies, which have a sweet filling of ground almonds, sugar, and orange flower water inside a thin pastry shell, and we will have chunks of watermelon garnished with mint leaves.

Mourad's recipe for beghrir has several odd things about it. You combine wet and dry ingredients in a spinning blender. The batter is rather watery, not thick. And he suggests using a "silver dollar" pancake pan with 3" hemispherical depressions. I was excited about that because I own such a pan. But it didn't really work for me yesterday. I realize that part of the problem was that I combined everything for a 90 minute "yeast rising" step and then went shopping. And I got home an hour too late, so I probably missed the peak of bubble making -- hence there were no "eyes" in my beghrir. Beghrir is a little reminiscent of the Ethiopian injeera bread with a "holey" texture, it is supposed to have "eyes." Also it was hard for me to regulate the heat on this pan, so I was getting a burned outside and an uncooked inside. Got to keep it lower. I was "eating my mistakes" and I really thought it was a giant flop. Beghrir looks like pancakes but unlike our pancakes there is no sugar in the batter, so they come out seeming tasteless.

At any rate I cooked up the whole batch and put them aside. Then late last night I microwaved a few and put butter and honey on them. O.M.G.! The flavor was fabulous!! That is what beghrir is made for, you have to "wake up" the lovely subtle yeasty flavor by adding honey and butter. And they look like little mushroom caps now, you really could mistake them for mushroom caps. I had completely decided to go with a different recipe for beghrir -- I bought another book, "Flavors of Morocco" by Ghillie Basan -- and now I'm unsure. Having been through the complicated Mourad recipe once, I would have a better chance of getting it right today. And I bought some whole milk (which the recipe calls for) -- yesterday I was using 1%. Hmmm.

Has anyone made beghrir? Did it work for you, did you get 1000 eyes?? There is also an Indian pancake ("appam") that looks almost identical -- except it's made from rice flour. I saw some frozen in the Patel Cash n Carry when I was buying basmati rice yesterday and thought briefly of buying some as backup. But I read the label and it had some Indian spicing, it really would not have tasted right...

[Robin Garr]

Has anyone made beghrir? Did it work for you, did you get 1000 eyes??

I'm wasting your first reply by saying that I have not made behrir, Frank. But I can't resist jumping in to say your discussion of trying for it is fascinating. I'll be intrigued to hear how round two worked out.

I also had one of those wacky intuitive flashes: Given the ancient ecclesial connections between Carthage and Ethiopia, based on trade routes through Egypt that skirted the Sahara, I wonder if there could be any historic touches between their cuisines, such as the apparently similar bubbly nature of beghrir and injera.

Robin, I am still in the discovery phase, but what you say strikes me as very possible. What I -do- know is that Chef Mourad is enamored of Ethiopian spices, notably Berbere. And oddly enough Berbere seems to share a name with the principal ethnic group in Morocco, the Berbers. ??? If using berbere is not just an eccentricity of Mourad, but rather a general phenomenon with Moroccan cooks, then there is your proof. But I suspect it is the former rather than the latter.

Actually I also think that the Indian pancakes could very well be related -- because they are not "Indian" when you come right down to it. Appam is a favorite dish of the Jewish communities in India. Analyzing these pancakes around the globe could be a very interesting pursuit. The flavor I specifically didn't want in the Moroccan meal was coconut, the Jewish communities are in South India.

As to the second recipe. I am very disappointed in my second cookbook, evidently these are un-tested recipes with either typos or mistakes. When Louise made the almond filling (for her Kaab el Ghzal cookies) it was ridiculously wet, it was like fresh mixed epoxy, terribly sticky and terribly wet. It took some very clever maneuvering on my part to turn this sticky slime into the "hot dog" cylinders that we were supposed to make it into. I was able to put lines of goo onto wax paper and then let it air dry for hours, turning as possible. Also I sprinkled almond flour on it to make it manageable. Thank God we started a day in advance.

And the beghrir is a joke. The recipe calls for more than 2 cups of flour with about 1 cup of liquid, and then says to "ladle the batter into a frying pan." The dough (not batter) that it made was too dry and tough even for a loaf of bread. I had to guess how much water to add, and just kept adding until I got something I could stir. The Mourad recipe gave me something completely liquid but it more or less worked. This would not have worked at all without some re-analysis and big changes. Then again, by tinkering, we might get something very close to the real Moroccan thing.

Anyway. The Chard dish from Mourad promises to be spectacular. I have my whole "mise en place" together and I have blanched and squeezed out the leaves. And I spent more than an hour making batons out of the pretty stems of the chard and dicing the rest. Knife work. The smell of the Ras al Hanout, onion, and preserved lemon with the scent of the cooked chard leaves is heavenly.

Gonna be a nice meal.

It was a nice meal. That chicken was SO tender -- Susan actually has a tagine and she used it. Works a kind of magic.

Anyway. After making crazy adjustments, I managed to get the beghrir to work. Not as 6 inch pancakes, even with much added liquid the batter was so cohesive that it "wanted" to be an inch thick. A few of the big pancakes developed "eyes." The others stayed plain and raw on the top, I had to flip them and finish as a regular pancake. The saving grace was the "Ebelskiver" pan, the one with the circular holes. Just about every batch in that pan developed eyes, and I must have had 2 or 3 dozen little pancakes.

I have to highly recommend WHITEFISH CAVIAR. Mourad had suggested using the small beghrir as blini, and serving creme fraiche and caviar. Whitefish caviar is a pleasant golden yellow color, and a jar cost me $10 at Wegman's. It is very much in the direction of Beluga, but less intense in flavor. And on these pancakes with creme fraiche it was very satisfying. Of course we were also drinking Moroccan mint tea which wasn't a great complement to caviar, so we moved along to butter and honey. Fabulous with the mint tea!

Then we moved to the dining room -- Paul had made wonderful brik -- I provided Moroccan spiced olives, and Peter had made the carrot salad. I opened a bottle of Moët Champagne.

After that the main course -- Susan's North African chicken with chick peas and turnips. Sounds weird, tastes delicious. That was served with my swiss chard with ras al hanout on the side (from Mourad). Tasty, lemony.

For dessert - this afternoon Louise solve the problem of the "skin" pastry for the gazelle horns. So she produced lots of beautiful cookies.

I thought I made an impressive presentation. When I realized that I was really interested in Moroccan I went on eBay and bought a big bowl. It has a green geometrical design on it. The other part of dessert was watermelon, lightly sugared, and sprinkled with chopped mint leaves. I made several cuts -- a horizontal one above the rind, and then vertical cuts to separate triangular slices. This was a quarter watermelon. Anyway so after the slicing it appeared to be intact, and I put the red watermelon into the green Moroccan bowl. Looked great. And then I could just pick up a piece and put it on a plate. One cookie, one slice of watermelon.

I had one Friday night in Marrakech. The lamb was very interesting. I ate too much.

John, good for you! Maybe some day I can get there. Paul and Susan have gone maybe five times, they even took Susan's parents along. And they always rent a car and get into those interesting towns behind the Atlas mountains. Esaouira, Fez... I have very much enjoyed the stories about their trips but I'm a little phobic about travel to 3rd world countries. Worried I'll get sick or something. Nothing every happened to my neighbors, tho.

Congratulations, Frank. The dinner sounds divine. I've made Mourad's lamb shanks and the spiced carrots many times. I haven't tried the breads yet. Seems a bit too involved for me. But, one day! Next time, pictures, please? Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Jo Ann. I am so inefficient with the camera. I can take good pictures but I get preoccupied during the meal. And even when I take pictures it takes me forever to put them on the computer and post them. I still have pictures in the camera from the Persian Nowruz meal, will post something eventually. Did not take pix last night but it might be worth buying another quarter watermelon just to show how it looks "posing" in that green Moroccan bowl.

[Jenise]

Frank, this does it. I'm moving to your neighborhood.

But secondly, I like your comparison of injeera etc to appam. I had never had appam prior to dining at Atlanta's Cardamom Hill a few weeks ago, but now I'm into it. The appam was served with a gently spiced pork vindaloo (no potatoes) topped with green onions that we scooped into the appam to eat. It was a GREAT dish, and a revelation about what Indian food can be vs. 99% of the Indian food I've had in restaurants in my life which I like a lot, but which is a lot heavier and devoid of the kind of fresh elements that this Keralan food had so much of. I don't know from authentic, but at the table next to me a gentleman was swooning over every dish he and his companion ordered, exclaiming "THIS is the food I grew up with!".

Jenise, if you moved to my neighborhood I think that would be a dream come true. With the neighbors I already have, we would constantly be planning "theme" dinners that would rival the best restaurants.

Paul and Susan, my neighbors, vacationed in Kerala and came back raving about the food there. BTW besides having a lot of Communists, they also have a lot of Christians there. They said when they got a driver or a cab, there were always hymns playing on the radio...

[Robin Garr]

BTW besides having a lot of Communists, they also have a lot of Christians there. They said when they got a driver or a cab, there were always hymns playing on the radio...

Interestingly, South India is one of the most ancient Christian communities, with a lot of legend in its roots. There's a firm, although non-historical, belief that the Apostle Thomas traveled to Kerala to found a church there, and plenty of archeological evidence that a Christian community - with large churches - goes back at least as far as the Fourth century in Kerala and Chennai.

It's all about ancient trade routes, really, and it just crossed my mind that this story is reminiscent of our discussion about trade between Carthage and Ethiopia being a possible route for bread evangelization. Maybe we could throw South India into this mix as well? Probably not, but it's a fascinating idea ...

Robin -- when I talked about south Indian Jews I was dropping a hint that I thought that there was a connection with north Africa and south India, a food connection. It hadn't occurred to me that there are also Christians there.

BTW I can prove, at least to my own satisfaction, that both Jews and Arabs originated in North Africa and migrated out to the Middle East. It is an evolutionary argument. The origin of a species is the place where that species shows the most diversity. With humanity, we see that non-Africans all fit into a very small spectrum of DNA sequence. In the continent of Africa, there is probably 1000 times the genetic diversity.

When we look at Semitic languages, all across north Africa we have Berber, Somali, Chadic, Coptic (old Egyptian) etc. This is one reason Islam spread across north Africa so quickly. You had to be able to read the Quran in the original Arabic -- and all of those semitic north African languages are close enough to Arabic that they had an easy time of it. If you have read Freud's book, "Moses and Monotheism" (have you?) you know that he is skeptical about the "baby in a basket" origin of Moses. Similarly, I think the Bible story about the Jews migrating INTO Egypt and then being enslaved there might involve some political spinning. Instead of "returning" to the Middle East I think they probably led there by Moses for the first time.

[Robin Garr]

If you have read Freud's book, "Moses and Monotheism" (have you?) you know that he is skeptical about the "baby in a basket" origin of Moses. Similarly, I think the Bible story about the Jews migrating INTO Egypt and then being enslaved there might involve some political spinning. Instead of "returning" to the Middle East I think they probably led there by Moses for the first time.

Well ... most modern biblical scholars ("modern" meaning since the 19th century!) understand the ancestral legends of the Torah as myth and metaphor, not historical. As I understand it, although the issue is still very much in doubt, there's a lot of archeological and linguistic reason to suggest that the arrival of the Hebrew ("abiru") people in the mountains of Canaan was largely driven by refugees from the coastal cities, probably but not primarily joined by migrants along trade routes between Egypt and Mesopotamia. In other words, there may have been some refugees from slavery in Egypt there, but they surely came as individuals, not as a large, organized band taking over the land by conquest. In fact, ancient Jericho has been well researched, and there is no evidence that it ever had walls.

Interesting take on North African/Middle East linguistics. Otto is our expert here, and I hope he's still hanging around and can give us the assistance of our expertise. My studies in biblical Hebrew are very limited, but I've learned just enough to be intrigued by the use of three-consonant roots that seems common in many languages of the region, both ancient and modern. I'm sure Otto could comment as to just how related they are.

We're getting far afield from food, but it's my topic and I suppose I can drive it off a cliff if I want.

I can't remember if I have ever gone into it here but I am fascinated by consonant swaps. Moustique = Mosquito, Al Iskanderiya = Alexandria.

My neighbor Paul pointed out that the difference between "Hebrew" and "Arab" is a consonant swap. AB_R vs AR_B

BTW the Wiki doesn't support my idea very well, "Semitic" languages go back quite far in the middle east. But if you expand the term to Afro-Asiatic, which is the family that includes Semitic tongues, the map looks pretty good for my hypothesis. Of course it is representing the modern day language distribution map, so Arabic is all over...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages

Congratulations, Frank. The dinner sounds divine. I've made Mourad's lamb shanks and the spiced carrots many times. I haven't tried the breads yet. Seems a bit too involved for me. But, one day! Next time, pictures, please? Thanks for sharing.

If Mourad's lamb shanks means the ones with prunes -- I just had a look, and "involved"? To do it right I need prunes I can only get by mail order, I need to pickle them for a week, I need 11 pounds of lamb neck bones to make the lamb broth... Fortunately I do have Farro in the pantry because it's used a lot in Tuscan cooking.

Do you take short cuts in the lamb shank dish?? Care to make any suggestions?? I am imagining that regular prunes and commercial broth simmered with a couple of lamb chops would give something that would be pretty edible. He does remind me of Keller though. One line of the recipe, and you look up what you have to do and it takes a week to do it... Do you make the Farro?