Second Course

(continued from Part I)

The main choice I had to make for the second course was tagine vs. couscous. While I quite enjoy a good couscous — and let's face it, a major holiday is the only time I'll ever make couscous from scratch — I really wanted to try some bread recipes, so bread and tagine it was. Particularly, I wanted to try some of the semolina breads from Paula Wolfert's The Food of Morocco.

Pictured above is the "tagine bread" from her cookbook. I'm not sure it quite worked out; the bread was a bit denser and harder than I was expecting. Wolfert said that the reader could substitute coarse-ground (pasta grade) semolina for the fine semolina flour Moroccans use in the recipe, but I think maybe that didn't actually work.

The tagine itself, namely the "fish tagine with creamy onion charmoula", worked a lot better. In order to bring in another very old Thanksgiving tradition, I added mussels to it, and swapped out winter squash (butternut) for the summer squash in the recipe.

As a lighter side, I included "beet salad with cinnamon", again from Wolfert. This was another must-keep, as the cinnamon dressing just accented the beets without taking away from their essential flavor. It's displayed here in another one of my bowls from that nesting set.

Dessert

For dessert, we ranged a bit further afield and my sweetie made "Om Ali" a filo "bread pudding" from a Nigella Lawson recipe. But hey, Egypt is in North Africa too, right? Kinda?

Anyway, to Thanksgiving it up, she swapped the apricots and raisins normally in the recipe with dried cranberries. This was brilliant, more like a rich, light noodle kugel than a pudding made with filo.

So another successful Thanksgiving with no turkey ... and that's something to be truly thankful for! I know the turkeys are.

One thing that's saved our holidays is that my in-laws don't like turkey either. I suspect a lot of Americans don't really like turkey whether they eat it or not; after all, why would people be deep-frying it if turkey actually tasted good? Anyway, eight or nine years ago we started on our theme of doing something different and ethnic for each Thanksgiving, including Austrian, New Orleans, Mexican, Turkish, and Italian foods.

This year's theme was Moroccan. Just to make things interesting, I decided to try to render as many of the traditional Thanksgiving foods as possible, in North African form. Except, of course, the turkey.

First Course

To make things even more perfect, we even had plates and other dinnerware from Tunisia.

First we started with an old Thanksgiving tradition: olives. In this case, salt-cured olives marinated in spices (rosemary, garlic, cumin and fresh bay leaves) and olive oil.

Standing in for the butter rolls or Pillsbury croissants, we have rgayif, a layered "pastry" made by the Berbers, from Jeff Koehler's Morocco. First step was rolling out the dough on an oiled mat to transparently thin; this was easier than it sounds. However, Koehler's recipe was faulty in that these really need finishing in the oven. Although my sweetie said I got them right based on her experience, I don't feel like the effort was really worth it; they were more chewy than flaky.

As our mashed potatoes replacement, I had intended Doights De Fatma, or "Fatima's Fingers", based on a recipe from Kitty Morse's North Africa: The Vegetarian Table. These are basically tubular pastry filled with cheesy mashed potatoes, and they seemed perfect. However, 2/3 of them exploded in the oven. I think this was my fault for refrigerating them overnight; it left too much time for the wrappers to get soggy.

No Thanksgiving plate could be complete without cranberry sauce, here replaced by cranberry harissa, here served in a handpainted bowl from Algeria. This was my own invention, loosely based on the harissa recipe from Kitty Morse. This was a success; the cranberries made the harissa just a bit different without making it overwhemlingly cranberry. I'll make this again.

Roasted carrots are also a TY Day thing, and are here represented by carrot, cumin and feta "salad" from Ghillie Basan's Moroccan. This is another recipe I'll make again just because it's so dead simple: you roast carrots in the oven with olive oil and cumin, and then puree them with a little feta. Here the salad is displayed in one of my own bowls, part of a nested set I gave my mother-in-law.

Then we took a long break to get our appetites back, before starting on the second course.

Every year we pick a new cuisine for TY Day, and this year it's Moroccan/North African. Since I don't have lots of experience with Moroccan food, that means time to hit the cookbooks! I used two I owned already and two I borrowed from the SFPL.

Moroccan by Ghillie Basan: this is a general Moroccan cookbook, with a general assortment of recipes from the standards of Moroccan food, so a few appetizers, a couple of kind of couscous, and a half-dozen tagine. The recipes are well-written and easy to follow, though, and the couple of things I've prepared from here have been good. For TY Day, I made the "carrot salad with feta" out of here, which is really more of a roasted carrot hummus. Recommended for anyone who is looking for a slim general Moroccan cookbook.

Morocco by Jeff Koehler: a much more substantial general Moroccan cookbook, with a good representation of all kinds of foods, especially tagine and side dishes. Has a moderate number of seafood dishes as well, something Ghillie Basan lacks. Spectacular photography by the author, including photos of most of the dishes, which are really helpful if you've never made them before. In comparison to Wolfert, though, Koehler's instuctions can be somewhat vague ("coin-sized pieces"). Recommended as an all-around Moroccan cookbook.

The Vegetarian Table: North Africa by Kitty Morse: despite her name, Ms. Morse is a serious North African cook, having lived in Morocco for several years. This slim cookbook gives vegetarian dishes and remakes of dishes from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. If you're a vegetarian, this is the Moroccan cookbook for you; otherwise, you might choose one of the others. Since Morse seems to be very fond of pastries, I'm making the Fatima's Fingers from her cookbook.

The Food of Morocco by Paula Wolfert: her first cookbook was Moroccan food, and Wolfert finally returns there with this omnibus. If you want one massive cookbook which covers almost all of Moroccan food for you — including very detailed instructions for tagine and couscous — and don't care how much bookshelf space it takes, this is it. Also has extensive chapters on breads and seafood, something most Moroccan cookbooks lack. I'm making "tagine bread" and "fish tagine with creamy onion charmoula" from this cookbook.

So, four cookbooks, all recommended depending on what you're looking for.