HOME COOKING
When I arrived on Thursday afternoon there was of course no food in the Airbnb. So even though I was worn out from not sleeping the night before and the long bus ride I decided to explore the Medina where I am staying until i found a grocery store of some sort where I could buy milk and coffee and butter and other staples. But all I found was gift shops in narrow alley after narrow alley. So after walking three miles I came back exhausted, but then thought to look up grocery stores on Google and finding one not far away I set out. I found the bean and crepe place where I had a wonderful meal for $1, but no grocery store.
Friday morning I looked up how to get around in Essaouira and found that a taxi would take me cheaply to Carrefour on the edge of town, a huge French grocery chain where we shopped in Paris months ago.
Carrefour apparently has everything. Bread, butter, coffee, fruit, cereal, eggs were easy to find. But I am a Trader Joe person and was looking for delicious easy to microwave cook frozen meals. But in the huge Carrefour there were almost no frozen meals and none that I recognized. I thought all Carrefours were the same, but just as Indian McDonalds don’t sell beef hamburgers, the central offering in the USA, Carrefours was catering to Morrocans and apparently Morrocans, probably for good reasons, don’t care much for frozen dinners. I got a couple of vegetable dishes that looked good and in a moment of weakness bought a large bag of frozen breaded onion rings, too large a bag to fit into the tiny freezer compartment of the Airbnb.
There were plenty of breakfast options. This morning I had coffee, fresh orange juice, two croissants with butter and honey or Swiss cheese.
When I got back from a long walk on the beach at 1 p.m. I was too tired to look for a restaurant. So I decided to eat some Carrefour cold roast chicken left over from yesterday when I ate all the dark meat that I liked and was left with the dried out white meat. That didn’t suit me so I decided to eat the now thawed and mushy onion rings. I looked for the cooking instructions on the package. But the print was too tiny and what I could read wasn’t in any language I recognized. I wasn’t sure whether I was looking at cooking instructions or lists of ingredients.
So I winged it. I put half the mushy white breaded onion rings into the microwave for 5 minutes. When they came out they were hot all right, but even more white and mushy. So I decided to fry them, instead, in a frying pan on the hot plate in the kitchen. And this seemed to work. I browned/blackened them on both sides and doused them in ketchup. The ketchup tasted good but the onion was pure mush.
It was at that point that I had a revelation. All I could think about was how good the big bowl of bean soup and the sweetened crepe for $1 had been at the roadside stand that I ate at two days ago. What in the world was I thinking when I tried to replicate Trader Joe in Morocco? I realized I was a great example of the ugly American who insists that the rest of the world do things his way. I also realized that my way of cooking, five minutes in the microwave, wasn’t cooking at all and that I didn’t know how to cook. I couldn’t face the next of my own meals.
At that point Susie called to see how I was doing and when she heard my sad story she said that she would send me an article she had found on line, an article by an American couple who had lived in Essaouria for five weeks, a couple who obviously were very picky about the quality of their food. The article is entitled “Where to eat in Essaouira.” A couple of the restaurants are expensive but most are quite cheap, about the price of a frozen bag of onion rings. I am going to start on their list tonight and am looking forward to eating again. I don’t know what I am going to do with the two unidentified frozen dinners I have in the freezer.
My predicament reminds me of a Warren Wilson student in Bhuj, India, who had had enough of Indian food and was dreaming of French fries. Finally, in a restaurant we stopped at French fries were on the menu. But when they arrived they bore no similarity to McDonald’s French fries, or to any American French fries, they were an odd variation of oily mashed potatoes. I remember her breaking down in tears, sobbing, wanting to scream, inconsolable.
I didn’t cry, I brought the onion rings on myself but with the same misplaced expectations. From now on I’m going to eat what Moroccans find tastes good.
Follow up
I looked up, Superbe Pastille, one of the restaurants mentioned in the article, just around the corner with mouth watering pastry wrapped meats including pigeon. I was looking forward to see what pigeon tasted like. I did find the restaurant’s second story sign but no way to get in. The restaurant was boarded up with bright blue boards for the night, lunchtime only, and the space in front turned into display space for the pottery store next door.
So I wandered away, disappointed, out of the Medina, along the huge wall of the fort, through a well lighted park and then back in another ornate gate onto a huge plaza rimmed with restaurants. And on a table in the first outdoor restaurant I saw a bowl of bean soup being ladled from a large urn, identical to the bowl of soup I had delighted in two days earlier. But there was no room at any table. I did find half a table loaded with emptied soup bowls and sat down, assuming the people eating there had eaten and left. But a family group drifted back from somewhere and soon I was surrounded at the table and a little embarrassed. A young man sat down beside me, smiled and said I was welcome to rest for awhile as he watched his eight year old son wheel frantically around the square on a tiny bicycle through the crowd of Saturday night strollers. My soup came and when I pointed at a honey sweetened crepe, that came too. I ate my soup and the sweetened crepe while the family talked in Arabic around me when it began to very gently rain. I got up to find the waiter and pay, but when I did was told that I had already been paid for by the young man, 5 dirhan for the soup (50 cents) and 5 dirhan for the sweetened crepe. The man at the table waved at me and I waved back. I realized that I had found my substitute for mushy onion rings, a delicious Moroccan snack that I would find all over the city for a dollar a meal that I would enjoy again and again.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 