Morocco Day 2: Cooking lesson – April 28th

We woke up around 10am to get ready for the day. We had planned a cooking lesson, so we met the guide at a local market in Maarif, part of the city of Casablanca. The market was not busy at all, and later our guide explained that it was because of Ramadan. Ramadan is a Muslin tradition, usually from April to May, when people fast from sunrise to sunset. The market had all sorts of options from freshly picked fruits to spices to full calves. We tried so much fresh fruits - it was just amazing! We also got to sample fresh almond butter as it was being made. Our guide explained that they first dip honey on a stick and then dip it in the almond butter. It was so good I wish I could have brought some home. After walking around the market for a bit, we got into her car to head to her home. She usually does the cooking lesson at a cafe but all the restaurants are closed during the day for Ramadan.

Her home was so beautiful. We started with eating some small traditional homemade Moroccan snacks as well as tea. They were mostly small crackers and different kinds of bite-sized breads. Tea is huge in Morocco. I don’t really like tea back in the United States but I loved the tea here. It was natural, so I think that’s why I liked it so much more. After the snacks, we began cutting and preparing all the vegetables for the meal. We cut a ton of different types of vegetables and added them to the tagine, a tagine is a traditional cooking method in Morocco. After the food was placed in tagine, our guide, Hiatt, added a lot of spices that we had just picked up from the market. After we had everything set, we put it over a fire and left it for about 40 minutes. The tagine basically steams the vegetables and meat. The final product was so good, I want to get a tagine for cooking back at school. We sat and just talked to Hiatt for a long while after eating, and she even invited us back for dinner the next night. She was the sweetest!

After the lesson, we headed back to the hotel to relax for a bit, where Anna and I went down to the pool and chilled out for a bit. When we headed back to the room, we decided to have a full-on photo shoot in the hotel room, random but the pictures came out very cute.

We headed down to the lobby for dinner. Given Ramadan, we ate at the hotel almost every day as there were limited options available elsewhere. We headed to bed early due to the early pick up time for the tour the next day.