eats along the 33rd parallel

I have since moved to Oman and live an hour and a half away from Dubai and Abu Dhabi.  The culinary opportunities are much greater there, but most of the fine restaurants are at hotels and are beyond the reach of a student’s budget.  We did have amazing catered Chinese appetizers at a US Dept of Commerce function, though.  Can’t remember the restaurant, though… I thought I saved a cocktail napkin.  Most restaurants in town are very inexpensive Lebanese, Syrian, or Indian places.  I have been meaning to do a couple write-ups on them, though.  First, I had to put my house in order!  We will be going to Jordan, and possibly Kenya and Tanzania, where I will most definitely have things to report!  Food!

A great recipe if you want cake at the office or anywhere without an oven!

Text review coming soon!

This weekend’s culinary adventures can be united by one thing (other than price): no mayonnaise on salad!  Hooray!  We went to a sushi restaurant on Saturday night.  We had heard nothing but praise for this restaurant with people saying that it was even better than Nobu and all the best and favorite sushi places in America.  Braced for the high prices, we took a petit taxi to Kiotori, a chain of Japanese restaurants in Morocco.  The decor was sumptuous with the chefs working on the floor above us, showcased in glass.  I bet you’ve never seen a sushi waitress wearing a headscarf before.  The first disappointment of the night came with the announcement that they had no tuna.  NO TUNA?!  TUNA IS SUSHI!  We had to rethink our entire order when we realized that we had planned to eat tuna in nearly every dish.  Instead, we had a nice unagi/roe/avocado/crab roll, a crunchy roll with tempura shrimp and some heavenly sauce (maybe the best eel sauce ever), and then some kappamaki, tekkamaki with salmon instead of tuna, and california rolls with and without cream cheese.  This came with a salad and miso soup.  The salad was comprised of long strips of finely shredded cabbage and carrots with this horseradish vinaigrette.  It was a bit difficult to eat with chopsticks.  The miso soup had tofu (!!!!!!!), our first since coming here.  They served it in a cute bowl with a lid, but it wasn’t piping hot and the spoon was stoneware, which was remarkably heavy!  The second disappointment was at dessert, when they had neither the passionfruit nor lychee ice cream listed on the menu.  I was even going to just order a handroll: it was mango, avocado, and tempura shrimp with other yummy things, but they couldn’t do that either!!  Probably a good thing we left it at that, because we spent nearly $50.  For Morocco, that is LUDICROUS.  For sushi, that is about par for the course.  We thought we’d splurge anyway, since we missed the trip to Marrakesh.  As an added bonus, they took MasterCard, so we didn’t have to pay out all our cash.

Here are pictures of Moroccan food:

<dd>We’ve been sampling Moroccan street food, usually our lunch fare after class.  No pics yet, but I’m working on it.  So far we’ve had b’sarra, which is a Fassi specialty (from Fes).  It’s a white bean soup with olive oil and garlic and served with fresh, hardy bread.  It’s about 6 Dh which is less than a dollar.  And includes wormwood tea - yes, the same stuff absinthe is made out of.  Addis is currently Aaron’s favorite: it’s a bowl of lentils with bread and tea and goes for 8 Dh ($1).  We’ve also tried their version of hummus, which is really just unmashed chickpeas that have been cooked with spices (served with bread and tea).  That’s also 8 Dh.  The other day I splurged and ordered tajine.  Tajines are ceramic conical dishes that you bake meat, couscous, whatever in.  At restaurants (even side cafes), they usually just use a big pot and ladle it into a tajine for serving.  Tajines are really single or double serving and used at home.  Anyway, I had chicken tajine which was chicken so moist and seasoned… with carrots and potatoes cooked in the chicken juices.  Mmmmm.  The first day we went, a large group of us ate so they brought out free sides like Moroccan salad, fried eggplant, and an eggplant tomato mash-up.  I really wish that they brought that to us all the time.  It makes them look good to have a table of foreigners sitting in front of their stall, so they keep plying you with treats to get you to stay.  And I don’t think we were charged for any of it other than the main dish, which usually comes out to a dollar.  I think the tajines are a whopping 13 Dh, but a nice change (especially because they have meat).  It’s always fun trying to talk to the people their in a mix of Fusha, Dareeja, French, and English.  I think I might put my old pocket Minolta in my purse so that I can more surreptitiously take photos rather than using my big new Nikon SLR.

At about 9:30 a.m., I rolled out of bed and trundled downstairs to dress my turkey.  He was a 9 pounder Butterball and after going through the motions (you know, remove giblets and neck, wash, pat dry), I stuffed him with carrots, onions, cloves of garlic, celery, rosemary, sage, thyme, cloves, allspice, pepper, basil, and oregano.  I gave him a dry rub with some of the same spices and then rubbed on some olive oil and it was into the oven for 2 hours.

Then I did my mother’s infamous holiday rice.  Best stuff ever!  And so simple.  You get Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage.  It’s precooked, they’re this little turds of a sausage, but they’re delicious.  Dice them an pan fry them up, add onions, green bell peppers, and mushrooms.  Finally finish it with day old white rice, seasoned salt, and pepper.  It sounds so boring, but it’s the combo of the flavorful sausage and the salt that really make it shine.  You can nuke it for a week, have it for breakfast or enjoy it as a side dish.

I steamed some green beans in the rice cooker and tossed them in lemon juice.  Aaron made yummy candied yams: he took canned yams and cooked them with butter on the stove.  Then he put them in a casserole dish with sweetened condensed milk and brown sugar and used a cake mixer to stir it up but good.  Pop it in the oven for a while and top it off with marshmellows under the broiler for that amazing burnt sugar campfire nummy taste.  

I cheated on the new potatoes, gravy, and cranberries: Trader Joe’s.  I chose not to have a salad with it because we had so much food already, but one thing remained: Red Lobster-style cheddar bay biscuits.  I had made the batter last night because it’s better if you refrigerate it overnight.  Bisquick, buttermilk, garlic powder, cheddar and butter went into the batter and while they baked I made a garlic butter with parsley flake glaze for the biscuits.  

All in all, a very successful Thanksgiving meal!  I’m making turkey soup at the moment and Aaron made brownies for dinner.  I’ve been thinking a lot about our next Thanksgiving since it’s still unclear where we’ll be living, but I’m 99.9% sure it will not be in the United States.  So then I look forward to two years from now and I’ll be finishing up my degree, back in South Carolina.  We have less than a month before we’re packed up and out of South Carolina and I still have so much to write about the place.