Souk Cuisine (soukcuisine.com) - This was the first cooking class I've taken while abroad - and I absolutely had a blast!! I would definitely look for similar classes in my future travels. What particularly interested me about this class was that it included a food-shopping excursion in the souks. (In fact, I'm splitting Souk Cuisine into two posts, one for the shopping and one for the cooking, because I took loads of photos and thought many of them were worthy of inclusion.) So let's get started, shall we?
We meet in the main square by Café de France. The group is about 12 students. That's Gemma, the program founder, in the black jacket. She's originally from the Netherlands, and actually, half the class turn out to be Dutch as well so she must get good word-of-mouth in her homeland. The lady in the white is her helper. She's French and also - randomly - a documentary filmmaker. (I've unfortunately forgotten her name! Something like Marie-Laure or Marie-France?)
They pass out shopping lists, shopping bags, two little purses of money, and we split into two groups for ease of navigation in the close quarters of the souks.
The first stall we visit is a mint vendor. Ah mint - so omnipresent in the food and drink. It's definitely a characteristic Moroccan herb. The vendor has several varieties of mint, as well as younger and older versions of the most common. I have never seen such massive piles of mint in my life! And sold in such giant bunches!
Next, we visit a stall that sells homemade harissa, a Tunisian chilli sauce. I love that the owner has bottled his sauce in old water bottles.
A small tub is passed for us to sniff. It actually smells more vinegar-y than spicy. And I could be wrong, but I think the harissa also has some tomato paste in it. (According to the Wikipedia entry, that's not a common ingredient). [Postscript: At lunch, there are little dishes of harissa as a dip for the bread. I bet it'd also make a killer pasta sauce.]
Next, a spice shop. We have to sit through a lot of old wives tales about the magical powers of spices like mustard seed (will stop snoring, clear sinuses!) and a local specialty, argan oil (will cure acne, make your hair shinier, fix your heart problems!) but I seize the opportunity for a little private procurement. I get a bag of ras al hanout, a spice blend that contains any number of things, among them cinnamon, cloves, cumin, pepper and nutmeg. I know it's in tagine, and I've definitely seen Tyler Florence and Marcel from Top Chef use it. The spice shop owner also tells us that you can put a teaspoon in coffee grounds to make café arabe.
We pass this old guy selling tomatoes on a blanket, and we stop for 3 kilos. Talk about old school. He has a rusty old scale, with a number of iron weights to measure your purchase. Fantastic!
This lady is selling garlic and salt. We select a few cloves, but ultimately can't agree on a fair price and we abandon that purchase.
We buy parsley and coriander (a.k.a. cilantro) from this guy selling fresh herbs. We only need half a bunch of each so, in the manner of children dividing a cupcake, the seller splits the bunches and we pick which one we want / perceive is larger. The cilantro looks completely different than I'm used to - the leaves are much smaller and frond-like, looking almost like dill, and there are small purple flowers - but it smells exactly the same. Interesting!
I see this guy selling goats' feet off a card table. For culinary uses? Voodoo? I never find out.
We head over to the main produce market area. It's absolutely chaotic - much more so than it looks in the picture below. The sellers are hawking their wares, and there are swarms of pushy little old ladies, poking and squeezing the vegetables, selecting their purchases, engaging in some minor haggling (though everyone's a local, so it's not nearly as bad as for the tourist-y souvenir stuff).
We walk around, trying to see which vendors have the best produce. We're instructed to look for small carrots, eggplant and zucchini (presumably because smaller almost always means sweeter and more tender). We meet up with the other group, also here for produce. It takes us a good half-hour to get the five or six things we need, and Gemma has to do a little group-wrangling to keep us on schedule. All vegetables procured, we split off into two groups again.
We take a quick tour of a dim little bakery, and buy some still-hot bread for our lunch. I believe the oven was wood-burning, but I wouldn't swear to it.
I love that you can still see the finger marks in the flattened rounds.
One last stop at a corner-store-type place for supplies like oil, sugar, flour, etc. The birds steal a snack while the owner is occupied.
And that's it for the shopping! We lug our now-quite-heavy bags out of the souks, to the riad where we will be cooking!
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