Lunch!

I have officially been in Morocco a little over six months now and about three months of them living on my own.

So after three months I have finally gotten the right seasoning/ingredients and proportions to make a good tajine!

First of all, you're probably wondering what a tajeen is. Notice I have spelled it a few different ways. That's because it doesn't really matter how it's spelled. Moheem- (the point:) A tajine is a traditional Moroccan dish, but not traditional in that it's only for tourists and people don't really eat it, but it is a very common lunch here.

It is made in a round dish, usually clay, but my tajeen, for example, is metal. And the lid is conical. It's a bunch of vegetables, oil, water, and spices. There are different kinds of tajeens here depending on personal preference. The most common one has a potato base. Now, most people put meat in the tajeen, commonly chicken but any meat or fish will work. Since I rarely buy meat because I don't have a refrigerator, all my tagines thus far have been all vegetables.

How I made my tagine: first I put a few dollops of vegetable oil in the dish and then some water. Then I added a good seasoning I call "yellow stuff" and then a seasoning called "knorr" but pronounced KAH-nor. It's kind of like a bouillon cube...

[An aside about spices: Now, when I first started experimenting with tajeen making, I just added this-and-that spices that Melanie, the previous volunteer, had left in the kitchen- anything that looked right. One thing I thought was really making the flavor of the tajines was this brownish/whitish "spice." I added it every time. One day Erika, the closest (by far!) volunteer to me and a cooking expert, visited me. I showed her my tajine method including that special seasoning and she looked at me and said,
"Abby, are you being serious?"
"yeah....why?"
"because that's bread yeast."]

Soon after adding the spices, oil, and water. I add a sliced onion and some garlic. I covered it and let it stay there boiling over the flame while I chopped up the other vegetables. The great thing about the tajine is you really can add whatever you want. I added carrots and potatoes first (since they take longer to cook) then I added zucchini and tomatoes. You can also add in whatever portions you want. I prefer to make enough that it will be dinner as well as lunch. I really like adding bell peppers too if I have any in the kitchen. It's kind of an-everything-except-the-kitchen-sink dish.

Then you leave it burning over a low flame for as long as it takes until the vegetables are soft. Covered the whole time, preferably. How long? Who knows. I am not a slave to the clock as I was in the states. All I know is I have at least a two hour lunch break and that is enough time.

Then you take the tajeen to the table, tear your bread (khobs), and dig in. We do not eat with forks and knives here. Just with bread. While I'm American and own forks and knives, the tajine tastes much better eaten with bread and my own two hands. Generally then I'll sit in the living room and watch the previous night's Daily Show, one of the few networks that will permit someone outside the U.S. to watch their show.

The reason I'm being so wishy-washy about the measurements is because it is really up to personal taste. Most people would probably add some salt but I'm a purist and like my vegetables to taste like vegetables. Plus, here you don't really measure exactly; it's all about eye-balling it. Besides, it'd be metric anyway.

Is this post going to allow you to make your own tajine/tajeen/tagine? No, but at least you'll understand the process more or less.

Here are some visual aids!! Good Photos with captions: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2232930&id=18806879&l=6c9081c7da

little Arabic, ya'll!

One thing I'm really loving about Arabic is that they have a you-plural tense. Like vosotros in Spanish or vous in French. In Moroccan Arabic the subject pronoun is Ntuma and the Object pronoun ending is 'kum.

The reason I love it is because my general use of ya'll (or y'all, depending on personal preference) which I picked up in Texas, is generally rejected by my non-ya'll using friends. Most preference just "you" or "you guys." But here I can use this pronoun freely and receive no criticism.

For example, when I greet a group of people I may say "Labas 3likum?" or "Ki rakum?" (how are you?) which sounds perfectly normal and not something to be criticized, but what I'm thinking in my head is "How ya'll doin'?!" and I'm thinking it with a big hillbilly accent. I even think this in the greeting when I say "Salam 3leikum" I'm thinking "Peace be upon ya'll!"

I suppose when you spend days and days alone with no one to joke with in English, one has to start humoring herself some how.

Why I joined Peace Corps

My mornings generally work like this:

I wake up about 7:30 or so, make coffee/breakfast, and then get back in bed where the sun is pouring in from the window and I sit and eat breakfast and drink my coffee while reading until about 10. (don't think me lazy! Things start later around here, and work lasts until later in the evening)

So currently I'm reading a book called "The Assassins Gate" loaned and recommended to me by my good friend and fellow Moroccan PCV, Xavier. It's written by a journalist named George Packer. It's about the lead up to the war in Iraq. I'm probably about 90% finished with it and from what I gather it is this reporter basically trying to dissect the war and make sense of the whole thing because all the details he has gathered make the entire war seem illogical. In the beginning he states that after extensive research and coverage he will still go to his grave not really understanding it. (There's a point I'm getting to, I swear.)

[He is also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) who served in Togo]

HERE IS MY POINT: Originally when Xavier loaned me the book, he had mentioned that a particular passage captured well why he joined the Peace Corps. While reading some of it this morning during my coffee/breakfast/book/bed/sunshine ritual I, by coincidence, picked out the same passage that had a resounding truth as to why I joined Peace Corps as well, though for different reasons.

Here's the particular passage from the chapter titled "Memorial Day":

"After years of sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could have stood up and asked what Americans could do for their country. We weren't urged to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to develop alternative sources of energy, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies.... Perhaps it was a shrewd political read on Bush's part-- a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11, would inevitably slouch back on their sofas. It seemed fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours was likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime... So the months after September 11 were a lost opportunity- to harness the surge of civic energy."


So this says that post 9/11 Americans weren't urged to do all these collective pursuits for their country, but what I see in this is that, although it's not the norm, we (me and other like minded PCVolunteers)are doing these things. why? To take some kind of action-- to do something that may actually mean something. Although our generation seems to manifest senses of self-entitlement and egotism, these give us the confidence to actually enter the world and try to do something meaningful because we believe we are actually capable of having an effect on it all.

So, we will continue to try and call it Thriving (not just surviving*) because we hope that's what it is. And we will reflect when we're ancient (our 40s...just kidding!) and a little jaded-- and hope that we were right.



*Thrive-- do more more than just survive was the tagline Xavier assigned to his Peace Corps Service and I have absolutely stolen it to use as my own because I like it so much.