Cooking Class, Pt. II

Since my first cooking class went so well, I decided to sign up for a second...maybe I'd get lucky and understand 25% of what was happening around me :)

The theme of this week was "Catering Dishes", or dishes that you might serve for a party. The menu consisted of the following:

• Salade Fistive: showstopping salad with seafood

• Poisson saumon a la glaçage blanc: glazed salmon

• Poisson meslala: white fish w/ olives, tomatoes, and mozzarella

• Bourse crêpes farcis au saumon: crepe rosettes w/ cream cheese and smoked salmon

• Les ballotine: a chicken puree thing wrapped like sushi in spinach

• Champignons farcis: stuffed mushrooms

For this class, one of the ladies (who spoke excellent Classical Arabic) took me under her wing and served as my Darija --> Arabic translator for the entire day - and she was fantastic!! Surprisingly, she didn't HAVE to translate everything because I could understand a little bit more on my own, as well. Needless to say, my notes were a bit more legible this time around, too...

The verdict from this cooking class: The white fish with the olives was amazing, and definitely something I could cook in the future. I would even try it with salmon and I bet it would taste just as good. The glazed salmon, as well as the seafood salad, were both better to look at than to eat (in my opinion). The gellatin glaze takes some getting used to (as it doesn't have any flavor). FYI - it took 6 layers of glazing to get the salmon completely covered! It was a really cool process to see the salmon plate come together, but it could benefit from a bit more flavor. And the salad was just a whole lotta seafood and mayonnaise...side note: they use mayonnaise in a TON of dishes here. Probably one of the funniest dishes we have eaten in Morocco was a "Caesar Salad", which ended up being some iceberg lettuce with mayonnaise on it. For real. Back to the verdict - the stuffed mushrooms were probably my favorite, followed by the crepe rosettes. And both were super easy to make. Expect to see those served at small gatherings in our apartment.

The dishes from this class were a lot less complex than the traditional Moroccan dishes we prepared in the previous class; therefore, I was pleased with how much of the lesson I was truly able to follow (without someone translating for me)! I would say my comprehension was upwards of 80%, which is a huge leap - but again, it was more a factor of content than language :)

Going forward, my intention is to try and attend 1-2 cooking classes per month, with the goals of learning a couple new dishes to make and to see how my language skills are coming along. We are hoping to see more of Morocco during the Winter Break from the university, so I may not attend my next cooking class until February. Don't worry! I'll practice some of the recipes in our own kitchen and see what I can muster up :)

As we say in Darija, "bssaha waraha"/بالصحة و الراحة (with health and wellness)!