To make up for all that sugary excess...

... we went fruit and vegetable (and egg) shopping today in the Djemma el Fna. Unlikely as it may seem that the Djemma or its environs has anything of any use to real people (and it is sometimes hard, even for me, to see past the glitter of all the tourist shops), on the Eastern side of the square, there is a proper food market, which is where we generally go to get our fruit and vegetables rather than hiking out to Acima on the bus.

Today we got exactly what you see above: pomegranates, avocadoes, artichokes, green beans, oranges, apples, limes, aubergines, courgettes, carrots and eggs. All for about eight euros. And we can't tell our housekeeper that we paid eight euros for all that because she would be horrified and tell us in no uncertain terms that we were had. Sometimes I really love Marrakech. I wonder how much all that will cost at our nearest open-air market on Rue Mouffetard in the Latin Quarter?

Wanton indulgence

The tragedy is that I forgot my camera. Today in Cafe 16 in the Ville Nouvelle here in Marrakech I was presented first with CARROT ice cream on cream cheese on a slice of breton baguette. Then my main course was accompanied by a scoop of basil and lemon ice cream. Then I had a desert of... oh it was so pretty... rose and lavender ice creams and tragically a third, the name of which I have now forgotten - perhaps Laura remembers from the other week?

Who needs Paris?


(Image sadly not from today, but with thanks to Cucina Testa Rossa)

Oh dear...

Because John and I have been very selective in our eating out habits in Marrakech, gradually abandoning all so-called mid-range places in favour of either the very cheap (i.e. low expectations, but generally pretty solid fare, such as El Bahia, which I am sure I have mentioned before with their respectable mains and fabby yoghurt) or relatively expensive, such as Kosibar (which I spell differently every time) and my favourite, Grand Cafe de la Poste, we have more or less succesfully avoided culinary disappointment since we arrived.

Alas, I cannot say this any more. Buoyed up by our success at La Licorne we ventured confidently in to Sirocco last night. Fair traveller, if coming to Essaouira in the near future and feel tempted by this appealing-seeming establishment, I have one word for you - don't. The only thing that was tolerable was the wine (trusty Domaine de Sahari Reserve) and the tapenade. Tasteless soups, even more tasteless tagines with overcooked meat so bland that it took us rather more time than it ought for us to distinguish between the shark and the chicken. We left our meals all but untouched, finished the wine and made our escape as quickly as possible. I was under the impression that enough expats live or make repeat/extended visits here to make restaurants consider the benefits of return custom and accordingly provide edible food, particularly at the mid-range, but not Sirocco.

Oh well. There is still the fabulous La Cantina Mexican restaurant with the best vegetarian options in the town and the equally wonderful (if slightly less exciting from a vegetarian's perspective) La Licorne.

Apologies for the continued lack of photographs - we have cameras with us but no wire to connect them to the computers.

Essaouira again

We are still in Essaouira and have decided to stay an extra day because it is so lovely here - last time we were here, during the height of the hot weather in Marrakech, it was very cold indeed - extra blankets on the bed, heaters, wearing every scrap of clothing we had brought at once; this time it is breezy, sunny and warm and John and James have even been swimming (not something which would have held any appeal here last time).

My trips to Ireland and England were very very busy and exhausting - all the more so because our lives in Marrakech are so very quiet and relaxed. We get up in the morning, study, read, write and chat and sometimes venture out into Gueliz for lunch or a trip to the supermarket but that is pretty much it. This, of course, leads to a rather dull blog-reading experience for my readers, with anxious articles about shopping and interiors composed in an attempt to mask our Moroccan inactivity.

Of course, as I have mentioned, we have guests with us for the rest of the month and must at all costs hide from them the fact that we rarely leave the house if we do not absolutely have to, and must therefore bring them to all sorts of exciting places while casually pretending that this is what we always do. Oh if only they did not all actually read this blog. Still, whatever deception we practice on our guests, my family, friends and readers will have the satisfaction of a little variety when they come here to find out what I have been doing, starting with our few days here in Essaouira.

Yesterday the tide was in but John and James cheerfully stripped off and swam the short distance to the ruined fort that lies drunkenly on the beach here before coming back into town to eat grilled fish at the port, sleep it off and then go out for a long, slightly boozy dinner with a couple of bottles of excellent Moroccan vin gris at La Licorne, a fabulous and gorgeously located restaurant right under the sea-facing ramparts of the town. After a short conference with the chef at La Licorne, my husband had his first good tagine ever, which must surely endear Essaouira to him forever - John is vegetarian, an unnatural concept in this country and as a general rule resulting in the most boring food imaginable while I tuck into all sorts of fishy wonders. However, La Licorne had a meaty tagine on offer with all sorts of dry fruit and nut delights and the chef was applied to to adapt this for John and it was delicious, or so I was informed.

Today will involve more swimming, eating and sleeping, I imagine and when we are back in Marrakech and I am reunited with my computer I try to put up some photographs.

Food again and bliss in a tourist's (or an expat's) heart

You may have detected a slight antipathy regarding Moroccan food in my past posts, subtle, discreet, but lurking there between the lines. Well, I'll come out and say it. Moroccan food is awful. Naturally, if you are willing to spend a lot of money and do a tour of the upmarket restaurants of the city (they are plentiful and they are not cheap) you could track down a genuinely nice tagine - and I have - but really, a lot of the time you'd just be finding a tagine that was less ghastly than all the others you had tried, rather than something that was fabulous in its own right.

When it comes down to it, a tagine is a mixed stew. They use fatty "lamb", stringy and dry chicken, deeply questionable unidentified-meat-balls and, for the vegetarian, carrots and potatoes. I don't know what they do with all the spices they are constantly pushing on tourists here, because they certainly don't use them in their cooking. If you are eating in local places and don't want to partake of the dreaded tagine then there is a whole array of... no, wait. There isn't. There are questionable brochettes, cous cous (the less said about that, the better, for the most part), omelette and chips that you have to wrap individually in napkins to squeeze out the oil. I will grant you that the yoghurt in El Bahia cafe on Rue Bani Marine is fabulous, and indeed for all my complaints I have eaten a full lunch in that cafe on several occasions and have lived to tell the tale (I must risk my credibility admit a partiality for their meatball and scrambled egg tagine). I suspect that the difficulty is that because Moroccan food has been romanced by tourists (and certainly there is worse food out there), a lot of mid-range eateries cut corners by serving very cheaply-produced food with substandard cuts of meat and so forth, so in order to hit the "nice" Moroccan food you are forced to play a Russian roulette with the top-end places while avoiding the horrors of belly-dancers and so forth.

However, for anybody who has spent more than three days in the country, the search begins for the food *least* akin to Moroccan food possible. Unfortunately, the best international restaurants and cafes are naturally going to be a little expensive for daily eating - Narwama, Kechmara, Tachibana - so you can imagine with what joys and ecstasies we found Bougainvillea in 2005, and indeed we have been eating there regularly since we arrived here in early June as we live just around the corner from it. They serve pizzas (big, nice and only 35DH - a little over 3 euros), pasta, salads, quiche, non-alcoholic cocktails, crepes, toasted sandwiches and so forth and you'd have to really go at it in order to get your bill for two to exceed 120DH. They do have tagine and brochettes too, but they are only for show, I'm sure (okay, I will confess that I have eaten their brochettes and they are quite nice). It is easy to criticise the place for being commercial and touristy, as some have, but it is also easy to be too precious about these things in the eternal search for "authenticity". Besides, it's very pretty, isn't it?

(PS: In case you think I am completelly negative about Moroccan food, Moroccan honey is divine - I'm eating some out of a huge jar right now)

Cafe Bougainvillea
33 Rue el Mouassine (adjacent to the mosque, facing down Rue el Mouassine as you come at it from the Djemma end)
Marrakech

We are just back from a short break in Essaouira, where we were deliciously chilled to the bone, windswept and almost blown from our terrace into the sea and it was wonderful! We had originally intended to stay at the delightful and colourful Tea House, run by Alison MacDonald. Sadly it was booked out, but Alison suggested the Riad de la Mer in the gorgeous and medieval-feeling Kasbah of the city, so off we went!

The thing about spending more than a couple of weeks in Marrakech is that you very quickly start to value things that are not *too* Morroccan (calling to mind Bowles' short story "A Man Must Not Be Very Muslim"). Unlikely as it sounds, there comes a time when the constant oranges and reds and tadellakts and zellijs become a little wearing and that is just when a couple of nights in the white studio suite of Riad de la Mer becomes a blissful escape! If you like pared-down Anthropologie interiors and unbleached soft wool blankets and drinking your breakfast cafe au lait on the terrace with an enviable view over the sea and the old harbour of Mogador, then you will enjoy your stay there every bit as much as we did.

To add to our bliss, we also found two tagine-free restaurants (tagines being the most wearing aspect of Moroccan "cuisine") - La Cantina, a tiny Mexican cafe run by three English people serving marvellously tasty chilli and carrot cake, and San Silvestro, an Italian place with a sadly bleak atmosphere but wonderful food, including home made spinach and ricotta ravioli!