Cooking the Mo’ rockin’ (Moroccan) Spice Trail

Awhile ago my parents gave us a gift certificate to Hipcooks and we finally put it to use for a Moroccan cooking class – I always try to be more adventurous at cooking classes to really learn something new, and this menu looked pretty yummy. Plus we have a tagine we received for our wedding that we haven’t used yet, so we were hoping this class might inspire us a bit!

There were 12 people in the class and chores got divvy’ed up around the group – first up for everyone was picking parley leaves off their stems for our parsley salad and grinding up spices. Added to the salad later was red onion and a simply vingrette – it was good, but a lot of parsley.

Along side the parsley salad we ate Bastiya – a Moroccan spice pastry with beef and/or lamb, cinnamon, raisins and pine nuts. We made the filling, then rolled the mixture up into phyllo triangles to bake. These were yummy – it seemed weird to top a savory meat dish with some powdered sugar, but it worked!

Our main course was Tagine of chicken with melting onions, saffron, preserved lemon and green olives over cous cous. Because of the large group we could this in a giant oven-proof pan versus a traditional tagine. the saffron gave it a great color, and we used the liquid from the dish in the cous cous as well to give it extra flavor. The preserved lemons were a nice touch and BK already has a couple jars of his own stewing in one of our cabinents now that he knows how to make them 🙂

Dessert was the one item I was a bit leary about but it turned out delicious: Beet, olive oil and spice cake. Its even gluten free! You barely taste the beets and I loved all the cardamom we put in it. Alongside the cake we had Poached apricots stuffed with mascarpone and pistachio.