Meghan Takes the ‘Mourad: New Moroccan’ Cooking Challenge

~Post by Meghan G., Children’s Book Buyer

When we were visited a couple of months ago by the Director of Marketing for Workman Publishing, we were offered the chance to preview Mourad: New Moroccan, a new Fall cookbook from Mourad Lahlou, chef and owner of Aziza in San Francisco. I love to cook, and immediately jumped at the opportunity to experiment with Lahlou’s Moroccan flavors and recruited Elizabeth Jordan, our Head Buyer, to help.

Because I was heading out of the country for three weeks, the first thing to do was get a start on preparing preserved lemons, since they needed to sit for a month to fully transform the flavor of the rinds. I was slightly nervous because I’ve never really jarred or canned anything before, but this was an extremely easy recipe to start with and turned out exactly right with very little effort. By the time I got back, they were ready to use (and very pretty to look at).

Looking through this gorgeous book of stories and recipes, we pretty much wanted to make everything. So we ambitiously decided to put together a tasting menu exploring some of the different techniques and complex flavors featured in the book and invite any member of the BookPeople staff who wanted to come. We put together the following menu for our feast:

    * Yogurt-Herb Spread with pita chips
    * Spinach Rolls with Caper-Pine Nut Sauce made with Handmade Warqa sheets
    * Crostini spread with homemade Tomato Jam and homemade Fresh Cheese
    * Corona Beans with Tomato Sauce and Feta
    * Roasted Peppers with Preserved Lemons and Garlic Confit
    * Grilled Kefta with Cilantro Dressing and Grapes
    * Basteeya
    * Roast Chicken with Preserved Lemons and Root Vegetables
    * Almond Cake with Plum Sorbet and Cardamom Yogurt

Just to be clear, I wouldn’t recommend making all of these dishes at once unless you have several nights to prepare and some willing helpers (in my case, Elizabeth and Cassie, the store’s other buyers) because they generally involve more than one element and require several steps of preparation. But part of the fun of making this food is learning how to build these complex flavors from the bottom up — from homemade spice mixtures to preserved lemons to fresh cheese.

The recipes do call for many harder-to-find ingredients, but with the help of Karen at The Savory Spice Shop down the street, we were able to gather pretty much everything we needed to create Moroccan flavors from scratch. Personally I would definitely recommend following the book’s advice and making your own spice blends because it was incredibly interesting to see how all those flavors developed and came together. And as an untrained home cook, I think that one of the best things about the recipes from this book was that although these recipes often involve  a degree of planning, none of them were out of reach. Mourad Lahlou’s step-by-step instructions really walk you through what needs to be done, and make even the most daunting tasks (like making super thin warqa sheets) seem accessible.

Flavor-wise, the Grilled Kefta with Cilantro Dressing and Grapes was possibly the biggest hit, with its pairing of beautifully spiced meat with a cilantro sauce that we’re all still talking about. I was actually in the kitchen doing some final prep when the Kefta came off the grill, and the only thing I could hear from the dining room were the words “GREEN SAUCE” being uttered over and over and over again. The first bite of Almond Cake with Plum Sorbet and Cardamom Yogurt actually made Julie, our store Publicist, start jumping up and down with glee. And I think we all truly enjoyed eating the brined Roast Chickens cooked with Preserved Lemons under the skin. They were tangy, moist, and delicious, and provided us with a beautiful introduction to the powerful flavor of the preserved lemon.

In terms of my cooking experience, I just wanted to highlight four dishes that inspired me to tackle completely new techniques and flavors.

One of the things that really caught my eye in the book was the recipe for Fresh Cheese. I’ve never made cheese, and I was curious as to how it would turn out. Although I kept second-guessing myself and trashed a batch or two, it was actually pretty straightforward, and the cheese came out in three spreadable rounds that I was ridiculously proud of. To go with it, I also made the Tomato Jam, which turned out to be a slightly sweet, yet deliciously spiced spread that I can’t wait to experiment with in other ways. This was one of the best recipes for spice blending, with dried rosebuds, juniper berries, cardamom pods, and more combining into an intensely flavorful jam. For this night, we simply wanted to taste the flavors on their own, so we spread the Tomato Jam and Fresh Cheese together onto yummy crostinis that we all ate way too many of.

Before we could make the savory Spinach Rolls with Caper-Pine Nut Sauce, I had to tackle the one recipe I was most nervous about: making Handmade Warqa. Although I cook a lot, working with dough has been known to defeat me. And this process of setting a nonstick skillet over a pot of boiling water and using a paintbrush to spread out thin layers of dough just sounded like something that could go very very wrong. But, to my great surprise, Mourad’s incredibly clear instructions led me through it one step at a time, and soon I had a neat little stack of pastry wrappers sitting on my counter! We later wrapped these sheets around a delicious spinach and feta filling, fried them, and served them with a caper-pine nut sauce that really made the whole dish sing. I’m a sucker for a good spinach dish, and I can absolutely see these rolls becoming go-to appetizers at my house.

The Basteeya was also a very unique dish to prepare and assemble. Mourad calls this the “one dish that most represents [his] native country,” so we had to try it. However, when Elizabeth and I were reading through the recipe at the beginning of prep, we were slightly suspicious about layering the saffron-and-spice braised chicken with almonds flavored with cinnamon sugar and orange blossom water. We were even more perplexed by the directions to layer it all within a shell of phyllo dough and cover it with powdered sugar. But we were so wrong. First of all, the dish was a showstopper — tantalizingly emerging from the oven with a beautifully golden crust. And second, the flavors were even more stunning, subtly blending together into a richly addictive, savory-sweet meal fit for a holiday table.

After all of that cooking and more, our meal was, quite simply, insanely good, and everyone in attendance was blown away by the flavors. There was not a single dish that disappointed our taste testers, and one of them actually wrote out a several page essay on what he loved about each and every dish. So for reviews of the food from our taste testers, definitely check back next month, when the book releases in our store, for part two of this post featuring their comments. In the meantime, you can take a look at some of these other photos from our party, and start thinking about when you can host your own — after the cookbook hits the shelves of course.

The work crew: