Tajine Tafraoute Project

Well, I have to say in advance I’m very picky with food generally..once I find something I really like (not happens that often) in a restaurant I stick with that choice without trying a new order… (that may be relevant background information).

So I ordered a chicken sandwich - tajine seemed t be too dangerous since I didn’t even understand the listed ingredients..I’m German so non/native speaker..) -..anyway, I thought that is a more ’safe choice’ and because there were also listed some crazy other ingredients (other than from ‘chicken’ and sandwich’), especially the ‘original spices’ I decided to go for it.

When my dish arrived I was very shocked (see picture)…I got fries…urg.. (well I like fries, but I didn’t expected fries at all in that original moroccan restaurant….)….about the sandwich I can say, it was better and more moroccan than expected: the spices we’re very delightful, the unknown taste was great and after I tried a real tajjine-bite from Anna, I have to say I found the basic taste in my sandwich too…

Summing up: If you’re in a moroccan restaurant, order no chicken sandwich but take the risk and try something you haven’t ate before… ( I will, promise for next time)

Dorit

The initial excitement turned into confusion when some of the tajines were not served in the clay pots. Apparently, a weird-looking clay pot is not a necessary feature of this delicious dish. But I wonder whether it makes it better.
In any case, all the tajines I tried that night were vegetarian (I am pretty sure), and they all were very tasty. However, I have no (Moroccan) baselines to compare this experience to, so I am not sure how informative this is.

Seduced by Moroccan cuisine though, I am planning a trip to Tangierino sometime soon. I will let you know how that compares with the SF place.

Often the vegetarian option is just as appealing as the alternative. Lasagne. Butternut squash ravioli. Eggplant parmesan. Other times I encounter a veggie version of a dish that is usually fine in its own right, but lacks the glorious splendor that graces the non-veg dish offers. This was true for the mighty Tajine in San Francisco. Mine was a fine blend of peas and artichoke hearts in a tasty green, creamy broth. But next to the meaty version, complete with clay hat and a multi-colored dream coat of vegetables, mine was, well, the color of envy.

Like Liane said, we didn’t get the special tagine hats at our end of the table. I’m not sure what dish feature earns the traditional tagine presentation, but regardless the dinner was delicious. While i can’t remember what we got by name, I can remember the 4 items (for Liane, Ev, Andrea, and I to split) all being clustered, as I pointed them out to our waitress with my palm instead of a finger.

Perhaps my favorite was the peas and artichoke, foreground in the picture of Liane. Couscous was good, but i tend to find it dry so i mixed it with the peas. In fact, i mixed most things with the pea dish since I liked it so much. I would recommend this place in particular to mixed crowds of vegetarians and meat-eaters, as the dishes are bound to please all palates alike.

Tajine in SF made for a delicious experience. As an aspiring vegetarian, I was particularly grateful for the three fully vegetarian tajines on the menu, in addition to the appetizers — (1) a tasty split pea soup with cayenne that, for lack of spoons, we quickly transformed into dip with the available bread, and (2) some sort of quiche-like pie (bastilla?), savory but with powdered sugar — this was so good that I considered ordering a second for my entree but ultimately opted for variety over certain deliciousness.

Tajine was out of one of the veg tajines, so we had, I believe, veg tajine with artichoke and peas, cous cous with veggies (usually not a fan of cous cous but enjoyed this for whatever reason — perhaps it was the turnips), and also a meat-based tajine with poached eggs and garlic. All of this was wonderful, though I don’t think anything I ate was served in a tajine. Not that I minded.

As one who was present at the groundbreaking of the Tajine Tafroute Project, I’ve been invited by Anna to weigh in on the experience. Maybe because I have a slipshod memory for the details of meals, I’m very gung-ho about the notion that context is everything. I’m going to go along with Douglas Bauer who writes, in his introduction to Death by Pad Thai, “For what makes the subject of food the scrumptious stuff of story is not the perfect balance of the recipe or the genius of the chef; it’s the narrative of what’s humanly at stake as we sit down to eat; what thoughts and emotions are stirred, revived, put into play, by the table we’re called to, by those who call us to it.”

For me, then, my first tastes of tagine–yes, Anna was kind enough to allow me to dip my spoon over the table in our cramped quarters and partake–have many associations. The story I was writing at the time, called “Urban Planning: Case Study Number Six,” which is roughly speaking about a city in which food conquers all; Morocco itself, which makes me think of my friend Ross, who traveled to Morocco many times, coming within a hair’s breath of marrying a Moroccan woman, once getting into a verbal sparring match with a snotty Moroccan princess; and Anna’s stories about Tafroute, about her experience of eating a snake, and about fire-eating. For me, these things are inextricable from the eating of tagine.

Also, I must note that this was the second night in a row that I had eaten at Amanouz, so I felt a little bit like a regular. Given that Northampton is bursting at the seams with restaurants, you might think that I’d be a bit reluctant or resentful when Anna steered us toward this place, but I embraced it. For such a tiny place, the menu was pretty extensive, plastered all over the walls so that your eye had to rove to make sure you weren’t overlooking any options. The night before I’d come alone with a notebook and ordered a spicy angel hair pasta merquez, or lamb sausage dish that had proved the perfect muse for my urban planning piece, especially washed down with a glass of white wine. My page was filled with scrawl that went outside the lines, forming stairways up and down the page and by the time I stood up I knew I had the bulk of the story down in the notebook. Exiting into the cold night I found myself wandering until I spotted the window of the Bikram yoga studio that I remembered reading about on the website. As it turned out, the class was scheduled to start in fifteen minutes, too coincidental to pass up by thinking logically, and so my first experience of hot yoga took place with spicy lamb and white wine rocking in my stomach like something stowed aboard a ship during a storm. Somehow I got through the hour-and-a-half class without passing out or puking.

So all of this was part of my foray into tagine. Those sensations, still somewhat fresh, and on top of it Anna’s tales of herpetogastronomy and pyroacrobatics, of specialty dog restaurants in Vietnam, of documentary projects and seductive Nicaraguan revolutionary feminists. We talked about all of these things and more over several days, but a blurring takes place where all of them may have transpired on the sidewalks of Northampton in light, persistent rain, punctuated occasionally with startled expressions from Anna that such a place could exist at all.