Tajine Tafraoute Project

Place: Amanouz Café, Northampton, MA. Birthplace of the Tajine Tafraoute Project.

Tajine Partner: Tim Horvath, short-story writer. (We’d met that week at Wellspring House, an artist/writer’s retreat).

How I found out about it: from Tim, who’d eaten there two days earlier while researching a story.

I’ll admit: I was a bit disappointed as I walked to the counter. Half the menu was taped onto the wall (written on bits of colored construction paper), and the other half was written on a chalkboard. From the outside, this place had looked like a sit-down restaurant. And, for a dish as serious as a tajine, it seemed weird to pay first and wait to have it delivered, café-style.

I know. I was taking things waaaaay too seriously. But cut me some slack. I was primed for a religious experience.

I told the Moroccan guy behind the counter that the best meal of my life had been a tajine in Tafraoute. (I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant.) He nodded. He said he was from Tafraoute. Then, we both smiled. There wasn’t much to say.

There were no free seats, aside from a tiny table squished next to a refrigerator, so I squeezed in and hoped that I wouldn’t have to get up to pee during the meal. I glanced at the steaming plates of food on everyone else’s table, but I didn’t see the familiar clay tajine pot anywhere. This was disturbing.

I remembered that real tajines usually cook for a long time: about hour or so. This Amanouz Café couldn’t possibly serve up the real thing. (This, of course, is when Tim suggested that I embark on a quest to replicate the original tajine Tafraoute experience.)

Finally, after about twenty minutes, the tajines arrived, served in clay pots. The waitress lifted the conical tops and we dug in.

My tajine was delicious! I had it served over rice — totally inauthentic, I know — but it was moist all the way down to the bottom, with enough juices to flavor the rice. The vegetables (sautéed onions, thin slices of tomato, chopped carrots, green pepper, chunks of potato) were the perfect consistency, soft and easy to cut with a fork. There were four gigantic meatballs, each infused with an amazing array of garlicky spices (not too hot though — just right). The tajine was topped off with a cooked egg and a scattering of green olives.

I ate heartily, but only made it through half the dish. Good Jew that I am, I professed my wish to “get it to go.” But, like an even better Jew, I ended up digging in for a second round.

Rating: 8/10

An excellent tajine. Not transcendental, though. And I certainly couldn’t have had a spiritual experience squeezed up against a fridge.

Restaurant details:

Amanouz Café
44 Main St
Northampton, MA 01060
(413) 585-9128
www.amanouz.com

The spellings are interchangeable, as far as I know. I’ve decided to stick with tajine, for the sole reason that it turned up three times more google hits than tagine.

I wonder why this is?

The Tajine Tafraoute Project is my quest to replicate the most sublime food experience of my life: a transcendental tajine in Tafraoute, Morocco. December, 2005.

The quest began in March 2008, when Tim (a fellow Wellspring House retreating writer) and I went to Northampton, a town in central Massachusetts, for dinner. As we passed by the Amanouz cafe, a Moroccan place, two words on the chalkboard menu in the window caught my eye: “Tagine Tafraoute.”

I had to have one.

We ordered. While we were nervously awaiting our tagines, Tim half-joked that I could embark on a quest to replicate the perfect tagine. I took him half-seriously.

But why not? I love tajines, and I can’t eat all of them by myself. Besides, quests are fun.

So, here’s the deal:
I’ll go out with a different person to try a new tajine each time around. This way, we could try two tagines. And the tagines at each restaurant would be less likely to blur because they’d become intertwined with your face, your body odor, or, hopefully, your witty repartee. In effect, you’d be lending your likeness to my mental tajine snapshot.

I’ll write about each tajine experience, and the friend will be encouraged — but not required — to write as well.

The RULES, entirely subject to modification:

1. Wexler does not pay for your meal.

2. No tajine is off limits. Unless it’s not really a tajine.

3. Home-cooked tajines are allowed. This does not mean I help you cook.

4. The further off the beaten the track, the better.

Thus — it begins!