Donkeys, Dates, and Decorative Doors - Fes, Morocco

Warning: These Morocco posts are going to be long and heavy on the pictures :)

We arrived in Casablanca just before 1pm on Friday and went to the train station to meet Oscar and Sarah (Dan’s parents for those of you who may not know). We boarded the 3:10 train to Fes which takes somewhere between 3.5 and 4 hours. Upon arriving in Fes, we took two taxis to our riad. A riad is a single family home that has been renovated to be a small hotel. Ours was called Riad Andalib and we gather that it is only about 4-5 years old after a renovation that took the owner 6 years to complete. The hotel, the owner and the staff were fantastic and it was very affordable.

 View of part of the medina from the rooftop of our riad ---- Entrance of train station in Fes

The riad is located within the old medina of Fes, which is dated to about the 13^th century. Within the gates of the medina there are no cars so the road on which our riad was located was the last sign of vehicles within the medina. Friday evening, we arrived at the riad and had some mint tea, a traditional Moroccan offering, ate dinner at the riad and retired for the evening after a long day of traveling.

On Saturday morning, we were picked up at our riad by Lahcen, our cooking class instructor. Yep, that’s right, we signed up for a Moroccan cooking class. He took us into the medina to buy fresh ingredients for the day. Lamb is a common ingredient in Morocco; however, none of us are big fans of it so we requested most things be chicken or beef. Upon learning that if we wanted to make chicken, he was going to have us purchase a live one and we’d have to kill it, we quickly agreed that beef really is “what’s for dinner”.  We did a lap of the day’s offerings and then went back through to buy things. Everything seemed pretty cheap (probably because Lahcen was speaking Arabic so he was likely getting better prices than we ever would). We took our collection to a lovely riad where they turned the kitchen over to us to start preparing our meal.

 An array of dates (Morocco is home to over 170 types of dates)

Spices galore!

We made an absolute ton of food. There were kefta meatballs in a spicy tomato sauce, fava beans steamed with garlic and herbs, phyllo dough filled with cheese and olives, braised beef chops in a delicious sauce, artichoke hearts with oranges, eggplant puree, roasted almonds, and fresh baked bread. For dessert we had little balls of sweetness made with dates, and walnuts, served in a strawberry puree.  We had a great time cooking and learning and eating our creations. 

 Goofing off in the kitchen before we started cooking

 Some of the finished dishes (yes, there was more)

After the class, Lahcen dropped us off at the blue gate and we walked home from there to try to speed up our digestion. After such a large lunch, we just settled on some small plates for dinner that evening across the street from our riad.