The Art of Eating In by Cathy Erway

Author:Cathy Erway
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Recipes, Cooking, Memoirs
ISBN: 9781592405251
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-28T08:00:00+00:00

That week, as I began hunting for a new place to live, Ben avoided being in the apartment as much as possible, staying with friends on most nights. All of a sudden, I was cooking weeknight meals for just one.

My mom and Jo-Jo had planned to come over for dinner that weekend after my trip, to see my photos, claim their souvenirs, and enjoy a homemade Moroccan dinner. It was also going to be a late birthday celebration for Jo-Jo. But the day after my return from vacation, Gong-Gong was taken to the hospital with a case of pneumonia. He was moved to intensive care the next morning. My mother called me that day to tell me the news. The doctor didn’t want to keep our hopes up. He was doubtful my grandfather would live much longer than a few days, in his fragile state. My mom spent the next day in his hospital room along with Jo-Jo. Later that night, with Jo-Jo beside his bed, he passed away He was eighty-two years old, and my last living grandparent.

We decided to still do dinner at my apartment that Sunday. Gong-Gong’s funeral wouldn’t take place until a few months later, when his ashes would be placed to rest in a temple. For the time being, they would be held in the crematory, and to pay respect to the dead, my uncle was observing a Buddhist tradition of abstaining from meat for eighty days. He encouraged me to go ahead and cook anything I wanted on Sunday, and he would just eat whatever vegetables were there. But I decided to prepare an all-vegetarian feast. Fortunately, this wouldn’t be too difficult with Moroccan cuisine.

I planned to make the taktouka again, this time with better bread, a spicy braised eggplant dish, and a savory vegetable couscous. Our Marrakesh cooking-class instructor, Mohammed, had begun his lecture by explaining that couscous was Morocco’s national dish and its importance could not be understated. Classic vegetable couscous was a focal point of the Moroccan table, from wedding banquets and holidays to everyday meals, and a proper feast wasn’t complete without it. Since it took so long to prepare, Mohammed recited only a recipe for seven-vegetable couscous during class, which we jotted on notepads.

As he described the painstaking process of gently massaging the grains by hand, setting them out on a wide, flat surface, then kneading them again to give them the proper texture and firmness, I could hardly believe what I was writing down. Wasn’t couscous just supposed to be drenched with hot water and left to sit for five minutes until done? This sounded like an obscene amount of prep work, and for what payoff, I didn’t know.

I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about over couscous then, and Jordan and I certainly didn’t get it when we were served a bland, dry couscous on our first day in Marrakesh. The British and Australians in our cooking class didn’t seem to understand, either, and one of them commented on how the vegetables in couscous he had seen were so overcooked as to look “sad.

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