Hosting a dinner party is hard work.  Hosting a vegetarian dinner party is a test of creativity.  Hosting a vegetarian dinner party for a group of French people is a cultural education like no other.

Of all the luxuries I anticipated upon our arrival to our house in southern France, it was surely the large fully-equipped kitchen I was most excited about.  Cooking in (or, outside, really) Totoyaya is an exercise in space management and patience.  Fishing out ingredients and cooking tools involves lifting our bed mattress and digging around in our storage boxes to retrieve the necessary items.  With a single gas cooker, an electric burner (when we have electricity), a single pot, a single pan, and a small picnic table, cooking a meal becomes a perpetual dance of re-arranging dishes and foods.  And, though I love many aspects of cooking outdoors, rain, wind, bugs and cold can sometimes mar the experience.

I admit to doing a lot of simple cooking in the camper van, focusing entirely on tried-and-tested recipes.  In France, with my triple-stovetop, ample chopping space, plethora of pots and pans, nearby sink with unlimited warm water, and (best of all) oven, I let my creative juices in the kitchen flow as readily as my water tap.

I made hummus and black bean dip; quinoa and broccoli veggie burgers; millet quiche; my mom’s macaroni casserole; minestrone soup; empanadas, roasted veggies; Thai tempeh and kale salad; pesto cannelloni vegetable patties; paella; swiss chard and herb crepes; samosas and Nepali curry; fennel, pear, and herb salad; sweet potato gratin; ramen noodle soup; homemade spelt pizza and homemade bread; quinoa, tomato and mozzarella bake; penne pasta with peas and creamy carrot sauce; spicy breaded tofu and spring rolls with Asian peanut sauce; Moroccan couscous; Thai curry and pad thai; arugula pesto, vegetable, and walnut puff pastry; fried rice and roasted cabbage; stuffed peppers; bean and veggie chilli; caramelized fennel and spicy couscous; pasta salad; and fruit crumble.

These meal ideas came easily to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed prepping something healthy and home-cooked for Bruno and me.  After a day filled with work, there’s nothing like unwinding together with food by candlelight or, when it was warmer, on our terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

I’m loving cooking in the kitchen!

Some of the meals I cooked – stuffed squash with wild rice; fennel and pear salad; sushi; and plantain gnocchi.

More meals – samosas and beet greens; spring rolls and breaded tofu; quinoa caprese bake; egg sandwich with homemade spelt bread.

And some MORE food – cannelloni patties; crepes; vegan broccoli salad; and macaroni casserole.

And some more – paella; taco salad; quinoa broccoli burger; and falafel salad.

Enjoying a homemade pizza on our terrace with a view of the sea. Lovely!!

It’s interesting that, when it came to cooking for my French community, food ideas didn’t flow quite as freely.

The French are renowned for their haute-cuisine, the pride with which they hold their gastronomy up to the world, and the importance they place on food.  Food is culture in France, and as with any culture, there are a set of unspoken but all-important rules and rituals associated with its preparation, presentation, and degustation.

You need to actually eat with French people to internalize their subtle rituals: to know, for instance, that cheese is eaten only after the meal (with plenty of camembert and Roquefort, long white baguettes, but no cheese knife).  Or that dishes are served one at a time rather than all-at-once, family-style (a matter of plating aesthetics, of the leisurely pace one should eat with, and so as to experience the flavour intensity of the dish at hand as it is intended).

Take bread: it is absolutely the staple of the French diet, sliced and eaten (never toasted) with butter or Nutella for breakfast, and placed on the table from the first moment of lunch and dinner until dessert.  Though I may have learned these facts without my French community, I wouldn’t have known that, in order to do like the French, one’s slice of bread must be placed directly on the table beside one’s plate.

I find the customs associated with food fascinating (as readers of my blog can attest to in my recent splatter of food posts), but I’d never had to cook for countrymen from such a strong – and proud – food culture before.  My funky meal salads and spicy curries wouldn’t really cut it here in France.

I suppose I could have just served my food my way – cheese as an appie, salad on the table with the rest of the meal, bread distinctly absent from the table.  But two years ago, when my parents and I cooked an American-style barbecue for Bruno’s family, it was met with almost as much incredulousness as leftovers.  This time, I decided I was in France and that it was up to me to conform to French food culture.

Unlike my other trips to France, when we’d wined and dined at fancy restaurants, the majority of our eating out this time was in cafeterias.  Like a park in the Middle East or a local market in Africa, the cafeteria experience in France enabled me to observe the French in their natural habitat and to understand their eating habits.

A French cafeteria is nothing like what we know in North America.  Instead of slices of pizza, hot dogs, pop, and mushy vegetables, you are greeted with a lovely, healthy spread of food choices: a salad bar, plates of cheese, mini baguettes, divine desserts, carafes of water and wine, and hot vegetable side dishes that haven’t been so overcooked as to be unrecognizable.

Most people come here for lunch in large groups from work, and they carefully peruse each section of the cafeteria, choosing a salad, a cheese plate or dessert, and a bread roll, picking out a wine, and then heading for the hot main dish section (which usually involves a fillet of fish or a slab of meat with unlimited access to the vegetable side dishes).  Most people’s platters are filled with their three-course meal, and they sit down, eat slowly, chat, and linger before heading back to work.

(I definitely stood out with my plate of unlimited hot vegetable side dishes and carafe of water.  No bread, no dessert, just a light meal of veggies.)

The salad/cheese/dessert bar at French cafeterias.  Wine behind.

Unlimited veggies with a hot main dish.

My loaded plate of all-you-can-eat veggies.

The cafeteria taught me a few things about the French way of eating: that lunch is the primary meal of the day, that happy hour starts at noon, and that without several courses, lunch is just not lunch.  With this knowledge, I set to work perfecting the art of the French lunch party.

First up: the apéro.  Thinking of a few munchies to whet people’s appetites was easy enough – it just couldn’t involve platters of cheese.  I usually made a dip with veggies and offered finger foods like peanuts or olives.  We made sure to have a reasonably stocked drinks cabinet – muscat (sweet wine), port, pastice (anise-flavoured liqueur that you mix with water), sirop (sweet fruit syrup that you also mix with water), and good ol’ French 1669 beer.  I learned slowly that, contrary to my instinct, it’s polite to wait for everyone to arrive before offering anyone drinks.

Next up: the entrée.  Since I love salad, I tried to go for what I knew, but I experimented with lots of types of salad – warm spinach salad with feta red wine vinaigrette, frisée salad with hazelnuts and orange slices, orzo pasta salad with mint and red onion.  Despite looking at my complicated and strange salad combinations with slight suspicion (why wouldn’t I just serve frisée with garlic and oil like a normal person?), I found that as long as I placed the baguette on the table with the salad, people seemed to enjoy my entrées well enough.

It was with the main dish that I struggled the most.  This is when the French generally eat meat, or at least a really cheesy, buttery, creamy veggie gratin.  Since I’m a gratin-newbie I didn’t want to give them mediocre versions of their own food, but I didn’t feel confident serving my exotic concoctions.

Bruno’s cousin-in-law, Dimitri, helped cure me of that.  He’s from Guadeloupe (a French colony) and cooks amazing French fusion dishes with a touch of spice from home.  He’d cooked an unbelievable feast for me the previous year, and he agreed to show me how to prepare some of the dishes he’d served me that day, like caviar d’aubergine, daal, and plantain gnocchi.

From Dimitri, I learned to use sweet spices like cinnamon and cardamom to perfume and balance heat.  I played with familiar (to me) Indian spices, but balanced them with French essentials like butter, cream, and cheese.  I learned to use unripe fruit like mango and papaya in recognizable recipes like mango salad with okra and lime vinaigrette and green papaya gratin.

The day after our cooking lesson we served our gourmet five-course meal to the family.  And when they ate it – and liked it – I realized that if I could serve my food with a French twist and within a French structure, I’d probably be ok.  With that, I began serving things like Tex-Mex nachos, macaroni and cheese, bean burritos, pesto pasta, and Nepali curry as the main dish for my French community.

Learning to cook food from Guadeloupe with Dimitri (and his daughter!).

Plating the five-course meal for our extended family.

Huh. French people like exotic food after all!

Guess I can serve weird food at my lunch parties, too!

And hey, they like it!

Even if my audience didn’t ooh and aahh as much as Bruno and I, as long as I followed the main dish with a cheese platter, a rich and sweet dessert, and a café espresso to end the meal, they were happy.

It might have been a challenge for me – a Canadian vegetarian – to host a lunch party for my French community, but it was a wonderful cultural education.  I gained an understanding of the flow of a French meal, their essential ingredients, and the proper presentation of the dishes.

But more than that, I internalized the French attitude toward food – namely, that food is about pleasure, celebration, and quality over quantity.  That a meal should be savoured slowly and with loved-ones.

And that, even if the meal is no good, there’s always dessert.

Dessert is always a hit, especially with Bruno’s mom!

Everyone’s anticipating dessert, so even if the meal’s a flop, we all end with a sweet taste in our mouths!

But it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve become conscious of my travel-for-food mentality.  I now write blogs about the foods I discover during our travels – like following the tracks of injira in Ethiopia, finding vegetarian food in Turkey, and understanding food customs in Morocco – and quite honestly, they are among my favourite posts to write.

And so, of course, I was excited to discover Spanish cuisine when I entered the country for the first time last October.  I had a very limited conception of what it would involve.  I knew about paella, though I’m not sure if I’d ever actually eaten it.  I knew about tapas, having frequently enjoyed an awesome tapas restaurant while living in Bangkok.

And, thanks to our Basque friends Josu and Ana, I knew about tortilla, the infamous Spanish omelette.  One night in Nairobi, the four of us had sat around our camping table as Josu and Ana sautéed potato and eggplant in half a liter of olive oil, drizzled into the pan bit by bit, before pouring in the raw beaten egg mixture, lowering the heat, and flipping the one-inch-thick omelette for the next thirty minutes.  As they cooked, they talked about how every Spaniard had their own preferred tortilla cooking method, usually based on the way their own mother had prepared it.  Josu, for instance, loved them a bit soft and runny in the center, while Ana preferred them fully-cooked inside and out.

It seemed tortillas, like so many other food icons from around the world, were a complex affair.  I was excited to eat it in Spain!

Had I know that tortilla would quickly become my go-to meal in Spain I might have curbed my excitement.

Spanish omelette, or tortilla. I wish I had placed an object in this photo to show you exactly how large it is!

***

Despite my obvious love of food culture, I always experience a moment of fear when I’m at the cusp of experiencing it for the first time.  I guess I’m intimidated, unsure of how to proceed, and self-conscious about my obvious greenness.

That’s how I felt that first day in Pamplona, as I stood staring at a bunch of small platters on the counter of a sunny bar.

I was in a pinchos (or pintxos) bar.  Pamplona was full of them, and now that it was noon, they were hopping.  Locals stood around wooden barrels with glasses of red wine and small plates of food, eating, drinking and being totally merry.  The snack-sized plates were pinchos, the tapas plates of Spain’s north.

It was obvious that Bruno and I should go up to the bar, point at a plate, grab a glass of wine, and choose a barrel.  There was one simple problem.  Almost every tiny dish on the bar was either wrapped in jamón (ham) or topped with some kind of fish.  As a vegetarian, I think the largest part of the fear when I first encounter a new food culture is related to not knowing whether the dish I’m staring at will be something I can actually eat.

With my incredibly broken Spanish, I mustered up the courage to ask the bartender if there was anything on the counter for me.  I think my words went something like this: No como pollo, pescado, y jamón.  Que comer?  If my brother and his Ecuadorian in-laws are reading this now, I’m sure they’re laughing at my butcher-like efforts.

The bartender, however, refrained from laughing at me, probably because my question was such a serious one.  She looked up and down her row of pinchos, winced, sighed, shrugged, and pushed the only dish I could eat my way: a potato tortilla.

The wooden barrels used in most pinchos bars as tables.

Locals enjoying their noontime pinchos and wine.

Our first pinchos bar, in Pamplona.

My go-to tapas/pinchos – tortilla.

I would soon learn this was the typical Spanish response when I’d announce my eating restrictions.  Over the coming weeks, I ate more tortilla at more pinchos bars than I’d ever care to eat, and when Bruno and I were asked to share dinner with a Spanish family while we walked the Camino de Santiago, they served their strange vegetarian guest – you guessed it – tortilla.

Nope, it wasn’t proving to be easy to be a vegetarian in Spain.  I encounter this challenge in most countries, but Spain was on a whole other level.  Jamón was everywhere!  It hung on the facades of restaurants and in the aisles of supermarkets, which was both fascinating and incredibly disturbing.  Worse, it was tucked into seemingly-innocuous food – I once ordered a vegetable sandwich from a restaurant menu and it came with two thin slices of jamón tucked between the tomatoes and cucumbers.

Our family meal of tortilla while walking the Camino.

Pig hind legs hung in supermarkets…

… and in bars…

… and even in doorways.

***

Still, I wasn’t about to give up hope in the face of this jamón-attack.  I’d fought against adversity before and managed to discover wonderful things about countries and their food.  Here in Spain, I’d start with the pinchos.

What, really, was a pinchos, anyway?  Was it lunch, or just a snack?  Was in the northern name for a tapas, or was it something entirely different?

I received muddled, seemingly opposing answers from most people I asked.  The most confident and nuanced answer came from Josu and Ana.  According to them, a pinchos was almost exactly like a tapas, but not quite.  Pinchos served the same purpose as tapas, namely as a snack between the Spaniard’s light breakfast and late lunch; but, unlike tapas, pinchos were generally served on a slice of baguette, like an open sandwich.

The purpose of this mini-meal definitely made sense in context of Spain’s mealtime culture.  The flow of the day in Spain is like no other country I’ve ever visited.  Spaniards are late-to-rise and late-to-bed, and this affects every aspect of their culture.  They take late, long, lunches that leave shops and businesses closed for several hours in the afternoons – from at least 2-4pm, but often later.  Lunches are large, involving at the very least three courses and often necessitating – especially in the hot south – an afternoon siesta (nap).  Because of this, their dinners don’t begin until 9pm, and on weekends can start as late as 11pm!  It’s a good thing their evening meal is light!

According to our friend Josu, pinchos are like tapas, but served on bread.

Pinchos on bread. Look, point, eat.

Tapas-time in Spain.

A little pincho pick-me-up before lunch.

This strange rhythm of life was very difficult for Bruno and me to deal with.  I’m the type of person that likes to try to adapt to the customs of the place I’m in; Bruno, on the other hand, works according to the rhythm of the sun – up early, eats when hungry, to bed early, repeat – and doesn’t give a rat’s-ass about doing “like the locals.”  I can’t tell you how many times we found ourselves in Spain wanting to shop or wander the streets exactly when all the shops were closed.

Worse yet, we fought about how and when to eat.  One day, early on in Spain, we found ourselves in Estella at noon.  We’d spent the morning visiting the town’s church and quaint alleyways, and Bruno had worked up quite the appetite.  Truth be told, I was hungry too, but my desire to do like the locals was greater than my desire to eat.  Not the case for Bruno.  He wanted lunch and he wanted it now.  I remember arguing about it in the town square before he sat down at a fast-food restaurant and devoured a pizza, me watching on with a mixture of disgust and pizza-envy.  An hour later I caved and grabbed a tortilla at a pinchos bar.

Eventually, Bruno and I came to a consensus.  If we ate a noontime lunch of pinchos, we could be like the locals while being true to the rhythm of our own tummies.  The key, however, was bar-hopping.  We would walk into a bar, grab a pincho and a drink, then find another bar and another pincho, until we were satisfied.

The bar-hopping part was my idea.  Bruno could have very easily eaten three pinchos in bar #1, but I could almost never find more than one vegetarian option.  Once I became too sick of tortilla to stomach another one, this process became even more time-consuming.  I’d sometimes have to visit three or four bars before finding a vegetarian pinchos, and each time had to go through the uncomfortable process of asking the bartender to point out a dish I could eat.  I got more strange looks in those bars than in my entire vegetarian life up to this point!

It was worth the effort though, because when I’d find a veggie pinchos, I’d feel the deep satisfaction of uncovering a layer of gastronomic understanding that I find so key to appreciating a country.  And I found a few delicious surprises, especially in towns like Bilbao and Pamplona, which are renowned for their pinchos innovation (pinchosovation?).  My favourite was a layered open sandwich of goat’s cheese, sweet membrillo (quince paste), roasted vegetables, and walnut.  Total yum.

I found one, I found one!

My favourite pinchos of all, roasted veggies, goat cheese, membrillo, and a walnut on bread.

Another good one, deep-friend cheese with a raspberry coulis.

Bruno generally filled up on several pinchos in bar #1. The bar-hopping was for my benefit.

A wonderful setting makes a pinchos-find even sweeter!

***

I refrained from writing this post until our return to Spain the following March because I’d hoped my second visit to the country would unlock something for me about its food culture.  It’s obvious that with only a few pinchos and a lot of tortilla under my belt, I didn’t feel I had much of a story.

I expected to return to Spain feeling excited to delve deeper into Spanish cuisine.  I was wrong.

What I felt was fatigue.  I didn’t feel like digging so hard to find foods that would appeal to me.  I didn’t want to watch people revel in their jamón while I stood nearby with my umpteenth tortilla.  It appeared that I was giving up on Spanish food before even giving it a second change!

During the four weeks Bruno and I were in the south of Spain, I mostly avoided restaurants (which seemed frustratingly expensive after Morocco, anyway).  When we did eat out, I chose non-Spanish dishes like lasagne and couscous.

But one evening in Cartagena, feeling perhaps inspired by the Semana Santa procession we’d just witnessed, I turned into a tapas bar.  Some may have chosen it for its hopping atmosphere or its central location in the main square, but I chose it for its extensive list of tapas menu items, of which at least a few seemed edible: garlic soup, battered cheese, stuffed artichoke, patatas bravas (potato wedges), and vegetable quiche.

From our table, I had a clear view of a bartender whose sole job it was to shave paper-thin strips of ham off a pig leg wedged onto some heavy-duty holding device.  He didn’t stop for a moment my entire meal – in fact, he finished the giant pig leg and started shaving a second one!  Jamón Iberico was obviously a best-selling item on their menu.

As our tapas items arrived one by one, it was a comedy of errors.  My quiche had a giant shrimp for garnish and my garlic soup was sprinkled with jamón.  Even my stuffed artichoke looked so much like a chicken drumstick that, in my communication struggle with the server, I almost sent it back thinking it was, in fact, that.

The bartender whose sole job it was to slice off ham from the pig leg.

My vegetarian quiche, with a big shrimp on top.

My garlic soup with jamón.

My stuffed artichoke looks more like a chicken drumstick.

That meal was my Final Supper in Spain, and was a sort of metaphor for my entire experience of its food culture.  I have to pick off, give away, or second-guess almost everything I want to eat in Spain.

***

There is a happy ending to this misadventure, however.  As with every country whose cuisine I’ve had time to explore, I’ll take a few recipes and food items home with me.  They may seem old-news to some – artichoke hearts drizzled with olive oil and vinegar, jars of red roasted pimentos that I can add to almost anything for a douse of flavour, and the coolest non-spicy green chilis ever, pan-roasted until dark brown and popped into the mouth.    Those last ones are a much-beloved tapas, and one of my new favourite appetizers.

I also learned to make paella.  Right after we finished walking our Camino, Bruno and I spent an overnight with Javi and Jasmine, the Canadian-Basque couple we’d connected with through our overlander friends Phil and Angie and with whom we’d stored Totoyaya while on our pilgrimage.  That evening, Javi taught me the secrets of paella – the short-grain rice, the paste of saffron and garlic, the laissez-faire attitude one needs to adopt while the rice simmers in tomatoey juices.

Green pimentos make an awesome appetizer! Just salt, sautee, and pop ’em in your mouth!

Sharing paella with Javi, Jasmine, and their son Emeric.

My own vegan paella simmering on the stovetop. It was just as delicious as the seafood-infused paella!

That night, we’d shared authentic home-made paella, which was so generous of them that I cheated and ate it despite the seafood.  Later, I used Javi’s cooking tips to try my own vegetarian paella; it was – honestly! – just as delicious.

More than the meal ideas I’ll take home is a deeper grasp of a country’s culture through the all-important lens of food.  I’ve long loved the idea of tapas/pinchos – the fact that you get to try loads of different foods in one meal – but now I understand its place in the rhythm of Spanish life.

And if I think that Spain is a little too reliant on animal products and deep-frying, and that maybe – maybe – it’s time they adjust their cuisine to meet 21^st century ideals and needs, well that’s just the opinion of a new-world, tree-hugging, almost-vegan Canadian.  In response, the proud and traditional Spaniard will likely raise his glass of Rioja, dig into a plate of jamón Serrano and boisterously offer me a consolation prize of – you guessed it – tortilla.

I’d wanted to try my first Moroccan meal.  But now that I was walking past cafés filled with men drinking mint tea, food stalls exhibiting animal carcasses, and hole-in-the wall restaurants with giant vats bubbling over charcoal stoves out front, I was having second thoughts.

Finally, my stomach won out over my fear.  I approached a few restaurants, looked inside their vats and platters, found one that looked like American baked beans, and sat down at an empty table.

My anxiety was a thing of the past; my curiosity at the food customs of a new country took over.  I watched others around me dig into their dishes with pieces of bread torn off of saucer-like loaves, then round off their meals with pots of sweet mint tea.  I did the same.  It was delicious.  And fun.  And it cost me $2.

Azemmour, the site of our first Moroccan meal.

Bruno standing in front of the first Moroccan restaurant we chose, where we were able to see inside the vats and tagines and choose our food by sight.

Oh yeah, I love eating food with my hands!

I couldn’t wait to visit another dive restaurant the following day in El Jadida.  This one, tucked in a narrow alley behind the souq, was even more grubby and local than the first; we were the only foreigners, and I the only woman.  On offer were five metal vats containing various stews.  Luckily, three of them were vegetarian – loobia (baked beans), ‘addis (green lentils), and hodra (vegetable stew).

More confident than the day before, I pointed at two stews, washed my hands, and dug into my meal with my khoobz (bread), tearing off one solid, crusty chunk at a time and dipping it, with my right hand, into my stew.  I automatically love any food that requires a utensil other than a fork or spoon.

The local restaurant in El Jadida, with the vats to the left and me washing my hands in the back. I’m the only woman.

‘Addis (lentil stew), hodra (vegetable stew) and khoobz (bread).

Khoobz, these saucer-shaped loaves of bread, are ubiquitous in Morocco, and cheap. They’re the staple food and often used as a utensil.

***

It was only weeks later, during our family reunion in Taroudant, that I got the second instalment of my Moroccan food education.  By this point, I’d tasted a variety of foods – briouat (Moroccan samosas), harira (a fragrant tomato soup containing chickpeas, lentils, rice, and vermicelli noodles), pastilla (mille-feuille pie), bessara (fava bean purée, called foul in many Arab countries); msammen (Moroccan crêpe), and beghrir (Moroccan pancake).

Mmmmm, msammen.

A very funky presentation of pastilla.

With the help of Hafida and Atika, our two Moroccan cooks, I began to deepen my understanding of their complex cuisine.  I was in charge of coordinating our daily menu with them, and each day Hafida would suggest Moroccan dishes.  Each suggestion was a tagine, one of Morocco’s two world-famous dishes (the other being couscous).  I remember thinking to myself that everyone was going to get really sick of such a repetitive menu.

What I slowly realized was that tagine wasn’t just a dish – it was a cooking method.  A tagine is an earthenware pot in which food is cooked.  It consists of two parts: a flat, circular base, and a cone-shaped cover.  Food is layered into the base – spices and onions at the bottom, followed by meat (if there is any), carrots and potatoes (which take longer to cook), and finally, fast-cooking vegetables like zucchini, tomatoes and peas.  The tagine is placed over medium-high heat (traditionally over charcoal, but now also on gas or electric stovetops), covered, and left to its own devices, except to add small quantities of water at frequent intervals.  This is the key of the tagine cooking method: food is cooked both from the heat below and the steam created by the water and kept in by the cone-shaped lid.

There are a plethora of different tagine dishes – chicken with olives and preserved lemon; lamb with prunes, almonds, and sesame seeds; kefta (beef meatballs) with a spicy red sauce; chicken with hard-boiled eggs; vegetables topped with chickpeas and caramelized onions; fish and carrots – so many, in fact, that we weren’t able to try all of Hafida’s meal selections in our two-week stay in Taroudant.

Tagines for sale on the side of the road.

Chicken tagine with boiled eggs, olives, and preserved lemon.

Bruno enjoying a vegetarian tagine.

A tagine of meat and peas.

Not only that, but since each chef uses a different spice mix to flavor the tagine – Hafida’s often used ginger, cumin, salt, and pepper, but some people use saffron, paprika, or coriander – you can try tagine kefta in twenty different places and never eat the same dish.

I really want a tagine in my camper van now.  Too bad they’re breakable.

***

I became friends with Hafida and Atika.  It was inevitable, really, what with my passion for world cuisine.  I watched them layer thin buttery pastry sheets over a spicy vegetable curry to make a vegetarian pastilla.  I asked about the spices that went into their harira.  I even helped stuff and fold briouat.

Learning how to make briouat with Hafida and Atika.

Vegetarian pastilla, yum!

When the family reunion was over, and I’d taken my parents on a tour of eastern Morocco in a rented camper van, I returned to Taroudant and called them.

“Please come to my house for dinner,” said Hafida without a second thought.  “And please come to my parents’ home for dinner, too,” said Atika.

What was meant – in my mind, at least – to be an evening with my two new Moroccan friends turned into thirty hours, a sleepover, and four meals.  What’s more, I was invited back the following week, with my friend, Sahnah, who would be in town from New York.  I knew Sahnah would love the opportunity to meet my friends, taste their food, and experience their family life, because that’s exactly what we’d done a decade before, on our first trip together, to Mauritania.

Hafida lives with her husband and three children in a 4-storey townhouse near Taroundant’s medina.  I’d met the family at our New Year’s Eve dance party; her youngest, Ihsan, was already quite attached to me.  Over the four nights I spent sleeping on cushioned benches placed along the perimeter of her second-floor salon, I got to meet Hafida’s mother, sister, and niece, as well as Atika’s sister, brother, parents, sister-in-law, and nieces.

Me with Hadifa, her mom, and two of her three children.

Spending some time with Atika and her lovely family.

Bite-size pastilla and beautiful briouat prepared by Atika and her sister when we went to their house for dinner.

It was wonderful to foster a friendship with Hafida and Atika that had begun as an uncomfortable employer-employee relationship.  Despite our inability to communicate complex ideas, I learned a lot about Hafida’s family and home life.  It was fascinating to experience firsthand their customs and routines.  A lot of them centered on food.

Breakfast is taken in two stages – a small bowl of plain porridge with ahwa (coffee) upon waking (this was perhaps just for the sake of Saaid, the husband, who left early for his bicycle repair shop), and later, an incredible feast that reminded me of Turkish breakfast.  A variety of spreads – butter, olive oil, jam, honey, and amlou, a divine southern Moroccan spread of almond butter, honey, and argan oil – are laid in miniature dishes in the center of the table.  Around then is fresh khoobz, of course, but also msammen (which I loved immediately), and beghrir (which, because of its spongy, bubbled texture, I didn’t love until I had it served with warmed butter and honey).  Olives and yogurt are available, as is lots of Moroccan tea, but fresh fruit, my own breakfast favorite, is served only for dessert after lunch and dinner.

Beghrir for breakfast! Under the white tagine-shaped bowls are the spreads.

And here are the spreads! The brown one in the back is amlou.

Because of the late breakfast, the timing of the other meals is very different from what I’m used to.  Lunch, the largest meal of the day, is served around 2pm; a light dinner is served anytime after nine.

To make it that long between meals, Moroccans eat an early-evening snack.  I had asked Hafida’s kids which meal they liked best, and it’s no surprise that snack-time was the unanimous favorite, for snacks consist almost entirely of sweet things.  There’s msammen or beghrir doused with honey; French croissants and pain au chocolat; gooey, dripping dates; and a variety of Moroccan pastries, or helwa. 

Bruno and I had definitely caught onto the helwa.  In even the smallest of Moroccan towns are patisseries, bakeries with massive windows displaying a variety of delicate pastries – displays that just beg you to create your own variety pack to-go.  We’d tried almond cookies, anise biscuits, frangipani briouat, honey and almond cigars, chebakia (deep-fried dough with sprinkled sesame seeds), and the lovely and much-loved crescent-moon-shaped cornes de gazelle.

Sugar definitely seems to be a Moroccan staple, as sweet things even find their way into savory meals.  Harira is always served with either dates or chebakia; dried fruits find their way into couscous, caramelized onions into tagine.  There’s even a dinner dish called sfaa that consists of either couscous or vermicelli noodles topped with raisins, crushed peanuts, powdered sugar, and cinnamon.

Tea and sweets for late-evening snack.

Bruno buying a mixed box of helwa.

Sfaa, vermicelli noodles with powdered sugar and cinnamon.

Dried fruit finding its way into a tagine.

And, the sweetest – and most-beloved – thing of all is Moroccan tea.

***

Moroccan tea is such a fascinating topic that I could probably write an entire blog post about it; a little interlude here will have to suffice.  Tea, in Morocco, is drunk as a relaxing, afternoon pastime amongst family and friends; as a way for unemployed men to while away seemingly-infinite hours watching the world go by at roadside cafés; and as a preamble to any important business transactions.

I’ve spent many hours watching people – mostly men, as women only drink tea at home – drink tea.  It is served in metal pots on metal trays with shot-sized glasses; the pots are generally stuffed full of fresh mint.  The man offering the tea will pour a drop into a glass and taste it before adding his desired amount of sugar to the pot.  He will fill a glass and dump it back into the pot, repeating this process a couple more times to melt and mix the sugar before filling all the glasses for his friends.

The key to this ritual is that the man will pour the tea, each time, from astounding heights.  The spouts of the teapots are long and thin so that the tea can be poured into such narrow glasses from distances of at least – and often more than – sixty centimeters.

Depending on who you talk to, this pouring technique serves to aerate the tea, to cool down the liquid, to look cool, or to create foam at the top of the beverage.  Whatever it is, it’s a lot harder than it looks.  I’ve been practicing the technique for three months, and from only thirty centimeters away I still create loads of spray with my wavering hand.

The ritual of pouring mint tea from great heights.

Bruno pouring mint tea. He can’t do it from a very big height.

I’m much better at it, right?

If you’re invited for tea by a Moroccan, it’s always a lengthy affair.  In Marrakech, I learned why.  Sahnah and I had befriended two shop workers after buying some spices and perfumes from them, and they invited us to lunch the following day.  Mohammed noticed my interest in all-things-cuisine and invited me to learn how to prepare tea.

“Sure,” I replied, omitting my inward retort that, at 31 years old, I already know how to prepare tea.  I was wrong.

Moroccans use gunpowder green loose-leaf tea from China.  They place a handful at the bottom of the metal pot, cover them with water, and set that to boil.  Then they dump that liquid in one of the tea glasses, add cold water to the pot, swish that around (to clean the leaves) and throw away the dirty water.  Next, they pour back the dense tea liquid from the tea glass into the pot, add a large handful of fresh mint – stalks and all – then fill the pot to the top with water and set on low heat.  The liquid is now simmered for at least ten minutes, and often seeped for several more.  Sugar is added before serving – and trust me, it’s needed to offset the bitterness.

During my tea observations over the past several months, I had been amazed by the amount of sugar Moroccans will add to their tea.  In Morocco, sugar cubes are giant rectangular prisms, and each prism must equal ten Western sugar cubes.  Most Moroccans add two sugar prisms to pots of tea that can serve three people.  That’s about seven cubes of sugar per tiny cup!

No wonder Moroccans have dubbed their tea “Moroccan whiskey.”

***

I’d read that couscous is the Moroccan equivalent of a Sunday roast – it’s the special weekly meal shared by the family.  I’d never been able to find couscous at a local restaurant because it was only prepared once a week (usually on Friday), and then, it was prepared in one giant batch that always included chicken.

I was perplexed that such a simple thing as couscous would be the special meal in a country that has beautifully-plated, more elaborate, seemingly finer foods.

Hafida and Atika helped me understand.  Preparing the couscous grains requires impeccable timing and strong hands.  First, the uncooked grains are placed in a large basket and massaged with oil.  They are then transferred in the top pot of a couscoussier, a Moroccan double-boiler.  In the bottom pot, the couscous vegetables are boiling away in a spiced tomato broth.  The couscous is steamed for a while, then dumped back into the basket, where it is lubricated with a bit of cool water and massaged by hand to remove any clumps.  (I tried this part and burned the crap out of my hands.  No joke, they were lobster-red.)  The process of steaming and massaging is done three times, requiring over an hour before the texture is perfect.

Couscous being steamed on a double-boiler.

Hafida showing me how to make couscous.

A cook at a random restaurant showing me how to fluff the couscous. One of the rare men I’ve seen prepare it.

Finally, the couscous is plated.  A huge pile of perfectly-cooked grains are dumped in the center of a large platter, and on top are piled the meat and a huge variety of vegetables, such as eggplant, pumpkin, carrot, turnip, zucchini, and cabbage.  There may also be dried fruit, caramelized onions, chickpeas or lima beans.  Broth is served in a bowl on the side and spooned to taste onto one’s portion of couscous.  During our family reunion, we served the couscous family-style onto our own plates and ate it with utensils; Moroccans, however, share it with their hands out of the common platter.

Hafida prepared us couscous in her home.  While she was cooking it, I learned that her 16-year old son, Hicham, knows how to prepare several tagine dishes.  I was impressed – I’d thought the kitchen in Morocco was reserved for women.  Later, when Sahnah and I shared a meal in Marrakech with our new shop worker friends, I found out that Mohammed had gone to the market to pick out all the seasonal produce needed for the tagines he would serve us at lunch.  Since he had to be at work all day, he had brought the ingredients, and his own spice mix, to a shop that would transform them into our meal.  It’s a cheap service that many vendors who can’t go home for lunch use.

Hafida and Atika plating couscous for a special meal during our family reunion.

Couscous during our big family reunion.

Ok, I get it. Couscous is pretty.

It appeared men in Morocco were adept in tagine preparation.  But rarely does a man attempt a couscous.  “No way,” said Hicham, his eyes big, when I asked him if he could make the Moroccan Sunday roast.  “That’s way too hard!”

It appeared couscous, at least, has remained a woman’s duty in Morocco.

***

Not everything about Moroccan food speaks to me.  The cuisine is too bread-, meat-, and sugar-heavy for me, and their street food isn’t as exciting, spicy, or healthy as what you can find in powerhouses like Thailand and India.

But I love the markets piled high with gorgeous, cheap, and supposedly-organic fresh produce.  I love the bean stews, the fresh herbs used on everything, the gooey, almost-burnt onions at the bottom of a tagine.  Despite the sugar, I love washing my meals down with a glass of mint tea.

Most of all, I love what food in Morocco stands for – hospitality, community, and celebration.  As I sat at Hafida’s low roundtable, gathered with her extended family around a platter of lovingly-plated couscous, I felt so welcome, so accepted.  Saaid said Bismillah (“in the name of Allah”), and we all dug our right hands into the platter.  Hafida’s mother nudged some pumpkin into my section of the food.  I scooped it up with my fingers, mashed it with some couscous into a ball in my palm, and popped it into my mouth, smiling inwardly.  That pumpkin – indeed that couscous – was a celebration of a new member in the Nasser family – me.

Enjoying couscous from a common bowl with Hafida’s family.

Benvenuto a Italia!

I’m standing in a piazza, gazing through a restaurant window. Inside, carafes of red wine and bread baskets rest on top of red and white checkered tablecloths. People smile and chat as they feast on homemade pasta topped with shaved parmeggiano, creamy wine-infused risotto, and rich tiramisu. I’m standing in the piazza, chowing down on my slice of takeaway pizza, filled with longing and envy.

What did I expect? I was traveling in Italy as a university graduation present to myself. I was a broke backpacker, staying in hostels with fourteen beds to a room, swiping extra bread and jam at the buffet breakfasts to eat later in the park. Did I really think that fine Italian food would be accessible to me?

My fast-food pizza: looks good, but it ain’t no five-course meal.

On that trip, nearly a decade ago, I decided that Europe wasn’t made for broke twenty-something backpackers. Many might disagree with me, but the type of experience I wanted to have in Europe was of the parmeggiano-risotto variety. I promised myself that I’d return to Italy in my thirties and do it right.

Apparently, I underestimated the age at which I could properly “do” Italy.

When I realized that Bruno and I would pass through Italy during our overland transit from Turkey to France, I immediately knew what I wanted from the country: to eat as much Italian food as possible. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to faithful readers who have followed along as I ogled over Turkish food, Ethiopian food, French food, and Tanzanian food (and that’s only in the last year).   Our five nights in Italy would be a quest for me to compensate for my lack of “proper” Italian cuisine the first time around.

Yet, when I envisioned this quest, I forgot to factor in inflation and the fact that I don’t have a job any more than I did on my backpacking trip to Italy. In the last decade, Italy got more expensive, but my budget didn’t.

Italy was insultingly expensive. You had to pay for everything. A euro to use the toilet, two to sit at a table. Even in the campsites, every tiny thing was charged. Extra for wifi, extra for electricity, extra for running water! When I wandered around towns and villages to scour menus, it wasn’t in search of vegetarian options, but of reasonable prices.

Scouring menus for reasonable prices.

Another restaurant, another menu.

Realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to live it up in Italy like I’d imagined a decade ago (because, let’s face it, I was envisioning five-course meals), I set myself a new goal: to walk around and take in Italian architecture and culture.

This was a much easier goal to achieve, in one sense. Italy isn’t one of the top tourist destinations for nothing – their towns have innate charm and their culture is tangible at every turn. On the other hand, you have to reach the towns to appreciate them. This is easier said than done in a camping car as wide as many of the old streets we wanted to pass though. Factor in crazy Italian drivers, no atlas, and one-way cobblestone streets and we had ourselves a very stressed-out driver.

Just let me wander!!

One of the wider streets in Italy – I was too busy holding my breath to take photos of the narrow ones!

Vespas and scooters make driving in Italy tiring and dangerous.

Still, Bruno knew how much I wanted to achieve my secondary goal. He kindly accepted to camp in the parking lot just outside the 16^th century Venetian outer wall of the fortified city of Verona. There were no toilets and we were surrounded by the mass of camping cars we usually try to avoid. But we were within walking distance of the historical town, which included one of the largest and best-preserved Roman arenas, the house of Juliet (of Romeo and Juliet), Gothic cathedrals, and Roman walls and bridges.

Our “campsite” just outside Verona’s outer walls.

Verona’s Roman arena is a slightly smaller Colliseum.

Verona’s Roman theater, still used today for performances!!

Porta Borsari, a Roman gate stuffed between modern buildings.

But it was the little things in Verona that charmed us both from the get-go. Italy seriously has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world. They pay attention to detail and form. They have visionary urban planners. Bruno and I delighted ourselves in slowly walking around, wandering down main streets, weaving through alleys, and getting lost in side streets. We admired window panes, statues, and wall frescoes. We pointed out old door handles and ancient pieces of wall. We rejoiced in every little detail. Verona was a living museum.

Charming windows and wall-paintings.

Statues everywhere – outside doors, on rooftops, in squares, on water fountains…

Old wall, new wall, dull wall, bright wall.

I may have rejoiced in Italian culture even more than in its architecture. I sat at the edge of a water fountain in the center of a piazza, listening to beautiful, singsong Italian all around me, and watched the locals. Some of them were opening their window shutters, sipping late-morning espressos with heads leaning over balconies. Others were sat at cafés watching the activity in the piazza. Their chairs all pointed outwards, to the world. It was a surprising contrast to catch several different groups of Asians sat at café tables sipping their own espressos with their heads in their Iphones.

Relaxing in the piazza.

Italians facing out to the world from their café seats.

That night, on the recommendation of a local, Bruno and I headed to Verona’s San Zeno square for dinner. I didn’t plan to eat a fancy five-course meal like I’d originally hoped for, but that didn’t mean Bruno and I couldn’t enjoy a more modest Italian meal on the town. We sat outside and sipped on a carafe of red wine, surrounded by boisterous locals doing the same. We shared pizza and pasta, then went next door for a nocciola gelato (hazelnut, my favorite) as a nightcap. We watched the Basilica di San Zeno, and the nearby multicolour shops, light up in stormy evening light. Italian culture and architecture really is the best.

Our restaurant in Verona’s San Zeno piazza.

I’m happy when I’m eating! :)

Basilica di San Zeno.

I didn’t expect to be as impressed with Italian scenery. So far, between the charm of the towns lay flat fields, vineyards, industrial buildings, and more ugly modern development than I’d expected. But as we headed north toward the Alps its collection of lakes, I found myself once again snapping photos from the passenger seat.

Nice view from the road!

We anchored on romantic Lac d’Orta. Our “low cost” campsite was a much-appreciated change from parking lots – especially the view of the medieval village of Ronco on the other side of the lake. Though we needed part of a day to catch up on laundry and internet, we eventually took our bikes into San Guilio, a charming town on a peninsula that juts out into the lake like a uvula. If it was possible for a place to be more charming than Verona, this was it. San Guilio’s piazza was on the edge of the water, facing an island with an old Romanesque basilica. Another church, with beautifully faded frescoes, stood on one end of the square. Pastel-colored buildings full of pretty windows lined the back. Shops sold multi-colored pasta, alcohol in beautiful bottles, amaretto cookies, and gelato. I ate gelato again, for the fifth day in a row.

Our view of Ronco from the campsite.

San Guilio’s pizza and fresco-filled church.

Love the colors and windows.

I love me some gelato!!

Beyond the piazza were covered alleys and side streets that led to the water. There were water garages for boats, like I remember seeing in Venice. We found a walking path on the edge of the water that circumnavigated the town. Charming homes and bright flowers lined the path. Ducks waddled in the water. I could easily see myself adding a basket to the front of my bike and riding into town every day from my hilltop countryside home for a fresh baguette and a bottle of red.

Boat garages on the water!

Such cute little side streets.

The pedestrian path along the edge of the water.

On our last night in Italy, we sat down for wine, risotto, and eggplant parmesan. It was only the campsite restaurant, and we weren’t sharing a five-course meal, so it may not have been the Italian dining experience I’d longed to have nine years before. But here I was, sprinkling (ok, more like dousing) my eggplant with freshly-grated parmeggiano after spending the afternoon taking in the best of Italian architecture, culture, and natural beauty.

I’ll save the five-course Italian meal for my forties, because, for now, this was just fine.

Enjoying a carafe of vino with my love. :)

Ooooh yeah, cusine Italiano!

Chances are it’s some sort of kebab, right? That’s surely what came to my mind when I had imagined my choices at Turkish restaurants and cafes prior to my arrival. Some sort of grilled meat, served in a wrap or on a stick. It was a disappointing thought to me, a traveler who loves to experience a country through its food but who happens to be vegetarian.

Kebab. Everywhere in Turkey.

On my first morning in Istanbul, my friend Dani pointed me to the neighborhood borekçi and counselled me to breakfast on a greasy savoury pastry filled with white cheese and spinach. As I wandered with a full stomach down the alleys off Istaklal Caddesi, I spotted other vegetarian snacks for sale at food stalls – grilled corn, chestnuts, and several varieties of simit (bagels – one with sesame, another with tahini and sugar) – that made for an excellent picnic lunch in the park. Later, when I sat for an afternoon drink at a café, a man walked by selling raw almonds topped with ice.

It seemed that I had made it through my first day as a vegetarian in Turkey without starving.

Simit with sweetened tahini – better than a cinnamon roll!

A good bar-snack: raw almonds on ice.

One of MANY chestnut and corn stand in Istanbul

Over the following weeks, I learned about other vegetarian Turkish foods. I sampled kumpir (baked potato loaded with a variety of pickled veggies) and gӧzleme (a crêpe filled with white cheese, spinach and potato). I tried çig kӧfte, a wrap that used to be stuffed with raw meat balls, but was now more often made with bulgar, chilis and tomato paste. And I feasted on mixed mezze platters with Dani, dipping bread into roasted red pepper dip, garlicky yogurt, and walnut and tomato spread (my favorite). Mezzes were my Turkish saving grace – something I could eat as an actual meal that was always vegetarian.

A spicy veggie wrap: çig kӧfte.

Gӧzleme

But this was Istanbul, a cosmopolitan city. People understood when I muttered vegetarian as I pointed to a tasty-looking treat. The same rules didn’t apply in Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey’s equivalent of the wild, wild west. I’d told Bruno about lokantas, cafeteria-style restaurants I’d discovered in Istanbul where the cooks whip up a few dishes of the day, you point, fill your plate, and pay by weight or portion. That’s where I’d learned the art of pointing and asking “vegetarian?”

When I spotted a lokanta around lunchtime, a dozen lovely-looking dishes displayed at the window in bain-maries, I waltzed in confidently. I was looking forward to guiding Bruno through his first Turkish meal. There was a stew with purple eggplant peeking out, another one with thick fasulye green beans. I played the pointing game. With every dish. But each of them had tiny chunks of meat floating around in the thick broth. I had to settle on mercimek çorba (lentil soup), bread, and salad.

Don’t get me wrong. Turkish çorba is really good. It uses sumac, an indescribably lovely spice I’d never tasted before and will now forevermore associate with this soup. I was just frustrated that Turks would ruin perfectly lovely vegetable stews with their meat chunks!

Food on offer at a lokanta.

I do like çorba, I just don’t want to eat it every day.

I was to eat çorba a lot that week. It – along with the ubiquitous bread and salad that’s served at every table – was practically the only vegetarian thing every restaurant seemed to have in Turkey’s wild, wild west. But I wanted my Turkish experience of food to be slightly wider that soup.

I forced myself to adventure away from the lokantas. I learned some Turkish words – mostly related to food – and dragged Bruno into salonus and pideçis to try new foods. With my new key phrases, etsiz yekem var muh? (do you have something without meat?), I began to try new foods. I tasted menemen, Turkey’s take on scrambled eggs. They came served on a mini hot plate, scrambled with tomatoes, onions, and green pepper, and served – of course – with ample cups of çay and a loaf of sliced bread. I tasted pide, thin, canoe-shaped pizzas, made to order with cheese and vegetables. You could taste the wood-fire oven in the crisp, buttery crust. I tried mantı (ravioli) stuffed with soya in a tomato and yogurt sauce and sprinkled with colourful spices. I tried patlıcan (aubergine) in every form available – chopped and fire-roasted, melt-in-your-mouth grilled, and bathed in olive oil.  I tried vegetable stew cooked in a clay pot and ceremoniously hammered open in front of us.

Menemen

Hammering the clay lid off the veggie stew.

Stewed vegetables in a clay pot.

And, of course, I continued to sample mezzes whenever I could. Technically, mezzes are the Turkish equivalent of apéro snacks – vegetable spreads to be served with bread and a drink while your main dish is being prepared. I solved that problem by always ordering mezze platters rather than single mezze plates. It allowed me to try a greater variety of spreads and acted as a main meal. I’ll never forget the mixed mezze platter at Topdeck Cave Restaurant in Capadocchia’s Gӧreme – the platter contained fourteen different spreads, including hummus, dolma (vine leaves stuffed with rice), and bean salad. It was my best experience of mezze in Turkey.

After meals (and between, if I’m being honest), I’d sample Turkish desserts, of which there are many. Rice pudding, fried flour dough balls doused in honey, dondurma (“sticky” ice cream) – the Turks know how to do dessert. Their bahklava is the best in the world, flaky layers of pastry dusted with pistachio shavings and dripping with syrup. And their lokum, which I’d never tried before, is a gelatinous (though vegetarian!) bar in a variety of flavours and colors, sometimes with hazelnuts or pistachios inside and sometimes coated in powdered sugar. My favourite flavour was rose, though I was never to find rose lokum as good as in Istanbul, where there were actually dried rose petals around the square that burst with rose flavour.

Mezze. Fourteen different ones.

Fried dough balls with walnuts and honey.

Bahklava!!

There was one vegetarian food I hadn’t yet tried – kahvaltı, Turkey’s infamous breakfast. I’d first experienced the ritual when I’d watched Zelal, my Turkish roommate, prepare her elaborate breakfast. A boiled egg, a block of white cheese, honey, jam, tomatoes, olives, cucumber, bread, and tea (of course) – all spread out picnic-style on the table. It looked weird. I mean, cucumbers for breakfast? Savoury and sweet mixed together? I wasn’t at all interested in eating those combinations for breakfast.

But for lunch? Kahvaltı could make a good lunch, I thought. I was willing to try – it was vegetarian, after all.

One late morning, at a little café on the edge of the Mediterranean, Bruno and I finally hunkered down and tasted kahvaltı. Each ingredient came out on a little individual plate. I started with the innocuous parts – the egg, the vegetables, the bread. Next to me, Bruno was spreading honey on his bread and popping it in his mouth along with big chunks of cheese. I tried it, and my eyeballs rolled back in their sockets. I tried the homemade fig jam with the white cheese. My eyeballs rolled back again. I tried the kaymak – clotted cream – and, no joke, my eyes rolled back yet again. It was ah-may-zing!

Zelal’s kahvaltı.

OUR kahvaltı.

This is when my understanding of Turkish food really started to come together, I think. This is when I began to understand the Turkish people’s true relationship to produce. I began to notice things like dried apricots for sale on the side of the highway, statues of oranges or cherries standing proudly as the mascots of villages, locals picking lemons and mulberries off fruit trees in town.

Dried fruits of every variety. Yum!

Dried apricots for sale on the side of the road.

If the locals do it, why can’t I?

Kumluca is proud of its cherries!

I began to visit the local farmers’ markets, and to really look. What I saw astounded me. There was fresh milk sold in Coca Cola bottles, homemade yogurt in wooden vats, more varieties of young white cheese than I ever thought possible (and all of them really, really good – I know, I got to sample loads of them!). And of course, more fresh fruit and vegetables than I’d ever seen in a market.

I’d read that Turkey is one of the world’s few countries that can entirely feed itself and still have leftovers to export. What I was beginning to understand, however, is that the Turkish people not only grow loads of produce – they love it. It wasn’t just Zelal, whom I’d watched taste her way around every stall at the vegetable market in Istanbul, and who crunched on raw veggies all day every day. It was all Turkish people, generally.

Cherries, oh my god!

Fresh white cheese, thirty varieties at least!

How else could I explain the fresh vegetables, decorated with parsley leaves, or the jars of pickled vegetables placed on every restaurant table? How else could I explain the cold mezzes made entirely of vegetables and so much a part of Turkish food culture? I thought back to the many locals’ picnics I’d sneaked peaks at and remembered that they all included whole cucumbers, olives, and tomatoes. As I walked through Selcuk’s farmer’s market and filled my bags with locally-produced and locally-loved fresh produce, I finally understood that vegetarian food was actually the soul of Turkish cuisine.

Turkish food hasn’t become my favorite in the world. It’s a bit too heavy on the bread and olive oil, and it doesn’t have the spice kick I love in Indian and Thai food. But it was an integral part of my experience of Turkey, helping me to understand and appreciate Turkish people, history, and culture in a deeper way. I’ve discovered new favorite foods – mezze, kahvaltı, pide, çorba. I’ve gained a whole new respect for aubergine. And I’ve included a few new food ideas into my own repertoire– yogurt dip with garlic and cucumbers, and picnics of white cheese, jam, and bread.

I guess we can say that my search for vegetarian food in Turkey was a success.

Our stash one market day.

I was shocked. I’d had injera several times before – in Chicago with Muna, in Cape Town with Rory, in Dakar with Sahnah, in Ottawa with my mom and brother, in Nairobi with Jo – and I’d rather liked it. Sure, the injera itself was slightly sour and had a spongy texture, but the vegetables and lentil curries that topped the injera perfectly complemented its strange texture and taste.

Plus, you got to eat the meal with your hands. I was a fan of Ethiopian food.

This is injera.

This is injera loaded with spicy wats. Yum!

“Maybe injera is good in the West,” continued Ana. “But in Ethiopia, the batter is fermented for days in dirty corners of dirty huts. Just seeing how they prepare the stuff will turn you off of injera forever.”

That got me worried. I’d been looking forward to eating my way through Ethiopia. Now I wasn’t so sure.

When we crossed the Moyale border from Kenya into Ethiopia, I watched a woman performing a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Leaves and flowers were strewn about the ground, a clay stove with hot coals sat waiting, and a tray with several tiny cups had been placed on a tiny table. The woman soaked and washed green coffee beans in water, then dry-roasted them over the coals. It smelled of roasted maize mixed with the incense stick she had lit to accompany the ritual. When the beans were dark brown, she pounded them into a powder with a mortar and pestle. Finally, she brewed the coffee.

The lengthy ritual is performed throughout the country, every day, by hundreds of thousands of people. The patience and love put into this ritual suffused me with renewed confidence in Ethiopian cuisine, and I decided to face my injera fear head-on. I would eat it that very night.

Washing the raw coffee beans several times is step one of the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony.

Step 2 is roasting them until they are dark brown.

Coffee ceremonies take place literally everywhere throughout Ethiopia, even on the side of the highway!

We chose the cleanest restaurant in Moyale – the one that had the disgusting toilets I wrote about, ironic isn’t it? – and ordered – with difficulty – injera with vegetables. I didn’t yet know how to order the typical wats (stews) whose names I’d soon master.

When the meal came, I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d read that the lighter the injera, the higher the quality (thus less sour). This injera was pale yellow. We were good to go.

My first taste of injera in Ethiopia.

When I’d eaten Ethiopian food in other countries, the injera had always been laid out flat on a large common platter with several dishes slopped on top. Often, the platter was placed on a small hour-glass table made of bamboo. Sometimes, African art hung on the walls and traditional Ethiopian music played overhead.

I’d imagined this type of culinary experience in Ethiopia. I thought this is how we would eat every day.

It wasn’t.

And so began my search for the full injera experience. Ethiopia, for me, became about finding the perfect injera.

Injera at Lake Langano. It was only so-so in taste and presentation.

But first I needed to learn the lingo. First up, yalleh sega yalleh dorro. Without meat and without chicken. This was an important one, since Ethiopians love – I mean L.O.V.E. – meat. Ethiopian wats almost always contain meat – lamb, goat, and chicken, sure, but also tripe and liver, beef tongue, and raw meat. Yes, Ethiopians love tere sega, and there are restaurants entirely devoted to preparing this luxury dish. They brandish carcasses at the doorways to advertise the freshness of their ingredients and to lure you in. Naturally, I steered clear.

Shiro and vegetables in Arba Minch. Amazing taste, but served on an individual plate with injera on the side, so still not perfect.

Instead, I learned the vocabulary for the vegetarian dishes – shiro,a delicious wat made from chickpea powder and berbere spice (the main spice in all Ethiopian stews); misr, or lentil wat; tegabino, similar to shiro but thicker, often served on a hot pan; enkulal tibs, scrambled eggs; and fir fir, spicy sauced injira.

The best phrase I learned, though, was baiyaina tu, a platter of all the vegetarian dishes spooned onto injera. This was what I had always eaten outside of Ethiopia. Inside the country, however, it wasn’t easy to find. But when we did, boy did we feast!

I managed to find baiyaina tu in a local restaurant in Addis. A rare feat! Delicious, but in a noisy pub, so still not perfection.

I already knew that Wednesday and Friday are fasting days in Ethiopia. Followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church are commanded to eat a single meal on these days, and it must be entirely free of meat products. This was good news for me – as a vegetarian, I’d imagined that on Wednesdays and Fridays, I would simply sit down at a local restaurant and be automatically handed a full platter of varied vegetarian foods.

Another assumption that turned out to be wrong.

In most local restaurants, the only dish served on fasting days is shiro. It is delicious, and is in fact most Ethiopian people’s favourite dish. But because it’s the center of an Ethiopian meal, you can actually get it seven days a week and don’t have to wait for a fasting day at all.

It turns out you don’t have to wait for a fasting day to get a vegetarian meal in a tourist restaurant, either. If the place is nice and busy enough, it will serve baiyaina tu almost every day of the week.

Suddenly, I didn’t need to search for the perfect injera only on Wednesdays and Fridays – I was in business seven days a week.

Tegabino and injira in Dire Dawa. The restaurant didn’t have any vegetables, though, so it wasn’t perfect.

I started to venture to the tourist restaurants. This is something I generally avoid when traveling, since I’m looking for authentic experiences (and cheap food). But in Ethiopia, I wanted the perfect injera – indeed, I had built up the entire experience in my head – and in this rare instance, perfect didn’t equate with authentic.

In Addis Ababa, I dragged Bruno halfway across the city to eat at a “traditional” Ethiopian restaurant (read: touristy). I even called ahead to make sure the live traditional music was going to be playing. We were greeted to perfect traditional décor – the low hour-glass table and local art on the walls that I’d imagined were all there. Surely tonight I would eat my way to Ethiopian injera heaven.

Then, the “live,” “traditional” music began. A guy stepped up to a synthesizer, pressed a few buttons, and a tinny melody began a twenty minute loop. We ordered a drink. I asked for tej, local honey wine, in honor of our perfect evening. But the waiter refused to serve it to us. “Too strong for you,” he declared.

Instead he gave us beer. There are several varieties of Ethiopian beer, none very good, but it’s important to drink something fizzy with injera. The fermentation process makes injera difficult to digest, but bubbles from a drink – be it soda, beer, or Ambo, a delicious natural mineral water that I became more than slightly addicted to – make the digestion process less, well, noisy and uncomfortable.

I love ambo water.

No tej? No problem!

As we sipped our beers, the “musician” returned to his synth to play a few half-hearted solos over the lopped melody. Our food came – it had the variety I was looking for, but all but the shiro were served cold. A man came up to a microphone and began to sing in a high-pitched whine. He sort of sounded like he was dying. I’d heard Ethiopian music was unique and good. This was certainly unique, but it was definitely not good.

It looked as though we’d have to keep looking for our perfect injera after our mini-holiday to Djibouti.

Check out the size of that chili!

“Traditional” Ethiopian music. O.M.G.

Injera is unique to Ethiopia (and Eritrea). That’s because its key ingredient, teff, grows naturally nowhere else in the world but on the highlands of the Horn of Africa.

We were driving through Ethiopia’s highlands now. Everywhere we turned, field of golden teff blew gently in the cool high-altitude breeze. It was beautiful. And it made me hungry.

The best teff grows in the highlands of Ethiopia, and the Amharic people are very proud of their growing abilities.

Driving through fields of teff, the main ingredient in injera.

There might be a reason I was becoming so obsessed with injera – my body knew a healthy meal when it got one. Gram for gram, teff has more fiber, calcium, iron, and protein than any other grain. It contains natural yeast, which is why it’s so easy to make injera – you only need to add water to teff, let it ferment and rise (naturally) over the course of a few days, then spoon it like crêpe batter onto an injera stove or a clay plate placed over fire.

The process might be easy, but getting the texture just right – in other words, soft and spongy – is no easy feat. Fermenting it just the right amount of time, so that it’s sour but not too sour, is even harder. Tearing a piece off with your right hand only, using your “injera-spoon“ to grab the desired wat from the common platter (making sure to politely leave some for the other eaters), and placing it in your mouth without getting red berbere spice all over your top, is the most challenging of all.

But it’s a feat I’m proud to say I accomplished. Over and over again. Obsessively. Like a true Ethiopian. (Ok, not quite like an Ethiopian – they eat injera three times a day!)

This injera in Gondar was crispy on the edges.

A different presentation style.

Eating injera obsessively proved to be a good tactic for finding the perfect injera – after twenty-odd injera meals, I finally found it. All over Lalibela.

Lalibela is the most touristy place in Ethiopia that we visited. Tourists mean tourist restaurants. And tourist restaurants mean baiyaina tu. During the week we spent in Lalibela, we ate baiyaina tu six times. The seventh time, we ate at home because all the vegetables I’d bought at the market were going bad. But believe me, I thought about injera the entire time.

“Injera again?”  Good thing Bruno likes injera almost as much as me!

I finally found the perfect injera! (Served with delicious ambasha bread on the side).

Oh my goodness, I don’t think I’ve EVER eaten this much!

Ok, so the injera meals we ate in Lalibela weren’t the perfect experience I’d pictured before coming into the country. Sometimes there was local art on the walls, and only once was there traditional Ethiopian music. But the surroundings of the restaurant had come to mean less and less to me during my search for the perfect injera. (I was in Ethiopia after all, so the environment in which I was eating my food couldn’t be better, really.) What came to matter more was that I was connecting with the food I was eating – I had driven through the fields where teff first grew, I had learned how it was prepared, I had bought my very own berbere spice, I had experienced firsthand what injera meant to the local people, and I’d learned to order vegetarian food in any restaurant, in any town, in the local language.

Ethiopian art in the Ethnological Museum in Addis.

All the tools needed for making injera.

And best of all, I’d eaten injera with my hands (food just tastes better with your fingers!), from the same bowl as my beloved. Together, we’d chowed down (fast, so the other wouldn’t get all the yummy wat), burped our delight, and listened to one another’s stomachs growl late into the night.

That, I learned, is the perfect injera experience.

Sharing injera with a loved-one is truly the perfect way to eat it!

The Ethiopians knew this a long time ago, but it took me a while to figure it out.

As I write this, my tummy is rumbling. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve just made a list of all the delicacies and special meals I consumed in France or because, ever since I left the country, I’ve been on a strict no pain, vin, fromage diet.

Either way, it’s no secret that any trip to France comes full of fine foods and drinks. Restaurants list their menu du jour on chalkboards along the streets, wooing us onto their riverside terraces with dishes like moules et frites (mussels and fries) or loup de mer (fillet of fish). Markets set in charming old village squares explode with exotic fruit and vegetables, massive wheels of nut-filled nougat and equally large wheels of cheese. On every corner is a patisserie, which is an excuse to sample yet another pain au chocolat or taste a new local speciality. On every other corner is a wine and cheese shop, which is an excuse to purchase a new cheese and another large bottle of fine wine. To get to the nearest boulangerie, we have only to walk on the beach, the Mediterranean Sea on our side, into the charming fishing village of Grau d’Agde. Baguettes have never tasted so good!

Choosing the day’s bread at the nearest boulangerie.

Sampling moules marinieres et loup de mer on a restaurant along the Herault River, in Grau d’Agde.

Check out the varieties of veggies!

Is it cheese or nougat? (Answer: nougat).

But it is the culture surrounding food – even more than the food itself – that had me saying Oui! Oui! to France from the get-go. The meals served as individual courses, paired with wines (Patrice, for example, had me sample a Bordeaux from 1989, by far my oldest wine!), and sprinkled with conversation and laughter – food in France exists to be enjoyed and shared, and is a centerfold of the day, just the way I like it.

The ritual of the meal – be in lunch or dinner – begins with an apéro. I looked forward to this every day, not only because it was a chance to tie me over until the inevitably late dinner, but because it was a chance to sit with family or friends and chat over a drink. And drink we did – port, beer, and more French champagne than I have ever drunk in my life. Sometimes, apéro was a chance to get to know new people – like the time we had apéro at Pierrot’s sister and brother-in-law’s home with extended family, or the time we shared apéro with Annie’s friends, Pierrot’s neighbors, and Bruno’s tenants. Drink in hand, I tasted regional delicacies such as tielle de Sête, a small pie stuffed with calamari and petit paté de Pézénas, a cylindrical pastry stuffed with sweetened meat. My favourite apéro snack of all was a cheese wheel that shaved girolle cheese into perfect carnation flowers.

The oldest wine I’ve ever had the pleasure of sampling. Thanks Patrice!

Mom and dad sampling a petit paté de Pézénas, IN Pézénas!

Apéro with friends and neighbors at Pierrot and Annie’s place.

The ingenuous girolle cheese wheel.

Cheese isn’t generally a part of the French apéro, however. Pierrot joked that if the cheese platter were brought out before the meal, he’d assume the meal was already over! Cheese can feature in the main dish of the meal, however, especially in the colder Alps region of France bordering Switzerland. Micheline thrilled our senses with a cheese fondue on my parents’ first night there, a potimarron gratin, a delicious squash baked with cream and cheese, and a tartiflette, a potato and bacon bake topped with reblechon cheese. Rémy and Nathalie served us aligot, a mashed potato dish loaded with a stringy cheese that’s almost as much fun to play with as it is to eat. Once, at lunch in Pézénas, I ordered a salad served with an entire baked camembert!

I told you aligot was fun to play with!

Delicious tartiflette, with and without bacon. Thanks Micheline!

Would you like any salad with your baked camembert?

Generally, though, cheese is served after the meal. From the first evening in Divonne-les-Bains, and almost every meal thereafter, we were treated to large platters of creamy, flavorful, beautiful, and varied cheeses. I tasted garlic-infused cheese, creamy cheese spread, blue-infused marscapone, hard cantals and contés, tiny goat cheeses that melted upon contact in my mouth, cheese made from sheep, and of course more camembert than I’d eaten in my entire life! I quickly learned to pace myself during meals so that I had room to sample as many of France’s four hundred cheeses as possible. Dad and I became so enamored with eating cheese after the meal that we even created our own cheese platter for those few evening meals that we didn’t share with Bruno’s family. Don’t be surprised, Canadian family, if mom and dad bring the tradition home.

Cheese wasn’t the only aspect of the French meal that dad fell for. The post-cheese espresso got him too. At first, he refused it, thinking it unnecessary to drink coffee after any meal but breakfast. But on a busy touring day in Pézénas, he needed a pick-me up after lunch. He toured with an extra hop in his step after. And thus began his newfound love of strong double espressos, taken straight up. With a crème caramel, a tarte aux poires, or a piece of Swiss chocolate, he’d sip down the caffeine and wonder aloud what on earth he and mom were going to do when they returned to Canada.

The first of many after-meal espressos. Dad’s eyes are perking up already!

I wondered the same thing about my return to Africa and my itty bitty fridge. Between the meals at the homes of Bruno’s family and those in restaurants, I was severely spoiled. Take, for example, the first lunch my parents had at Pierrot and Annie’s. Apéro was champagne with raw oysters and mussels. The entrée was more oysters with tails of langouste (spiny lobster). The next dish was moules marinière, followed by coquille st-jacques. My exploding stomach was thankful to be a non-meat-eater when lamb racks were brought out, but I was sufficiently recovered to sample a few of the twenty or so cheeses that were subsequently brought out. By the time the pastry platter arrived, mom’s eyes were rolling back into her head and I was wishing I had a hollow leg. Dad – clearly the most French of us all – tossed back a few pastries and washed it all down with an espresso. Pierrot was impressed.

A magnum bottle of champagne to start things off right!

The fathers feeding each other raw mussels. They loved it.

Langouste et huitres as first entrée.

Ho la la, fromage!

The meal that topped all others, however, was a few days later, when Pierrot and Annie invited us to a French restaurant called La Table d’Emilie. Set within an old brick building with cathedral ceilings, we were treated to a five-course meal of such stunning beauty and taste that all restaurant meals will forevermore be held up in comparison. At one point, during the second course, dad muttered sounds of an exquisite ecstasy that I have only ever heard from mom when she eats amazing chocolate. That night, I myself found my hollow leg.

Sitting down at one of Emilie’s tables.

Food as art.

Even after two amuse-bouche and three courses, dad is ready for cheese!

Of course, it was important to balance all this French food and food culture with a bit of North American. And so, we invited Pierrot, Annie, Rémy, Nathalie, and the kids over for an American-style BBQ. Rémy had told the kids that dad was the Canadian hamburger champion, so we scrambled to find equivalent ingredients for burgers, hot dogs, mom’s Caesar salad, corn on the cob, French fries, and hot fudge sundae. As our feast fell the day after Pierrot’s seafood extravanganza, we might have over-bought and over-served. But we were happy to share a bit of our own culture with our French family – and have Pierrot and Annie taste their first ever hamburger! Whether or not they were burger-champion-worthy, I’m sure they were better than the McDonald’s burgers my parents and hubby scarfed down on our road trip to Divonne.

The boys prepping the BBQ, Pierrot looking on closely to check out what exactly is in the hamburger meat…

North American BBQ in France.

My family stealthily chows down on McDonald’s, or MacDo’s, burgers. I caught them red-handed!

And now, dear family and friends, my stomach is screaming at me. It’s time for lunch. On the menu today, a green salad minus the bread and cheese, sans apéro. I miss France already.