A recent trip to the coast provided us with the chance to check out some local ingredients and a two-day foodie fest ensued!
On the road to Rabat we came across some guys selling Saharan desert truffles. We’d heard about them and the season has just started so we were keen to give them a try. They cost 100dh (10 Euro) for half a kilo (we probably paid too much).
We arrived in Asilah and headed to our holiday house. We had been on the road all afternoon and had skipped lunch so we decided a truffle and mushroom omelette was an immediate priority. Once the mud had been rinsed off they appeared a pale pinky-brown colour and looked rather disconcertingly like testicles…still, we persevered. The truffles didn’t have much smell but we hoped if we put enough in they would have some flavour.
Sliced up and added to a frying pan with the mushrooms and some seasoning, our tastebuds were getting juicy in anticipation…add the eggs, struggle with the non-non-stick frying pan, serve with flaky Moroccan bread and voila! Hmm. Not quite as we were hoping – the truffles had very little flavour and a bitter after-taste. More research into the best way to use this ingredient is definitely needed.
The next food adventure came across our path on the way out for dinner. We bumped into some fishermen who had just brought in a crate of live spider crabs and decided to snap some up for lunch the next day. Four big crabs for 110dh – a much better investment than the truffles! We popped back home and put them to sleep in the freezer.
Dinner out was underwhelming, a disappointing paella (Asilah is close to Spain and so has a lot of Spanish influences) – we were better off eating at home!
The next morning I searched out the local market and came home laden with ripe avocados, fresh lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, lemons, baguettes, olives, a bottle of rose and a jar of mayonnaise. Meanwhile Vincent had been boiling the crabs in salt water. We got to work and a simple, but very tasty lunch was soon ready: salad, fresh avocado with lemon juice and olive oil, crusty baguette with butter, green olives with preserved lemon and most importantly fresh crab. Picking the crabs apart took some doing as we didn’t have the right tools but we improvised with scissors, a garlic crusher and some garden secateurs! It was worth the effort though – mixed with a little seasoning, lemon juice and mayonnaise or just eaten plain, the crab was sensational.
Our last new food experience was discovered on the way back from the beach – fresh cheese and local farm butter from the back of a guys van. Back home again and chilling with a gin and tonic and a couple of hands of gin rummy, the cheese drizzled with olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and pepper was the perfect snack with more baguette and olives.
All cooked out, that night we opted for pizza and red wine – a lazy but satisfying end to two days of culinary adventure.
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