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What kind of special cookware is used in Moroccan cooking?
Something called a Tagine, also spelled tajine. These are special conical clay pots which are glazed to retain the heat and moisture making the food tender, while retaining the flavors and natural juices of the ingredients.
You can find some great pictures of tajine (both the food and the cookware) on Flickr
Today we did some work on our Squidoo lens about healing herbs and spices. We added a great list about herbal teas you can add to your diet to detox, reduce stress, control blood sugar, and improve liver function.
Take a look at the new information we posted there because many of the herbs and spices, and even the teas will play a part in our How to Cookbooks project.
http://www.squidoo.com/healing_herbs_and_spices
When you start to cook food from a part of the world that is somewhat foreign to you, one of the first obstacles is to know the terms you’ll find in the recipes. Some of course translate easily while others need a bit of explanation.
Below is a short list of some terms you will want to be familiar with related to Moroccan cuisine.
- Confit – preserved
- Confiture – preserved with sugar
- Merguez – a spicy sausage
- Tagine – a dish you eat cooked on a low fire with very little liquid
- Tagine – a dish you serve and cook the stuff you eat called tagine in
In one of my earlier posts I mentioned the connection between certain ingredients in food from very diverse areas of the world.
One of the other things that is fascinating is the way that spices and herbs are used in many ethnic cuisines for health reasons.
Since I have always be fascinated by alternative forms of healing, and since food and cooking has always been a passion of mine I connected those two things on a new lens on Squidoo.
I’ll be including a great deal of the information on the How To Cookbooks site but I wanted to make that information available to as wide an audience as possible. That is the reason for the Squidoo lens.
Take a click over there when you have the time and see what else I’m working on related to this project. Healing Herbs and Spices
Well do you?
We doo () and here’s the link to our lens
http://www.squidoo.com/howtocookbooks
Oh and today I attracted the way for us to provide you with printed versions of these wonderful cookbooks we are creating. I’ll save the details of that for another post once we’re farther along with the project. But suffice it to say we’ve got a bunch of surprises in store for you.
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I’ve thought about what we can do to keep you entertained while you wait for us to get the authentic cookbooks ready.
I’m working under the assumption that you’re a cooking enthusiast so I decided that I’d offer you some cookbooks as dirt cheap downloads and offer some bonuses to keep coming back to the site.
I’ll put the cookbook links on the homepage of our site http://howtocookbooks.com
Right now I’m going through the hundreds of digital cookbooks I have the right to resell, and will put together the links this evening so come back and see what I’ve got on my overloaded hard drives. It will be worth the return visit I promise you.
If you’re a cooking enthusiast that simply has to have a cookbook on the counter to look at while you try out a recipe, them please have a look at these.
I own them myself, and recommend them highly. Don’t be put off by the word Kosher in the title. The recipes are excellent, easy to prepare and Kosher is healthy for many reasons. Maybe in my next post I’ll give you a little background on that particular thing since our Moroccan contributor keeps Kosher house and her recipes are all Kosher.
I’ve thought about what we can do to keep you entertained while you wait for us to get the authentic cookbooks ready.
I’m working under the assumption that you’re a cooking enthusiast so I decided that I’d offer you some cookbooks as dirt cheap downloads and offer some bonuses to keep coming back to the site.
I’ll put the cookbook links on the homepage of our site http://howtocookbooks.com
Right now I’m going through the hundreds of digital cookbooks I have the right to resell, and will put together the links this evening so come back and see what I’ve got on my overloaded hard drives. It will be worth the return visit I promise you.
If you’re a cooking enthusiast that simply has to have a cookbook on the counter to look at while you try out a recipe, them please have a look at these.
I own them myself, and recommend them highly. Don’t be put off by the word Kosher in the title. The recipes are excellent, easy to prepare and Kosher is healthy for many reasons. Maybe in my next post I’ll give you a little background on that particular thing since our Moroccan contributor keeps Kosher house and her recipes are all Kosher.
For more than 15 years I have wanted to create a project like this. In the early days of my vision, the internet was an infant and I didn’t even think of making the cookbooks digital downloads for sale.
Years ago my sister and I joked about writing a cookbook called “Recipes I stole from other people.” We knew so many amazing cooks, and come from a background of bakers so cooking was in our blood. Add to that our Jewish heritage and you have food on the brain almost 24 hours a day.
Every significant event in our lives took place around a table filled with food. Okay, almost every significant event, but even the ones that didn’t usually were fooled by a food fest.
In the course of my adult life many wonderful friends from very different backgrounds than my own came into my life. One of the people who changed the way I cook forever is my partner. We met almost 20 years ago, and since he is was born in Morocco, but grew up in Israel, me cooking like an average American just didn’t cut it for him. The solution was for me to learn to cook like a Moroccan, even though I am not one. Hence the title concept for our cookbooks featuring authentic ethnic cuisine.
It is so frustrating for me to see someone present a dish on a cooking show as authentic when you know it is a faux version at best. Even on websites that are reputable and regarded as authorities when it comes to food often to the “copy cat” version of traditional ethnic dishes.
Over the years we met people who owned a Chinese restaurant. One day we were asked by the owner if we wanted to order from the regular menu or the one the Chinese diners ordered from. The food on the authentic menu was 180 degrees from what we were used to eating in Chinese restaurants prior to that. Even in cities that have a Chinatown food has become americanized.
As a Jewish person I also had pounded into my head the value of keeping heritage alive. For my family that heritage was food most of the time.
My maternal granmother ALWAYS hade a pot of soup on the stove. My maternal grandfather had a poultry farm in Rogers, Arkansas from the 1920s to the 1940s.They also had a poultry market in St. Louis so it was not uncommon to see a pot of chicken or turkey soup bubbling on Gran’s stove 365 days of the year.
Growing up we heard stories of my mother and her three sisters scribbling onto paper treasured recipes from our Uncle Jake who had been a baker in Holland before his emigration. He would not give copies of his recipes. If you wanted to learn how he made something you had to sit and watch him and hope that as he crafted another masterpice you didn’t miss that one key ingredient.
Each sister had her treasure trove of cherished recipes and each one guarded that treasure like it was Fort Knox or the Hope Diamond.
Living in New Orleans for 18 years I had that “food is our heritage” concept imbedded even more deeply in my subconscious. If it’s Monday the average New Orleanian is eating Red Beans and Rice for dinner. Thanksgiving dinner in a New Orleans home means there is a plate of Merliton stuffing on the table.
And there’s another food connection for you. Merlitons in New Orleans cuisine connect to chayote in hispanic cuisine. Different name and different preparations but it’s the same main ingredient. Something no doubt also brought to New Orleans by the Spanish settlers.
Since so many of our friends are first generation immigrants they still cook their traditional foods each day. That has given me the great privelege of experiencing cultures from around the world by simply accepting an invitation to dinner or a family celebration.
I’ve travelled to many corners of the world in person, and those I have not visited I have sampled at the dinner table of our friends.
All of that brought me to this project. So many of our families have these treasured recipes and traditions. Too many families today only enjoy them on holidays. For many families when the matriarch or patriarch leaves this earth their recipes will go with them.
It is my heartfelt wish to keep those memories, traditions, and cultures alive every day not just on holidays. The internet makes that possible on an even greater scale than I envisioned for this project 15 years ago.
What makes http://howtocookbooks.com special is that we will not be presenting and preserving just one ethnic cuisine, like many websites do. We will be covering every corner of the world as we expand. We will be teaching you how to make the recipes in our cookbooks the same way my mother learned how to make Uncle Jake’s Mocha Checkerboard Cake and his Yeast Waffles, except you won’t have to scribble it down as we cook. you’ll have everything you need laid out in easy to follow instructions with photographs of each step in the recipe and when we’re in the mood perhaps even a little tale of how we learned a particular recipe or favorite memories that go with it.
I am an avid believer in the Law of Attraction. I didn’t discover it like many of the people around the world who are currently touting its wonders. I was born to the belief and awareness of it, in a manner of speaking.
My childhood was unique in many ways, especially the way I was taught to see and perceive the world around me and my place in it.
If I heard the phrase “you always have two choices” from my father once, I heard it ten thousand times in my life. As I got older I understood it differently and put it into practice in more and different areas of my life.
I also heard things like “At some point you need to accept that some people WANT to be miserable.” My father taught me that even feeling miserable is a choice. In between the lines was the question of whether I wanted to be one of those miserable people.
I did not, and so I have dedicated my life to choosing to be happy and grateful for everything, everyone, and every experience life presents as I travel through my life journey.
You may very well be wondering what all of this has to do with cookbooks or this authentic cookbook project. If you will allow me to, I will try put the pieces into place for you.
Everything in life is a choice. This is one of the premise on which the Law of Attraction is based.The ultimate choice being how you see things and what you choose to feel about every experience.
Another premise is that everything you need and want already exists in the world. In the case of this project all of these people and their love of cooking already existed. I just needed to ask for them, and they manifested themselves in my life. It is no coincedence that most, if not all, of them also dreamed of writing a cookbook at some point in their lives.
Now I will explain how choice comes into play with this project to present and preserve authentic cuisine and ethnic traditions.
Because of all the years I dreamed about creating this project I was able to attract the people, experiences, knowledge, and information into my life which have helped me to get it to this point. The “good vibration” from me when i think about or am working on it translates and trickles down to the other contributors. They pass that to others who appear, and become a part of this project as it grows and develops.
The journey atarted in St. Louis where I was born. I was connected by birth to one of our contributors, and to his partner who is our herbal guru and our “tea party” guide.
The journey then carried me to New Orleans where I met my partner. My partner was the catalyst for almost every other connection in this project.
He introduced me to our resident wine guru and his wife who is one of the contributors for the Dominican cookbook. The other Dominican cookbook contributor also came into my life in New Orleans through my friendship with her husband, also a connection with my partner.
Of course, our New Orleans contributors appeared in that period of my life also through social connections, as did our “Scratch Baking” contributor. Both of those connections started because I went with my partner to a local watering hole where those connections were made.
Our German cookbook and healthy baking contributor is my partner’s ex-wife. Our Lithuanian contributor is my partner’s daughter-in-law.
Next stop on my life’s journey was Orlando, Florida following Hurricane Katrina and our need to be able to sustain ourselves financically. We chose Orlando because many of our connections from New Orleans had moved here already years before Hurrican Katrina.
It was in Orlando that the pieces of this dream finally began to take real shape and form and interlock.
Our wine guru who is Argentine introduced me to our Argentine cookbook contributor and our Costa Rican contributor. Those connections all started with my partner too because he brought the wine guru into my life. Our wine guru and his wife were part of the reason we came to Orlando, since they were already here and established.
Our Moroccan contributor also came into my life because of my partner through business and social connections. She will also be contributing Israeli recipes as well as other North African cuisines and authentic French recipes.
Our Yemen contributor appeared during a visit from a member of my partner’s family, who brought her friend to stay with us. The friend who came to visit is our Yemen contributor.
One of our vegetarian recipe contributors is also our Mexican recipe connection and she came through our friends from Argentina and Dominican Republic.
So except for me, my brother, and my brother’s partner each piece of this grand puzzle came from that meeting with my partner all those years ago. And although I knew of, and had visited Morocco long before I knew my partner existed; cooking for him was how I learned the things I know about authentic Moroccan cuisine.
Other’s might look at our group and not see the connections or even see how this was a manifestation of a dream I’ve held for more than 15 years. That is a choice. I choose to see that life has brought me everything I needed and wanted in a single moment. Even the professional things I have done in my adult life brought me knowledge that will help make this project everything I dreamt it would be all of these years while it germinated inside my head.
My next post will have less to do with the quantum aspects of life, and more to do with the cookbooks and recipes. At least that’s the plan 
