My carb-licious life.

Hello, friends! Weve been blessed with a lengthy lunch break today, which reminds me: I havent yet described the food yet! Samhatyyee -- I will correct the error of my ways right now.

My daily meal schedule consists of the following:

Breakfast, around 7am - bread, home-made olive oil, jam, and mint tea.

Tensies, our tea break at 10am - bread, olive oil, jam, and mint tea.

Lunch, around 12:30pm - typically a tagine*, but always served with bread as the primary utensil. Tea and fresh fruit are served after for dessert.

Foursies, around 4pm - bread and tea or coffee.

Immediately after arriving home from school - tea or coffee and bread with olive oil and jam.

Anytime I go visit anyones house, at any time of day - tea or coffee, bread, cookies, oil and jam.

Dinner, around 10pm - anything from tagine to watery rice. Always served with bread, and followed up with tea and fruit.

Thats right, folks. I eat bread more often than I hear the call to prayer. Im lucky to be in such a mountainous area of the country, where I have the opportunity to hike all of the carbs off each day. If I were to eat this much bread in, say, the flat desert... my fingers would eventually be too fat for this keyboard.

The tea and coffee are both heavily sugared, but are served in small enough cups to avoid having a sugar overload. The tea is always mint, while the coffee is spiced with a variety of flavors, and is usually cut in half with milk, producing qahwa nuss-nuss: literally, coffee half half.

Fun fact: the tea is poured from waaaaay up above the cup to produce a bit of froth on top of the tea, but this is inappropriate to do with coffee.

The things that I miss here are simple, though discussion of food reveals a few more dormant cravings. Garlic has been the standout element that I miss, though Lebanese, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Italian and Mexican food are all on the list of Things I Miss. American candy bars and pizza are up there, too, but Im more than satisfied with my culinary life right now... although Im excited to start cooking for myself again once Im out on my own, starting around July.

Speaking of cooking for myself, I have made a tagine and bread so far, but that was more of a put-this-in-here-now experience rather than true cooking. I will update again once I have my own kitchen and can cook for myself!

*Im sorry that I dont have time to blog thoroughly about tagine, but you can take some initiative and look it up yourselves. Its a stew of seasonal vegetables and meats (ranging anywhere from pigeon and rabbit to lamb and chicken), cooked for at least two hours, and seasoned with cumin, cinnamon and anything else youd like. Each family has its own recipie, so no two tagines taste alike. Tagines are all served in the traditional clay tagine, and bread is the utensil of choice for Moroccans. Each member eats from the unspoken pie slice in front of him, and only dips into the tagine with bread using the right hand -- never the left, as we use Turkish toilets here (the left hand is used for, ahem, other matters).

Morocco is all around, part deux

Oh em gee! I just caught the tail end of Tyler Florence doing an episode of Tyler's Ultimate featuring -- wait for it -- flavors of Morocco and North Africa! Check out the recipes for grilled za3tar flatbread, apricot couscous and brick chicken here.