Ramadan, Harira and True Religion

Ramadan has begun and I have a pot of harira, the traditional Moroccan soup to break fast, simmering away on the stove. I do not fast at Ramadan, I fast at Yom Kippur (one day, get it over with). So what’s a nice lapsed Jewish girl doing with harira?

Harira and I have a history. I made it years before I visited Morocco, made it from a recipe in Erica Rozin’s Ethnic Cuisine, a book so old and battered now, my copy is in pieces. I keep it as a talisman because it was, in its own way, the book that launched my food writing career.

I had been writing for BookPage and Ann my wonderful editor asked if I ever reviewed cookbooks. I hadn’t but sure, I could, why not. She suggested kitchen-testing some recipes. I chose harira because it was winter and I had a wretched cold. It looked comforting. It looked easy. And it looked odd. I’d never seen a soup recipe that called for yeast. I've since learned this is traditional for harira, giving it some oomph and thickness and a mild fermenty kick.

I was then as I am now, a vegetarian but for professional reasons, a closeted one. A food writer with a limited diet can result in a limited career. So I quietly went about substituting the chicken in the recipe for vegetables. The result was something greater than the sum of its parts. I loved harira and wrote about it so rapturously, other editors approached me about doing food writing.

Even if they hadn’t, I’d still love this soup. I have since learned every family makes their own version of harira, and over time, I’ve changed up my own version even more. Harira is entirely forgiving, allowing you to add more of this or that. You can make it elegant with a pinch of saffron or ras el hanout, a blend of up to two dozen spices and botanicals, you can make it simple and straightforward. I’ve since seen recipes with lamb, with chicken, with eggs. I haven’t seen many plant-based versions like mine, though.

By the time I discovered harira’s link to Ramadan, I was already besotted with all things Moroccan. On a bad day, or sometimes even a good one, I dream of running away to Marrekesh. I can imagine living (somehow) within the medina, in a riadh with a blue-and-white zelig-tiled interior courtyard and a small burbling fountain that makes watery music. Every day, I’d shop in the souks for dinner. I’d gossip with my neighbors over mint tea poured out boiling hot from a battered silver pot. I’d ride a camel. I mean, if you’re going to fantasize, there’s no point in half-measures.

At the very least, I can make harira. It sustains the body because its made with ingredients that are humble but whole, nutritious and recognizable. It sustains the soul because it has a rich cultural and culinary history, a history that goes back centuries before my first taste of it. It connects me to the past and to others. As I make harira here, women in Morocco are probably making their own for their families to eat at Iftar (the Ramadan break fast at sunset).

I will serve it to those I love the way they will, with dates, bread and coffee or tea. Harira makes me feel I’m not alone in the universe. If that’s not true religion, what is?

True Religion Harira

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

1 teaspoon turmeric

3 zucchini or yellow squash or a combination, chopped

2 red peppers, chopped

2 celery stalks, chopped

1 28-ounce box diced tomatoes or 2 pounds gorgeous ripe tomatoes

1 15-ounce can chickpeas, rinsed and drained

6 cups vegetable broth

1 pinch saffron or ras en hanout (optional but very nice)

1 small handful whole wheat vermicelli or angel hair, broken into pieces

1 tablespoon yeast dissolved in 1/4 cup warm vegetable broth or water

juice of 1 lemon

sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

1 handful fresh cilantro, chopped

extra lemon wedges for serving, if desired

In a large stock pot, heat olive oil over medium-high heat. Add onion and turmeric. Saute a few minutes, until onion softens and turns golden. Add chopped squash, red pepper and celery.

Continue cooking, stirring often, for another 5 minutes.

Stir in tomatoes, chickpeas and broth. Reduce heat to medium-low and let harira simmer, uncovered, for 45 minutes to an hour.

Add broken noodles and dissolved yeast. Squeeze in the lemon juice. Season with sea salt and pepper. Stir in chopped cilantro just before serving.

Serve with extra lemon wedges if desired.

Serves 8.

Charmed, I'm Sure

photo illustrative magic courtesy of Philip Brooker

I have always been a hard sell when it comes to magic. Back when I toggled my first loose baby tooth, my parents explained about the Tooth Fairy -- your tooth falls out and the Tooth Fairy appears while you sleep, takes the tooth and pays you for it (your original Cash for Clunkers concept). I looked at them, smiled coolly and nodded. I didn’t believe a minute of it. I was over magic by the time I was five. Kind of too bad, but that’s the way I’m made. I didn’t burst my parents’ bubble. The idea of the Tooth Fairy seemed to make them so happy, and I didn’t object to handing over my teeth in exchange for the coins my father left by my bed.

Several years later, my adult teeth affixed firmly in my head, I’m beginning to believe magic isn’t such a bad thing and might, even, in fact, exist. Paul Bowles defined magic as “a straight connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man, a hidden but direct passage that bypasses the word.” I might add it bypasses the eye, too, unfolding within its own damn time frame which is not necessarily ours. Perhaps that’s why we say a watched pot never boils, because though there’s science behind cooking, if the end result is any good, there’s magic’s involved, too.

It may also be why with Joe Meno’s otherwise excellent novel The Great Perhaps and with the film Henry Poole Is Here, two works about belief, magic, transformation, the whole shebang, the pivotal moment, the sea change, felt false or even forced to me. As with the Tooth Fairy, I wanted to believe, but I didn’t. Magic is not interested in proving itself to you, it just happens. I mean good magic, white magic. The other stuff -- when the roof leaks or your honey dumps you or the doctor says pathology, that to me isn’t magic. That’s life doing its best to bleed magic right out of you. Magic can happen despite that stuff, but you can’t set your watch by it. Like H1N1, it comes, it goes.

Maybe magic is Blake’s energy, eternal delight. I see magic with P, who makes art, and with S, who makes bread. Sometimes I’m even capable of magic myself -- more often, my husband says, than I realize. I certainly wasn’t capable of it at three this morning, in a knot of insomnia-induced dread (see previous post). Magic does not come on demand. It cannot be forced -- God knows I’ve tried. It can sometimes, however, be coaxed.

Ritual helps -- you know, indulging in the notion that something you do or say or wear can affect change. This is known as magical thinking, a rather sparkling term made famous by Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. Magical thinking is probably a mild form of delusion. I see nothing wrong with this. Magic comes with surrender, with infatuation with possibility, with being loose and giddy right up in life’s ugly little face.

And if magic is being coy or annoyingly elusive, the next best thing is to appreciate it and be grateful for it when it comes. This is what I tell myself, anyway. Then I curse and make dinner.

Magical Moroccan Tagine

Most Moroccan tagines take hours. The transformation that comes from slow-cooking is part of their magic. You can make this one, with very few ingredients, in minutes and you don’t even need a tagine. That is its own kind of magic. Freewheelingly adapted to the point of being unrecognizable, its origins can be traced back to a recipe by the oh-so-magical Paula Wolfert.

Enjoy over whole grain couscous or quinoa. Also very nice stuffed in a pita.

2 tablespoons olive oil

4 cloves garlic
1 head of broccoli

1 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

a pinch of red pepper flakes or, even better, Aleppo pepper

sea salt to taste

1 large handful cilantro

In a large (14-inch or so) skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat.

Mince garlic and add, stirring, just for a minute or two.

Chop broccoli into bite-sized pieces, both florets and chunks of stem. Yes, you are using the entire broccoli. Magic does not appreciate waste. Neither do I.

Add broccoli to skillet, along with tomatoes, paprika and pepper flakes. Stir together. Reduce heat slightly, so tomatoes are still on the boil. Stir constantly. The tomatoes will (magically) thicken and turn jammy and the broccoli will become tender, in less than 10 minutes. Remove from heat.

Chop cilantro. Add to broccoli. Season with salt. Enjoy the magic.

Serves 4.

Next up: Fowl play.

Orange Crush

It is Sunday afternoon, I am in my frock, ready to go out. I am waiting for my husband, who’s been out running errands, to pick me up. He is a smidge late. I am used to this. The phone rings. “I’m okay,” my husband says, “but I’ve been in an accident.”

My heart and stomach fall down my inner elevator shaft to the bottom. He’s okay, I tell myself, running out the door. He called, he spoke and he said he is okay, ergo he is okay. This is what I think as I run. I do not have to run far. The accident has happened a block from our house.

My husband was driving home when a 17-year old ran a stop sign. Husband is indeed fine, kid is fine, both of them standing bewildered in the debris in the middle of the intersection. I am wobble-legged with relief. My husband says he felt tremendous relief at the sight of me, too, and holds the image of me storming towards him like some righteous angel, my white frock fluttering. The dress would soon be drenched with sweat, thanks to anxiety and to standing outside in a shadeless 90 degrees. That part his brain has kindly edited out.

Angels and such are a good idea, but I’m not one and I don’t believe in them as a rule. Yet some benevolent something-or-other must have been present. Had the kid or my husband been driving faster, if there had been any sort of injury or worse or, oh, I can’t even bear to think about it. And since I could not bear to think about it, I got a headache and a sound worm -- the technical term for a refrain or song stuck in your brain. A logical choice would be Radiohead’s “Airbag,” with its happy (for Thom Yorke) refrain, “An airbag saved my life.” Instead, my brain seized on REM’s “Orange Crush.”

My husband was not crushed, he is not orange, nor is his car, he doesn’t even drink Orange Crush. We met at an REM concert, but well before the song came out. I had liked “Orange Crush” for its boppy hook until learning it was really about Agent Orange, after which it pretty much creeped me out. But we don’t get to choose our obsessions.

I play “Orange Crush” repeatedly to try and get it out of my mind. It doesn’t work. I kind of hate when life so shakes you up and instead of devoting your life to finding a cure for cancer, you go and do something weird like obsess about an REM song. And yet I think these shakeups, however we react to them, are also when we are closest to the real business of living. Even if we don’t understand it. At least that's what I tell myself by way of comfort -- this is easier for me to accept than angels.

Back at the scene of the crime, the cops come. They fill out a report. We learn the kid is driving with a suspended license. Kid's car isn't so bad. Husband’s man vehicle has to be towed. He endures a few days of achiness, but he is, as he says, okay. I pop ibuprofen for a few days, just to keep him company and do not tell him about my “Orange Crush” obsession but take to touching him more frequently, as a way to reassure us both. And come up with this heady saffron and orange-scented couscous to cook this sound worm out of my head and celebrate the privilege of being alive.

Here’s a vid of REM doing “Orange Crush.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BvXBwtrs_k Proceed at your own risk.

Heretical Angel Orange Crush Couscous

A word about this couscous -- it is heretical. The Moroccans would no sooner tart up their couscous than they would sell their mamas. They serve couscous, their national dish, fluffy and unadorned, to serve as foil for the subtly spiced tagines. Nevertheless, I have turned couscous into a stand-alone salad that demands and deserves its own attention. Apologies to any offended parties.

1 cup whole grain couscous

1 cup fresh squeezed orange juice

1/2 cup white wine

1 good pinch of saffron

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon cumin

1 tablespoon coriander

1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon Aleppo pepper or other red pepper flakes

grated rind of 1 orange (about 2 teapoons)

juice of 1 orange

4 scallions, chopped

3 handfuls fresh herbs, chopped, including parsley, mint and cilantro

3 handfuls arugula or spinach

sea salt and ground pepper to taste

1/3 cup chopped pistachios

Feta would be a nice addition for those who goat

Pour orange juice and white wine into a medium saucepan. Bring to boil. Add saffron and couscous. Turn off heat and cover pot. Let stand for about 8 minutes or until liquid is absorbed, Fluff couscous with fork. This is fun.

In a small bowl, whisk together olive oil, spices, orange rind and orange juice. Pour over couscous. You may add the scallions, herbs, greens and chopped nuts now, but the couscous is exponentially better the next day. Even this scribbling, which seemed entirely scattered yesterday came together neatly and swiftly this afternoon (note to self -- be patient, sometimes things improve over time).