DAY 109

I woke up again late, but this time more aroung lunch time. It was wonderful to just wake up naturally and not by an alarm clock or something. I then went down stairs and through the kitchen to the patio were I had breakfast yesterday and sat down to Josef just 5sec behind, sort of like a lost puppy, with my orange juice. Something that I didn't realize till later was that until the two other people came that afternoon, that I had the whole place to my self (the previous people had either left last night or very early this morning), well by myself in the since that I was the only guests. There was still the staff, grounds keppers, and the gaurds, but still... Then around lunch time the second person came, Jeff. Something that I think is funny is while talking with him at lunch I had another small world episode. So he currently live in New Mexico, but before moving there a year or so ago, he lived in Seattle. But that is not even the best part. OK, so he is a doctor, more specifically an OB-GYN, who worked at Swedish hospital. Not only did he work at Swedish but with Dr. Thereasa Burdick. Dr. Burdick not only is one of my best friends mother, but she delivered 2 of Erin's kids. So when I had asked him if he knew her and he said yes, I silently freaked out. At around 5:30pm we had our first cooking lesson, it was only Jeff and I since the other person had had some problems with airplans and hadn't arrived yet. So here's the story. We usually have 2 classes a day, the first class we make our lunch, and the second we make out dinner. Tonights reciepes are; Khizü (Carrot Salad with Pepper and Cumin), Btata M'shermla (Potato Salad), L'ham bel'Kouk ou Jelbana (Lamb with Artichoke Hearts and French Beans), and Seffa (Sweet Couscous). The one thing that I love about Moroccan cooking is all the spices that they use... oh, and also 90% of the time there is cumin in the dish. Another thing that I learned is that the take the core out of the carrots. The reason for this is that in Moroccoan culture since the core is harder than the res of the carrot, if you serve it with the core it is a VERY big insult. That is unless your puréeing it or something where its going to be a orange thing anyway. Going back to the reciepes, the carrot and potato salad where mainly spiced with the cumin and the normal salt and pepper. The Lamb dish however was spiced with salt, pepper, cumin,ginger, and saffron. Now the Seet couscous is insteresting, but soooooo good. what it is is your make the couscous, but it had to be the very, very fine couscous, the one that lookes like fine grain sand. Then you serve it with the sauce, which is made from butter, finely ground almonds, honey, icing sugar, and Argon Oil (which is the most expensive oil in the world since it only grows in Morocco and no where else on the planet). After out cooking lesson we just hung out around the house till almost dinner time. A little bit before Jeff and I went onto the roof terrace for before dinner cocktails, our third and last person, Sam, arrived. Well, during cocktail hour Sam gave us the very interesting story of how he got here and why he had been so late. To make a long story short, he was supposed to fly direct from Boston to Casablanca, then Casablance to Marrakech. He ended up, because of some plane malfunction or something, flying from Boston to JFK, waiting forever at JFK, then JFK to Paris, Paris to Casablanca, where he had to wiat for a couple of hours, then Casablanca to Marrakech. This is on top of the fact that they had lost his luggage and when we finally tracked it down, it had apparently never left New York. We then headed down stairs to the dinning room were we got to eat the yummy thing that we had made. After dinner I hung out down stairs in the solarium type room, just off the dinning room until I couldn't stay awake anymore.