Dear Readers, it feels like an eternity since my last post.  I hope you didn’t think I had stopped blogging! After the last 6 months’ cataloging of my experiences in culinary school, I will be bringing this blog back to its roots in food and travel.  I’ve just come back from a trip.

After I finished my externship, I graduated from culinary school, and then I went to what felt like the complete other side of the world, and back in time.  If you’ve been following along you’ll know that as part of my culinary school training, I spent two months in a restaurant serving modern cuisine with Moroccan roots.  It is fantastic food and was a great experience, but I left still in search of the perfect tagine, and couscous made the way it has been for centuries.  So I flew to Morocco.

From the first glimpse from the airplane (above) to my adventure with a camel (dromedary to be precise, as the one-humped species are correctly named), it was one of the most interesting and different destinations I have had the privilege to visit.

My camel, sporting the red saddle, was comically named Shakira.  While she gave me a mainly gentle ride, camel riding is not for the timid.  (What was I thinking?) It was a white-knuckled experience, and one which I’ll always remember.  More than my 30 minute ride, I was fascinated to learn more than I had ever hoped to about camels from the tour guide we hired for a day, from Arib Voyages, based in Marrakech.  Our guide, Bachir, was from the nomad tribes of the Sahara, known as “Blue People,” and while his family was forced to settle down and end their nomad lifestyle when Bachir was a child, he still grew up around camels.  He had great affection in his voice as he described how prized camels are to his people.  They are beloved as intelligent animals with personalities, excellent memories, as well as serving as a source of transport and of food (milk and milk products, and occasionally, eaten for their meat, offal, and the gelatinous substance inside their humps).

I’ll leave you with this bit of camel trivia and these images for now, but promise to be back in the near future with more scenes of the places I visited, the architecture, the souks, and of course, the food. Til then,