Morocco via Marseilles

It's not a big secret that I love the food of North Africa; at the restaurant, my tasting menus often included dishes from or in homage to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. I find the use of spices fascinating and second only in the world to Indian cooking, another love of mine. North African cuisine also relies heavily on my favorite style of cooking, the braise, in the form of its ubiquitous tagines. Tagines are stews, essentially, cooked in the flat earthenware dish with the conical lid which gave its name to the dish.

Ann and Michelle

And I am a big student and lover of French provincial cooking, the more rustic dishes of the countryside versus the haute cuisine of Paris and the Michelin-starred restaurants. Provence, as a region, really excites my palate with its broadly Mediterranean cuisine, a far cry from the more pan-European cuisine of Paris and the north. I have fond memories of eating exciting and for me at the time, novel, dishes in Aix, Nice, Cassis, and Marseille.

What do these two regions on opposite sides of the bright sunny blue Mediterranean have to do with each other? A lot, as it turns out. People and their food have been coming and going across the water from continent to continent for millennia. And as people and cultures have mixed, each side of the sea has influenced the other in innumerable ways. The second language of the North African nations is French and the second cuisine of the south of France is North African, interpreted through the French lens. Highly spiced tajines, for example, are widespread along the Mediterranean coast of France.

I am always truly fascinated how distinct cuisines meet across political boundaries to inform each other. Think of Tex-Mex or the Polish influence in Pittsburgh and the Rust Belt. The mixing of African and French cooking to form une cuisine afro-française delights me.

We had new friends Andreas and Michelle over for dinner last evening and in the process of brainstorming the menu, Ann was pushing in the Moroccan direction. This naturally had me thinking of a tajine. And then I remembered a subtly spiced chicken tajine that I had once in Provence spiced merely with cumin, garlic, and olives. I would make a version of this tajine but naturally, I would make it my own, adding both saffron and preserved lemons to the dish in my food memory for a subtle, yet complex dish.

What to serve with a tajine? Well, naturally, one would make a very plain couscous to soak up all the delicious braising juices. But a dietary restriction precluded any gluten in the dinner. Ann suggested (she's very good at helping me to focus in my menu-making) panisse, the delightful chickpea French fry replacements from Marseille, the major French port on the Med. Why not panisse? It and other chickpea flour dishes (such as socca from Nice) are so common to Provence though they are likely to originate from another close neighbor, Italy.

That left one more dish for the menu, a side salad. Chopped tomato salads are common across the entire Mediterranean from North Africa to the Levant and back through Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, and France. Everyone has a simple salad of chopped tomatoes simply dressed. I thought to make a Moroccan version spiced with cumin until a sachet of fennel pollen arrived in the mail the afternoon of our dinner. Fennel pollen would make a tremendous substitute for cumin. And with that, the menu was largely set: panisses, tomato salad, and chicken and olive tajine.

Any time we have people over for dinner for the first time, I like to set a menu of dishes that I can execute in advance so that I can spend my time socializing rather than cooking. We save guest participation dinners for those who like to cook for future gatherings. However, Ann conveyed to me that Andreas was really into cooking or at least seeing some cooking, to pick the mind of a chef, and so Ann and I did minimal prep beforehand and left much of the actual cooking for after Andreas and Michelle arrived.

Cooking Chickpea Flour for Panisses

Bartender Annie Pre-Mixing a Batch of  Cocktails

About a week before the dinner, I started the process of preserving a lemon, cutting it into lengthwise quarters, coating it in salt mixed with a touch of cinnamon and thyme, and covering the whole with some kalamata olive brine (rather than lemon juice). I used to keep big batches of preserved lemons in the refrigerator, but they take up too much space, so now I just make them to order. They will cure fairly well in a week on the counter, but two weeks is better.

As an aside, we used to make preserved lemons (and dozens of other pickles) in huge containers at the restaurant and pray that the health inspector would not come in during the two-week period that we left them on the counter before refrigerating them. Health inspectors are notoriously bad at overlooking food items that are traditionally not refrigerated: butter, eggs, cured hams, cheeses, and all manner of pickles including sauerkraut and preserved lemons.

Also, I made a batch of harissa, the super spicy chile and spice paste that is ever so common in North Africa, especially Tunisia. I did not know when I made the batch what I would use it for other than as a condiment to accompany the tajine. I have made my own harissa for so long now that I can barely remember the process of reading through recipes for it and trying a bunch of commercial versions to come up with my own version.

One thing I don't like in a lot of commercial versions is a dependence on tomatoes or tomato paste in the sauce. If it's supposed to be a chile sauce, why use tomato as a filler? And so my version came over time to be a mixture of crushed red ripe jalapeños (easily available in the US), smoked paprika, spicy Hungarian paprika, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, a pinch of cinnamon, and spices. For my spices, I add texture to the sauce by leaving half of the spices whole. My spices include roughly equal parts of fennel, caraway, and cumin. The whole spices soften after about a week while all the flavors marry in the refrigerator. In my not so humble opinion, my harissa beats any that I have ever tasted.

Later in the week when talking with Ann about the menu, she clarified for me that her idea was to serve the panisse as a first course rather than as a couscous replacement with the main course. I loved that and immediately thought that we needed a dipping sauce for the crunchy sticks of cooked chickpea flour. Out of seemingly nowhere, the idea of harissa aïoli jumped into my mind and so the sauce issue and how I would use the harissa were settled.

Early yesterday morning, I ground a bunch of cumin and chopped a lot of garlic which I mixed with olive oil to make a paste. I then rubbed this paste into a batch of chicken thighs and put them in the refrigerator to marinate all day until needed at dinner time. Next, I pounded out a couple of cloves of garlic into a paste in my big green granite mortar and made a batch of plain aïoli that I flavored with a bunch of harissa to give a spicy sauce the color of Russian dressing.

After that, I made a batch of batter for the panisses by whisking water, salt, and olive oil into chickpea flour, bringing it a boil while stirring, then cooking over low heat while stirring constantly for ten minutes. Finally, I would spread the super thick batter into a greased dish to cool to room temperature on the counter. My basic recipe is roughly 250g of chickpea flour to a liter of water with a teaspoon of Kosher salt and a drizzle of olive oil. This is the perfect amount to put into a 9"x9" brownie pan.

In the afternoon, Ann mixed up a bunch of her Oaxacan Old Fashioneds (reposado tequila, mezcal, bitters, and agave nectar). She also rimmed four coupes with smoked salt, meaning that all she had to do when Andreas and Michelle arrived was to chill the drinks and strain into the cups. 

Panisse with Harissa Aïoli

When our guests arrived, I fired two frying pans on the cooktop, one for browning the chicken and one for frying the panisse. While the first batch of chicken was browning, I flipped the panisse cake onto my cutting board and cut it into fingers which Andreas and I fried in olive oil to crispy goodness.

While everyone was enjoying dipping these crunchy fingers into the spicy aïoli, I drained the excess oil from the chicken pan and added diced onion, preserved lemon, and saffron. The onions cooked until translucent at which point I added both green and black olives, both pitted, and moistened the mixture with a bit of chicken stock. Once the sauce was boiling rapidly, I poured it over the chicken which went into a 400F oven, covered, until the chicken was tender, about an hour.

Star of the Show: Tomato Salad

Between sips of wine and while the chicken was cooking, I made a quick tomato salad. It is so hard to get decent tomatoes in this part of Oregon, so I rely on grape tomatoes year round. They aren't awesome, but they aren't bad either. After splitting the tomatoes in half, I minced a quarter of a red onion and a big handful of Italian parsley from the farmers market. These I mixed into the salad with the juice of a lemon, some olive oil, salt, black pepper, and a big sprinkle of fennel pollen.

Fennel pollen is something that I used to use frequently at the restaurant, mainly by sprinkling it over a finished dish. There is something special about a big piece of roasted Striped Bass garnished with a slug of great olive oil, a grating of lemon zest, a sprinkle of coarse salt, and a sprinkle of fennel pollen.

Fennel pollen is exactly what it sounds, the dried pollen from fennel plants created by harvesting fennel blooms, letting them dry, and then shaking them to release the pollen. Fennel pollen is wickedly expensive but its unique and inimitable flavor makes it so worth the price. And a very little goes a long way as it is extremely flavorful. At first taste, the flavor is clearly of fennel, like fennel seed. But unlike fennel seed, the flavor is stronger, deeper, richer and finishes with a delightful fruitiness. Get you some today and play with it. You are guaranteed to fall in love with it as much as Ann and I have.

I had not set out to create a salad that would upstage every other thing that we ate or drank, but that was the happy result of substituting fennel pollen for cumin. Everyone was blown away by this simple salad. I will never forget it. The combination of fennel pollen and tomatoes yields a result that is far, far greater than the sum of the two parts. Happy, happy belly!

Chicken and Olive Tagine

Once the chicken was tender, I pulled it out of the oven and placed it on the stovetop where I boiled it rapidly to evaporate and concentrate the braising liquid. The result as you see in the photo above was as delicious as it was simple. To recap, the chicken was marinated in cumin and garlic, browned, and mixed with onions cooked in olive oil with saffron and preserved lemon to which I added green and black olives and chicken stock.

Ann, Andreas, Michelle