The New Age (S.A)
Mia McDonald
The giggling gourmet chef, Jenny Morris shows us a world filled with wonder and it’s not just about the food. With her enigmatic and entertaining personality, Morris tells stories and weaves it all into her dishes as she cooks up a Moroccan storm. Local women in Marrakesh treated Morris to a ritual involving burning coals and delightful perfumes, a ritual of acknowledgement. Women perform these rituals to unite and purify themselves – while smelling good, of course.
The Moroccan culture is a male dominated one; here, the role of women is to stay at home, nurture the family and weave carpets. Morris, a woman from Cape Town, with a personality as big as Table Mountain, mingles with the locals and draws her audience into the sights, sounds and smells of Marrakesh.
She walks through the local souks – marketplaces – where gypsies and snake charmers fill the space with fortune telling and magic between the seasonal fresh produce on sale. Ten fun-filled episodes document Morris’s exciting journey and the audience gets a chance to travel with her, as she laps up Moroccan recipes, gives the local cuisine her own twist and feeds it back to the locals. The men and women of Morocco fall in love with Morris’s cooking as she cooks for the local stallholders while they are busy cooking for their customers.
Morocco is filled with fresh herbs. Coriander and saffron abound, in fact Morris discovered a hilltop of thyme, and talks about the beauty of this hill as it was enveloped in afternoon sunlight.
Morris learned how to make her own couscous from the locals, it’s steamed three times from flour semolina, and she says it’s easier than what you’d expect it to be. Putting her own spin on traditional couscous, Morris makes a sweet couscous omelette and offers it as a dessert to some local women. She infuses this exotic dish with almonds for extra texture and orange water for flavour. The local women devoured this omelette, they shared it among themselves, Morris says, “Moroccans are all about sharing and are exceptionally generous.” Everybody gets to taste this deliciousness; the sweet joys of existence are spread. Even if sharing makes the portions smaller, sharing is part of the pleasure of Moroccan culture.
With Morris as the host of the show, there is charisma and humour, as she describes her “Happy, humpy days, riding camels,” with poignant irony, “I’ll never do it again, really not meant for girls.”
A stunning soundtrack accompanies Morris, as she enters the town of Marrakesh and checks out the hidden gems of Morocco. She meets a modest trader with 15000 handwoven carpets in his shop, each one of them unique. The raw and rustic, mysterious energies of a land that’s filled with ethnic diversities, Arab-Berber making up the biggest part of the pie, it’s also home to French and Spanish foreign residents and has a Jewish minority.
As Morris discovers the Sahara desert and the nomads, her faith is restored when she learns that there are children who travel through the desert to go to school. One day, a blind man follows Morris through the souk because he smells the delicious dishes she cooks up; she rewards the stranger’s curiosity by giving him a taste of her version of Moroccan spiced chicken with olives.
Morris travels a donkey path to a hotel that women have built with their bare hands. She gathers wild honey from beehives. On this day the bees go wild and she gets stung. She also makes a fresh lemon preserve, layering textures and flavours.
Shot on location in Morocco, don’t miss it.
• Jenny Cooks Morocco begins with a double episode on Monday July 16, on DStv 185 at 8.10pm, with a repeat every day at 3.30pm and 8.10pm
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