Spiced eggplant & mint salad w/ goat's cheese
And a series of Moroccan miscalculations
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Spiced eggplant & mint salad w/ goat's cheese
Serves 4-6
There are a few things I will always remember from our trip to Morocco: the pyramids of dried herbs and red spices in every market stall, the gale-force winds in Essaouira, which blew permanently from the ocean, the two days I spent deliriously food-poisoned, watching my husband play Plants vs. Zombies while I muttered incoherently, and sending him out for highly specific snacks that I didn’t eat.
And this salad. This salad was not one of the highly specific snacks I requested, nor was it - thankfully - responsible for the food poisoning (I suspect that was a suspicious tagine, blithely ordered, rapidly consumed and infinitely regretted).
This trip was also the time I watched the first 15 minutes of the movie John Wick. Apparently I’m the only person on earth who didn’t realise the protagonist’s desire for action-packed revenge was motivated by the death of his teeny tiny Jack Russell puppy. About twelve minutes in, I proclaimed out loud ‘I’m not really paying a lot of attention to the plot so far - I’m just enjoying watching the cute puppy run around’. Three minutes later, the puppy was dead and I was hiding underneath a doona, profoundly distraught.
My husband and I then spent the next hour watching inane YouTube videos of (happy and very much alive) Jack Russell puppies, while I continued to sob. I have not watched the remaining 86 minutes of John Wick. I have conscientiously avoided a lot of tagines, and - shockingly - said husband has not suggested we take another overseas holiday together. Happily, though, we have roasted (and enjoyed) a great many spiced eggplants. The takeaway? Never trust a tagine or an action movie that features adorable baby animals. Trust eggplants. Trust saffron, sultanas, slivered almonds and mint.