World in One City goes to Morocco

For this week's World In One City - Robyn was delighted to receive the following email:

"Hi Robyn! We would love to participate in the series "World in One City". We are Karim and Karen Zarrouki. Karim is from Morocco, and Karen is from Ottawa. We have a great story of how we met in France. We would prepare you a wonderful Moroccan meal. Karim is a fabulous cook-can turn any cut of meat into a delicious tagine-and Karen is a great talker (and can turn out a mean couscous, too!). We invite you into our Moroccan-Canadian kitchen for some fun and great food.

And with that, Robyn drove out to Barrhaven to meet the Zarrouki family and got to know them in the comfort of their kitchen.

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Here's their recipe for chicken tagine:

Preparation 15/20mn

cooking time 45mn.

Difficulty: chef must like chopping ingredients

Ingredients

· 1 chicken (cut into chunks)

· 1 onion (finely chopped)

· 1 large preserved lemon

· purple or green olives ( 200g)

· 4 garlic cloves (finely chopped)

· ½ cup parsley (finely chopped)

· ½ cilantro (finely chopped)

· ½ cup olive oil

· 1 teaspoon smen / ghee (clarified butter) ( optional)

· 1 ½ teaspoon black pepper

· 1 ½ teaspoon ginger powder

· 1 teaspoon turmeric

· A pinch of saffron threads

Preparation:

Cut the preserved lemon into quarters and separate the flesh from the skin. Keep the skin whole as we are going to use it later on for decoration.

Remove the pulp from the skin, and finely chop pulp

Peel and finely chop the garlic cloves.

Finely chop the cilantro and parsley. Place the preserved lemon pulp, garlic, parsley and cilantro in a bowl. Add the spices, olive oil, and water. Mix well.

Add the clarified butter (Optional). Mix well.