It is fascinating to do something, anything, with full awareness and presence. One of the places where I get to be fully present is my kitchen, wherever it may be. Recently, while at a supermarket in Warsaw, I fell under the charm of pomegranates imported from Tunisia, my husband’s country of origin. Well, one of his countries of origin; he has three for sure, and we suspect there may be more.

Buying pomegranates is one thing; peeling them is another. After admiring the three fruits on my dining table for a couple of days, I decided to take the bull by the horns. Since the work is messy, I peeled them all at once. The seeds keep well in the fridge for several days.

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Armed with a cutting board and my favorite big knife, I chopped off the hairy crown and the bottom, praying like a new surgeon that I hadn’t removed too much healthy tissue. For better control over the three lengthwise incisions that followed, I switched to a smaller knife. They had to be just deep enough to cut through the thick skin without damaging the inside, so I followed the white ridges down the sides, barely through the skin, and let the fruit tell me where it wanted to open.

This is when I realized something about the way the pomegranate likes to be handled. You can’t be too firm, and you can’t be too soft. When I pressed my thumbs into the seam and pulled too eagerly, the arils burst and the juice ran down my wrist, staining the cuff of my sleeve a color that will not wash out. When I held back too much, the sections stayed locked, the seeds clinging to their pale pith like a child clinging to his parents on the first day of school.

The pomegranate teaches you the middle ground, a dance of soft and firm: firm enough to part the chambers, gentle enough that each seed comes away whole and glowing like a small ruby. I was told there is an easier and faster way to peel a pomegranate and skip the mess, but in doing so, you also skip the meditation and the chance to be fully present. And when you’re fully present, it’s also fun. Eckhart Tolle would call this being aware of your awareness.

There is something meditative in choosing the slower way. In a life that constantly pushes me toward efficiency, the pomegranate asks me to do the opposite, to slow down so I can feel the subtle resistance of the rind under my thumbs, and to notice the moment the section yields without breaking. Each intact seed feels like a tiny victory against haste.

I won’t search for the fast method online, though there are many videos. I want to stay amazed at how the brain fine-tunes pressure, seed after seed, before I have even thought about it. As more juice ran down my wrist like blood (pomegranates are dramatic), I thought of how far these seeds had traveled.

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The pomegranate began in the dry hills of ancient Persia, where it grew wild long before anyone called it a superfood. To this day in Iran, some artisans use the rind as a natural dye for the wool of carpets, its tannins yielding rich yellows, soft browns, and, with iron, deep greys. Anar, as it is called in Farsi, needs little water and a great deal of sun, so it traveled well. Merchants carried it east toward China and west along the Mediterranean. The Egyptians placed it in their tombs so the dead would have something sweet for the journey.

The Romans called it malum punicum, the Punic apple, because they knew it from Carthage. See, we’re back to Tunisia again. Its Latin name became pomum granatum, the seeded apple. In Arabic we call it rumman, رمان.

The Moors planted it across Andalusia. The city of Granada, whose name means pomegranate in Spanish, still carries a split pomegranate on its coat of arms.

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From Spain the fruit crossed the ocean in the sixteenth century. In Mexico, where I lived for six years, it arrives in the local markets at the end of summer, just in time for chiles en nogada: green poblano peppers stuffed with ground meat, nuts, and dried fruits, covered in a white walnut sauce, and topped with pomegranate seeds. There is no proper celebration of Mexico’s Independence Day on September 16 without this traditional dish. It’s fascinating how a fruit born in Persia finds its place on a Mexican plate in the colors of the flag.

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In eighth-century Córdoba, Abd al-Rahman I, an Umayyad prince who had fled Damascus, planted a garden he called al-Rusafa, in the style of the Syria he had lost. He was a poet as well as an emir, and he collected fruits and seeds from the East. One of his envoys, a man named Safr, brought him a pomegranate from Syria, and the variety that grew from it was called safari after him. In the same garden the emir wrote a poem to a lone palm tree, a stranger in the West like himself, far from the land where it was born.

A palm tree appeared before us in the heart of Rusafa,
Cast far into the Western lands, away from the country of palms.
I said: You are my twin in exile and estrangement,
And in the endless distance from my beloved ones.
You grew up in a soil where you are a stranger,
And just like you, in banishment and isolation, am I.

Ode to the Palm Tree, by Prince Abd al-Rahman I. 
Translated by Sanaa Boutayeb.

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For centuries, different kitchens have asked the very same fruit to carry their shared hopes of life, abundance, fertility, and love.

At Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, families eat pomegranates, wishing that their good deeds will be as numerous as its seeds, while on Yalda Night, the Iranian winter solstice celebration, families place the fruit at the center of the table to welcome the return of light with promises of life and renewal.

The magical symbolism of the pomegranate also extends into the home’s most important moments. In Armenia, a bride traditionally throws a ripe pomegranate against the wall so the scattered seeds might foretell the number of her future children. In Türkiye, families smash one on their doorstep at midnight on New Year’s Eve, hoping a year’s worth of good luck will spill into the house.

Though the languages and rituals change, the wish is the same: more life, and more love.

No story of the pomegranate is complete without the Greeks, even though theirs is darker. It is said that Persephone, goddess of spring, was kidnapped by Hades, king of the Underworld. Her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest, was so heartbroken that she stopped all plants from growing, and the first winter fell upon the earth. Zeus ordered Hades to release her, but Hades tricked Persephone into eating a few pomegranate seeds, and those few seeds bound her to the Underworld.

A bargain was struck: she would spend the dark months as Hades’s queen and return to her mother every spring. Thus the seasons were born, death and rebirth held in the same fruit.

Go ahead, cut one open with full awareness, and marvel, as so many have before you, at the hundreds of seeds sitting in separate chambers, divided by thin white walls, all held together by one leathery skin.

With love & gratitude,

Sanaa 💛🌴

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There are two situations in life that wake every sense at once.

One is cooking without a recipe. The other is landing in a country whose language you do not speak. In both, you will find that your eyes sharpen and your nose goes to work. In The Experience Machine, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark describes the brain as a prediction engine. It lives by guessing what comes next. When the world surprises it, every sense turns up to listen.

You listen past the words and the instructions, to what moves underneath. Sometimes it’s the sizzle that announces the heat is right, and sometimes it’s the silence that tells you the energy in the room has changed.

You watch color, texture, expression. You taste, you adjust, you read what is in front of you with the whole body instead of the mind. I have cooked without a recipe and landed without a language more times than I can count. Both ask for the same skill. Sensing your environment becomes your best friend.

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Fresh off the Plane

I cannot remember the date of my last holiday travel, but I do remember every date I moved in or out of a country. They feel like a collection of tattoos in my mind.

May 7, 1994, is one of the most memorable dates for me. I landed in Washington, D.C., alone like a big girl. I was nineteen, not yet twenty, and I had never been this far from home. The Madison Hall dormitory on 22nd Street smelled of strange fresh paint. God knows I had smelled fresh paint back home, but not like this. No, this one smelled like a sharp synthetic assault that coated the back of my throat and made me feel nauseous.

Outside, the trees and plants around campus gave off a sour, vinegar-like smell that turned my stomach. I later learned it was a type of heavily treated hardwood mulch, nothing like the sweet, resinous pine bark I would one day encounter in Poland.

From the shared kitchen down the hall drifted something industrial and reheated. Ready-made meals in five minutes, I would eventually understand. Smells I had no names for and no memories to attach them to. My nose had spent nineteen years building an archive, and none of it was useful here.

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Red Bricks and Hollywood Sirens

The police sirens cut through the night the way they do in Hollywood movies, which should have been reassuring but wasn’t. They sounded both exciting and scary. Through my window I could see red bricks. A sky that looked like the Moroccan sky yet felt completely different.

That first night I was starving and did not eat. I did not know where to go and was too overwhelmed to find out, so I went to bed hungry, the new smells and sounds nursing me to sleep.

The only thing that made me feel safe was a soft Moroccan blanket (only people who lived in Morocco would know the type I’m talking about here) my high-school friend had given me. Meryem had moved to D.C. a couple of years earlier and welcomed me those first days. Before I headed to the dorms she pressed one of those familiar blankets into my arms. It smelled like home and made me feel like a puppy wrapped in her favorite blanky.

A Smile from Ghana

The next morning I went to the international student office and was greeted by Jackie, a woman from Ghana. I was hungry and homesick. She had a smile so bright and friendly it made me tear up. She took me by the hand, walked me around campus, and led me into the cafeteria.

The stalls of food stretched out in front of me and everything was enormous. I felt intimidated by the portions, the choices, the soda fountains, the large paper cups… I stood there knowing that at some point I was going to make sense of all of it, just not today. Jackie was my first life-saver on campus. I have never forgotten her.

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Emma Thompson with a Twist

Later that day I sat in Ms. Moore’s English as a Foreign Language class and met Takanori from Japan, who quickly became Taka, and Miguel from Peru, who of course became Miguelito. Ms. Moore wore skirts every day, always A-line, paired with the same fuchsia lipstick that left a perfect print on the rim of her water bottle, which she refilled constantly.

She spoke no language except English. At the time it felt like a deprivation; in retrospect, it was the greatest gift she could have given us. She sounded like Emma Thompson with a touch of a U.S. accent. Since none of us could yet rely on our ears, we relied on our eyes. We watched her the way you watch a pan you are not sure about, reading the heat, reading the color, and waiting for the signal that tells you it’s ready.

My English was so basic that when someone asked me “What’s up?” I looked at the ceiling.

When you cannot guess what comes next, you watch everything, and it can be exhausting. By learning to read subtle movements and facial expressions, Ms. Moore was preparing me for a cycle that would play out many times in my future, landing in a new country, completely blank to the language, starting all over again from the eyes up.

The Hand to the Mouth

After class the three of us went to the school cafeteria. The signal was simply a hand raised to the mouth. The universal sign for hungry, which is also, when you are nineteen and far from home, the universal sign for I’m glad you exist.

Three international students from three different continents, navigating a city none of us knew, in a language none of us spoke well enough for anything beyond the classroom.

Between us we had a shared talent for sign language and a hunger that had nothing to do with food. We pointed at things and made faces at each other’s trays. We ate Asian, Mexican, Lebanese, cuisines each of us recognized from different angles. And we laughed a lot, at our mispronunciations, at the blank faces we made when native speakers talked to us. The laughter replaced the missing words.

We went to the movies too. Cinema, we discovered early, is a universal word. Thank God for that.

Cooking by Heart

Years later, life carried me back to D.C., this time as a new mother, cooking Moroccan food in the tiniest kitchen, the baby bottles and the sterilizer taking most of the counter. I was making kefta tagine, a dish that has no fixed recipe because the meat is different each time, the tomatoes more or less ripe, the spices fine-tuned by the color, and the salt adjusted by taste alone. I used to call my mother mid-cook to compare notes. Talking food with her was the best break from the difficult family conversations.

That evening I realized I hadn’t called her yet and didn’t need to. My hands knew what they were doing. I did call her afterwards, just to chat, and it was a different kind of conversation entirely.

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Gracias for Now

Not long after, I moved to the Dominican Republic with a one-year-old on my hip and approximately one word of Spanish. Gracias. Dominicans are generous people, and they made me feel welcome in a language I did not yet speak.

I learned Dominican Spanish the way you learn to cook without a recipe. I was not afraid to make mistakes, and embarrass myself with wrong conjugations and mixed-up genders. Él instead of ella. El instead of la. Every error was a way of saying I am trying and I will get there someday.

I knew I had arrived when I lost my cool at a supermarket cashier who refused to recognize my foreign ID while my toddler was falling asleep in my arms. The argument that came out of my mouth was in broken Dominican Spanish, but it worked.

Dinner and a History Class

In Belgrade I met Kasia, a Polish woman, at a friend’s house. She was the first person who knew I was moving to Warsaw. She invited me over and made me pierogi, some with potato and some with meat.

The dough she made was thin, firm on the outside, soft and yielding inside, each one a small perfect parcel. While she folded the pierogi she told me about Poland. How the country was partitioned three times in the late eighteenth century and ceased to exist as a sovereign state for 123 years, divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795, surviving only in its language and its kitchens, until the republic was restored in 1918.

Can I give some homemade apple compote to your children? she asked. The French speaker in me guessed jam. She served them compote while she talked, a cooked-fruit drink that Polish children grow up with, and mentioned that as a child she was also given kvas, a fermented bread drink that my teenage son now loves. I sat at her table and ate pierogi and thought about all the times a kitchen had been the place where history was kept. Where a people who had lost their land and their name on the map kept themselves alive through what they cooked.

The Food Words First

Poland would be different, I decided. After thirty years of jumping off language cliffs, I was going to give myself permission to skip one. Polish has more accents, dots, tails and slashed letters than French, and that felt like too much for me.

Polish is a Slavic language of extraordinary complexity, a language that seems designed to test your commitment before it lets you in. I was settling again in a new country and deep into writing my cookbook. Then my own curiosity overruled me, as it always does. I decided I would learn the food words because food is the first language.

I started in the kitchen, the way I always do, in every country and in every life I have assembled from scratch.

The first word I learned to spell properly was pierogi. The second was chłodnik (there goes the slashed letter), a cold beet soup in shocking pink that screams I’m healthy and delicious. I saw it in a bowl at a restaurant in Warsaw and knew I was going to love it. My eyes had already guessed the taste. wrote about it and you can find her recipe here.

Every new country eventually becomes a place where you cook without thinking. The language still surprises you, the street signs still take a moment, but the kitchen settles first. It always does.

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Never Cooking Alone

Cooking without a recipe comes from a body that has learned to read. Years of meals have taught it to guess well. Every dish you have ever tasted or learned from a friend, every correction your mother ever made, every mistake you adjusted mid-pan, all of it lives in your hands and your nose and the back of your throat.

You are never cooking alone. You are cooking with everyone who ever fed you. And it turns out the body reads a room the same way it reads a sauce.

Taka, Miguelito, and I have managed to stay in touch after all these years and have been trying to organize a reunion with great excitement and no fixed date. The intention is there, and when it happens, I want it to be in Essaouira.

I want them to arrive at my house near the sea and smell the salt air and the rosemary and whatever is growing in the garden. I want their families there, sitting around a long table. I won’t plan the menu in advance. I will go to the market and let it surprise us. Something with fish, to honor the Peruvian and Japanese cuisines. We always met in food and we’ve been doing it this way since the school cafeteria.

With love and gratitude,

Sanaa 💛🌴

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We rarely realize how everyday cooking is a dance with physics. When we heat a clay tagine or a cazuela we are manipulating thermal energy. When we reduce a sauce, we are watching a phase transition from liquid to vapor. Even a pinch of salt dissolving into broth relies on molecular diffusion. My teenagers already know the last two scientific concepts, though they also believe a fairy with a magic wand will clean up after them.

For those of us who love to cook, the kitchen is our first personal laboratory. It is the place where we learn that changing the environment changes the physical state of matter. Of course, many of our early kitchen experiments have less to do with science and more to do with pure chaos.

Who hasn’t turned the burner to maximum, hoping the dish will cook ten times faster, only to end up with something charred on the outside and raw in the center?

Physics has its own laws and does not care about human impatience. It demands respect and timing, and yes, I’m as guilty as the next person for wanting to defy them now and then.

Classical physics explains why we keep burning the garlic. A subtler physics of mind and spirit explains how food, and the memories it carries, can transform the person who eats it.

In quantum mechanics there is a fascinating phenomenon called entanglement. It happens when two particles remain so connected that the state of one is bound to the other, no matter the distance between them.

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The Sufi tradition has long described a spiritual equivalent known as Tay al-Ard, the mystical folding of space. It is the capacity to collapse enormous distances in a single heartbeat, pulling two separate points together the way you and I fold a kitchen towel while also talking on the phone. Physics and mysticism, each in their own sauce, describe the collapse of distance.

But what collapses most powerfully in our human experience is not space. It’s time.

Life is supposed to move only forward, yet the mind keeps its own rules. Every so often an unexpected echo from the past arrives, a fragment of an old, unfinished story that suddenly resurfaces.

The sensory magic of the kitchen makes this far more vivid than any talk of abstract particles.

The fine mist of orange-blossom water over a dessert, or the warm aromatic steam of ginger and cinnamon rising from a slow-simmering tagine - these scents are anchors of time. The moment the fragrance reaches you, twenty years can fold shut. You feel briefly reconnected with an earlier version of yourself, almost breathing the same air as the memory.

The great Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi understood this connection deeply. He often turned to the kitchen, using the acts of cooking and eating as metaphors for the journey of the soul.

In The Masnavi, a 13th-century collection of Sufi poems about divine love, Rumi tells the story of a chickpea trying to jump out of the boiling pot. The cook pushes it back down with a spoon and conveys that the boiling is how the chickpea becomes something more, soft enough to be mixed into rice and nourish someone.

The chickpea protests. Who wouldn’t? It remembers softer days in the garden and doesn’t understand what is happening. The cook explains that those days were only preparation for this moment. Eventually the chickpea stops fighting the heat and asks to be boiled more. It admits it cannot do it alone. That is when the cook reveals: “I was a chickpea once too. I boiled long before you did. That is how I became the one holding the spoon.”

The chickpea’s eventual trust and consent is the point.

Growth arrives when we stop leaping backward toward earlier gardens and stay in the present boil long enough to be transformed. That lesson is easy to accept in a story about a chickpea. It is harder when the pull backward is not a metaphor.

Who hasn’t received a message from an old friend or an ex out of nowhere? A name that suddenly appears on the screen after years of silence? Most of us know this feeling. For a split second, time collapses and the years fold. The old familiarity rises again, carrying with it whatever was left unresolved.

When major change arrives in our current lives, the temptation to run backward into history can be strong. Our monkey mind has the amazing capacity to offer reasons to do so (shared history, casual curiosity) just to see whether the old fires can still be stoked.

But that is often the spiritual equivalent of walking into a kitchen and trying to feast on a meal that has long been consumed. What remains is only the ghost of what once was. Returning sometimes requires us to abandon the person we have become in the meantime.

The true test of growth is the capacity to honor the past without trying to live in it.

In the art of cooking, a meaningful creation requires niyya. That is pure, conscious intention grounded in the present moment. It usually comes with effort and patience. Niyya is what our nafas (our soul) is made of, a topic I explored in an earlier piece, The World’s Best Chocolate Cake? A Story of Nafas, Altitude, and Love.

The past is a precious spice to keep on the shelf of the mind. But the kitchen of a sovereign soul only serves what is made fresh today.

Growth requires trusting and consenting to the present fire. Sensory memories and old, unresolved relationships can fold time and briefly return us to earlier versions of ourselves, but those returns are ghosts. They cannot nourish the person we are now.

Real transformation, like the chickpea becoming food, happens only through patient, intentional work in the kitchen of the present moment.

Let us honor the aroma of what once was and have the courage to cook what is.

With love and chickpeas 💛

Sanaa

For the curious minds:

If you’re interested in a cookbook that features the actual historical and spiritual dishes of Rumi’s time, look for Sufi Cuisine by Nevin Halıcı. The book compiles over 100 recipes inspired by 13th-century Mevlevi Sufi practices and Rumi’s poetry. It includes historical dishes like chickpea soup, lamb served with plums and sweet spinach, and traditional snow helva.

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Imagine you’re new at parenting and decide to get into a field that’s totally new to you: agriculture. While at it, you also decide to trade city life in Germany for the countryside in Mallorca.

That’s what a Spanish-German couple did, settling into parenthood with two toddlers just as they were starting out as farmers. Luckily, both require dedication and patience.

The finca (farm) sits tucked in a valley just outside the village of Alaró, at the foot of the Tramuntana mountains. Across three hectares, the couple has spent years slowly bringing the land back to life: rebuilding the soil, planting trees, and coaxing back a biodiversity that takes patience and passion to grow.

The trámites (bureaucracy and paperwork) required to build their tiny greenhouse took a couple of years to sort out, probably much longer than the time an oil drilling company needs to get permits to start sucking out the black gold.

“We knew nothing about farming, permaculture, or regenerative agriculture,” Giuliano, the owner, told us while pouring freshly made mandarin lemonade and laughing about it now. Five years later, what was once neglected ground has become a gathering place, where meals stretch for hours and conversation flows on its own.

A friend, , a name well known in luxury travel circles based in Mallorca, arranged the lunch. You don’t think twice when Sarah suggests a place. The meal we had under the trees with our families beats a fancy restaurant any day. I didn’t want the day to end.

There is something almost spiritual about a meal made straight from the garden, no fuss, no sense that the chef has gone through Cirque du Soleil training to prepare it.

We started with warm focaccia, made by a local French baker who mills his own flour and leavens it with masa madre, paired with honey butter. Then a fish rillette with pickled zucchini and fermented cabbage, followed by a farm salad pulled straight from the beds we’d just walked past.

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Then came serviola with tomatillo, jalapeño, and herbs, and amberjack with tomato salsa, alongside a carrot and lentil purée. All the fish is sourced from a local fishmonger and tastes of the Mediterranean sea.

We concluded with an olive oil cake topped with goat cheese mascarpone and roasted peaches that melt in your mouth. Every dish had the right balance between beauty and taste.

I loved the elegance and simplicity of the linen tablecloth, the flower arrangement, even the plates, made by a local pottery maker.

Seeing butterflies, birds, and bees join the party makes the owners happy. I know that feeling. Giuliano and his family grow enough to feed themselves and to sell, and the wine is their own. I had to ask about the name.

Solu, it turns out, comes from the first two letters of each daughter’s name, Sophia and Luna, the same two toddlers who once knew nothing about farming either and are now selling homemade lemonade to visitors.

Watching my friends’ children run through the vegetable beds where our lunch had just come from reminded me of what my grandfather used to say: when you love the land, the land loves you back.

After going through a couple of months of organizing two relocations, I thought I should write one mini post before taking a break from writing. I'll be off this summer and will resume in September.

To all of you who read and share my posts, thank you. And to my paid subscribers and my Founding Palm Keepers, this space grows because you tend to it. Merci!

May your summer be peaceful. 💛🌴

Sanaa

Summer reading (and rereading):

• A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle

• Eva Luna, Isabel Allende

• Princesse Bari, Hwang Sok-yong

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You would think spending a week in Morocco with learning about food writing would make me jump back to my desk and write about food. Well, it did that too. But the mind is mysterious and likes to take what it learned and use it however it wants, whenever it wants. I surely didn’t ask it to write an unusual recipe while sleeping. It did it anyway, at 1:30 in the morning.

Leaving the little village last Friday at the crack of dawn felt like a heavy, weeping transition.

I finished packing while crying at five in the morning before leaving my stone house. By evening, the ocean with its dunes and breathtaking sunsets were replaced by the quiet architecture of Warsaw.

Unpacking my suitcase of garden herbs, vegetables, and gifted olive oil from my family on the kitchen counter felt like an emotional triage. It is my usual Moroccan takeaway; the one I carry with me like a band aid meant to cover a fresh wound. Physically, my feet were on Polish soil, but my heart remained in Essaouira.

That bittersweet feeling always happens after I leave the little village I adopted as my home. Its simplicity never fails to hook deep into my soul. The nursing sound of the Atlantic Ocean at night and the intense wind, both conspire to whisper the mysteries of life to me when I take the time to listen. And I always do.

I had just spent six days with Dianne and a group of women who flew across the ocean to find their narrative rhythm and learn food writing from her.

They were well-traveled, accomplished, each carrying her own feminine energy into the yoga room. Our classes took place in a beautiful, ocean-view yoga space raised above the ground on pilotis. I was the retreat organizer, but during the classes, I was also a student.

On one of the mornings, during a writing exercise, some of us expressed grief. The room felt it, and after that we were no longer strangers who had just met. That is what writing from the heart does when you let it. It’s ok to feel vulnerable.

Dianne said something during the workshop I am still digesting. She emphasized that a literary voice must be unmistakably identifiable as belonging to you. Authentic, with the exact shape of your personality on the page. People don’t just want your technical formulas or standard recipes, she told us. They want to understand the human behind the creation. They want to know exactly who you are.

My mind liked the voice lesson so much it decided to use it for something else.

Two days after I landed in Warsaw, I woke up around 1:30am from a dream and reached for my phone to write it down. I do that sometimes after a vivid dream but this was the first time I dreamed about a recipe. Not for food but for love.

The bedroom was pitch black, and the light on my nightstand wasn’t plugged in (somebody unplugged it while I was away), so I wrote entirely in the dark. Warsaw felt perfectly quiet outside, as I typed it out half asleep into the glowing screen before it could disappear. That is the beauty of catching a dream. I needed to capture it before my monkey mind decides it’s illogical, sometimes even crazy. The true magic of dreams is that they feel surreal. There was no room for hesitation or embarrassment; it felt like the most honestly raw text I had written in weeks.

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Dianne taught us the exact anatomy of a recipe: headnote, yield, equipment, ingredients, and method. Viewed analytically, it sounds clinical and precise. But when approached with the human soul, that rigid structure transforms into something else entirely. It becomes a perfect framework for telling your story. The headnote is the emotional space where you live. The ingredients are the raw qualities you bring to the table. The method is what you choose to do with all of it.

My sleeping mind, apparently, had been paying close attention to Dianne’s anatomy of a recipe class. What poured onto the screen at 1:30 AM was this:

How to write a recipe for love

There are as many recipes for love as there are humans on this planet. This one came to me in a dream. Feel free to adapt it to your own heart. The ingredients listed are the ones I consider essential, but you may add. Do not subtract. Patience is not optional here. And the most important ingredient, the one that makes everything else work, is you.

Yield: One life, well-lived. Possibly more.

Equipment: An open heart. A willingness to play. Lots of patience.

Ingredients:

One generous cup of passion

One cup of respect, non-negotiable

Three tablespoons of curiosity, do not substitute

A pinch of salt, because nothing real is entirely sweet

Silence, to taste

Method:

1. Cleanse your heart before you begin. And your intentions too.

2. Meditate on what you are making and why.

3. Observe before you stir. Not everything needs to be touched immediately. Some elements are meant to be set aside for a while.

4. Ask yourself if you are adding an ingredient because it serves the recipe, or because you are afraid of what it tastes like without it.

5. Be open to the moment when it becomes something you didn’t plan.

6. Keep believing, even when the heart resists. It usually opens.

7. Follow what your soul already knows.

I read it back in the morning after a cup of coffee as if a stranger wrote it. I laughed but I owned it.

The paradox of a recipe is that it asks you to have the right ingredients and be generous at the same time. For love, you must know yourself well enough to set your boundaries and trust the process enough to let it transform into something beautiful.

Dianne was right about the voice. It has to be yours. And I think the reason mine came out at 1:30 AM, in a dream, is that voices don’t perform when you’re asleep. They don’t have time to slip into a mask. They come out raw.

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Among all the exercises, La Madeleine de Proust was my favorite.

The task was simple: eat a cookie slowly, notice its texture, its taste, its smell. Then write freely — whatever comes. Memory, emotion, association. No filter.

We needed a traditional cookie for the exercise. We used Ghriba.

For those not familiar with this strange sounding cookie name, Ghriba, vaguely translates to “the stranger.” It earned its name because it enters the oven looking plain and unpolished, yet it comes out smiling and delightful.

My Take on La Madeleine de Proust Exercise:

Ghriba has long ceased to be a stranger for as far as I can recall. She, because everything has a gender, in both Arabic and French, holds no secret for me anymore. Her round shape, her cracked crown, the way she sounds when she breaks. I know all of it. Yet every time I taste one, it feels like the first time.

The first bite feels like a first kiss, butterflies and all. The second bite is still surprising. By the third, it feels like two lovers who are completely familiar and still not finished with each other. That is the Ghriba’s particular power: the excitement of a first kiss, first touch, arriving again and again.

Sometimes she lets herself melt at the first contact with my mouth, smooth as silk. Other times she is fragile, shattering before you expect it. And other times still she holds her shape, rough at the edges, demanding to be tamed, but always delightful.

Ghriba, the one I grew up with, is made of flour, butter, sugar, sesame seeds, and almost nothing else. Its minimalism is the point. You would not think, looking at the sparse ingredients on the counter, that anything remarkable was going to happen within the heat until it does.

Ghribas ceased to be a stranger to me, yet never once became ordinary.

I think that is also what Dianne meant about voice. A voice that is truly yours doesn’t wear out or lose its edge. It gets better with age and keeps arriving with the raw intensity of the very first time, instantly identifiable and beautifully surprising.

The recipe for love, it turns out, was always the exact same recipe.

Ghriba Behla — Sesame Shortbread

Ghriba Behla are Moroccan shortbread cookies known for their unexpectedly delightful crunch, courtesy of the dough’s sandy consistency and toasted sesame seeds. The name means “silly stranger” because as they cool, they crack and appear to smile. Their minimalism in ingredients belies the complexity of their taste. From the polvorones of Spain to similar treats in Italy, Mexico, and Serbia, Ghriba Behla is a cookie that has traveled across cultures and continents, and remained unmistakably itself wherever it landed. Ghriba comes in many versions: almond, walnut, coconut, even chocolate.

Yield: About 15 pieces

Ingredients

100 grams sesame seeds, toasted, plus about 20 grams for sprinkling.

120 milliliters vegetable oil

120 milliliters butter, melted

150 grams granulated white sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon salt

500 grams flour

7 grams baking powder

¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180°C. Spread the sesame seeds on a baking tray and toast for about 10 minutes until fragrant and lightly golden. Remove and set aside. Keep 20 grams separately for sprinkling.

2. In a large mixing bowl, combine the oil, butter and sugar. Mix thoroughly until smooth.

3. Add 100 grams of the toasted sesame seeds, vanilla extract, salt and mix well.

4. Add half the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and mix until uniform. Add the remaining flour and work the dough with your hands until you achieve a crumbly, dry texture.

5. Knead by hand for about 15 minutes until the dough holds together but remains slightly crumbly. It should not be moist or sticky. If too moist, add a little more flour. If too dry, add a tablespoon of oil (or two) and mix thoroughly. Let the dough rest for a couple of hours. You could also let it rest in the fridge overnight.

6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Roll the dough into small balls the size of a golf ball and flatten gently into the palm of your hand. Place on the baking sheet with enough space between them and sprinkle the reserved sesame seeds on top of each Ghriba.

7. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, until firm to the touch and lightly golden. Do not overbake as the cookies will continue to firm as they cool.

8. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes. Transfer to a rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container with wax paper between layers.

With love and gratitude,

Sanaa 💛🌴

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On nature and symbolism

I have always been drawn to the way nature mirrors us back to ourselves. It is a book of symbolism hidden in plain sight that few take the time to understand. A tree survives the harshest winter and still blooms. Its roots find water no matter how deep it runs.

Food sits somewhere between nature and culture, and it carries the same meanings. Long before recipes were written down, people found meaning in what they grew and what they ate. Fruits and vegetables were offerings and metaphors. They still are.

On onions and language

In Morocco, when something has no value, we say it’s not worth an onion. Ma yeswa h’ta bassla. The humble onion becomes the measure of worthlessness. There is also a saying about breaking a fast with an onion, meaning to expect something nourishing and receive almost nothing.

In France, the onion carries two completely different meanings. It represents both the deepest attention and the firmest boundary. Aux petits oignons means something done with extraordinary care and love. To be treated aux petits oignons is to be cherished. And yet the same language also says mêle toi de tes oignons, mind your business, or stay out of it.

Two cultures, and between them, every possible relationship with the same ingredient. And yet in both kitchens, the onion goes in first.

I know this not only from cookbooks and culinary history, but from my own kitchen, and from a friendship with a woman who, like me, comes from an onion culture.

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On Mahsa

Whenever I am cutting onions I cannot help but think of my friend Mahsa. The name Mahsa (مهسا) is a Persian name. It means as beautiful as the moon, and she is. Mahsa is an engineer by training and reinvented herself to become a photographer.

When we both lived in Mexico, we called each other in the mornings. Both of us cutting onions, on speaker on the counter, talking while the knife was chopping or slicing depending on what the recipe was asking for that day. Sometimes we video called each other too, cooking and laughing at our onion tears.

Our conversations covered the whole nine yards, work, life, children, politics, family back home. There was no off-topic, and I loved that. Meanwhile, the onions, red or white, were there like background music.

We never had to explain this to each other. Two women from onion cultures, we simply understood that the day could not begin any other way. We bonded over onions, like some women bond over wine.

I rarely fry fish, and once I got a splash of hot oil on my cheek. I tried everything I could find but it left a mark that took months to fade. When Mahsa saw my face, she recommended a scar cream she had used before. When I looked up the ingredients, I found out it was made with onion extract. Of course it was.

On leaving (again)

We both left Mexico around the same time. In fact, Mahsa was the one who recommended the international moving company that packed my life and shipped it overseas during COVID. She had used them before and was happy with their service. I trusted her completely.

The first volume estimation for my move took place over Zoom. With phone in my hand, I took the moving agent around my home and showed him every room and every closet. Later, he came in person to confirm the volume of stuff accumulated over the years. Because I had become frightened of catching COVID, I had soaked our special doormat with chlorine. And when I say soaked, I mean I must have poured two liters of pure bleach onto it, convinced that shoes needed to be thoroughly disinfected before crossing our threshold.

The mover arrived wearing a dark suit with trousers slightly too long. I was terrified at the sight of his hems brushing the floor as he walked in and stopped at the mat, wiping his shoes carefully, unaware he was standing in a lake of bleach.

I could not stop staring at his feet, waiting for the hems to turn white. I was hoping, quietly and guiltily, that it wouldn’t. I never knew what happened to his pants. A few weeks later, the movers came in, wrapped everything I owned, loaded it into a container, and shipped it across the ocean. And then I was gone too.

On distance

When the container arrived in Belgrade, I did think of the bleached pants. By then, the time zones had pulled Mahsa and me apart. My late afternoon was her early morning in Peru. I would call from Belgrade, grey and cold outside my window, and she would answer, her day just beginning. And almost every time, she would laugh and say: I’m cutting onions.

Something about her morning routine made me feel that the world was still in order.

Mahsa grew up in Iran, one of the great culinary civilizations on earth. Persian cooking is ancient and sophisticated. And it begins, like almost every other cuisine I know, with onions. Moroccan cooking begins with onions. Indian cooking begins with onions, and so does French, Chinese and Mexican. You can travel the entire world without a common language and walk into any kitchen and recognize the smell of onions softening in oil. That smell is the same in Casablanca and Tehran and Lima and Warsaw.

Nobody agreed on this. No ancient council of cooks convened and decided. Every culture arrived here on its own and I find it fascinating. And the more I think about it, the more I think the onion has been trying to tell us something all along.

On Respect

The onion is not glamorous. It will make you cry the minute you touch it before it gives you anything. Nobody takes a photograph of it (but I do sometimes). By the time the dish is beautiful, the onion has dissolved into everything, giving itself entirely to the depth of what it touches.

But remove it and a good cook knows immediately. The sauce is thin and boring. The base is hollow. Something feels fundamentally missing. You can add more of everything else, more spice, more fat, more time, and it still won’t thicken the way it should, because the foundation was never there.

Respect in a relationship works exactly like this. Discreet and rarely the thing you speak about when you speak about love. You don’t fall into respect the way you fall into love. It doesn’t keep you awake at night. It doesn’t write poetry. But it is what allows love to deepen rather than just burn.

Ask anyone in a kitchen and they will confess the onion is the ingredient they least enjoy preparing. Who wants the tears and smell of onions? We tolerate it because we know what it builds and we pick up the knife anyway.

Respect asks the same courage but it is uncomfortable to set on the table. It can feel easier to let it slide, to tell yourself love is enough, and that things will find their own balance. But a cook who skips the onion to avoid the tears ends up with something that looks right and tastes of nothing. And a person who avoids the conversation about respect, early, clearly, before the heat rises, will feel that hollowness later and wonder where it came from.

A relationship built on love alone can be vivid and consuming. But without respect it stays thin and never gets the chance to fully develop. Like a sauce that never simmers long enough, it coats nothing and nourishes less than it promises.

Respect is what you add at the beginning, before anything else, before the heat rises and the flavors awaken. It is what makes everything that follows possible. And like the onion, you will only truly understand what it was doing there once you try to cook without it.

On what remains

The great loves of a life, the friendships that outlast cities and time zones, show up in the most ordinary moments. In laughter about nothing. In the fact that someone is always, somewhere, cutting onions in the morning, and it is enough.

Mahsa and I don’t live in the same city anymore. We probably never will again. But I still think of her when I reach for an onion. Which means I think of her almost every day.

Every dish has to start somewhere. Every relationship too. And almost always, if you look closely, it starts with something small and necessary before making everything else delightful.

It always begins with onions.

With love and gratitude.

Sanaa 💛

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I wasn’t there when they arrived. But perhaps, in some way I couldn’t have explained at the time, I had been expecting them.

I was thousands of miles away from Essaouira when my gardener sent me a video update on WhatsApp. It showed a colony of honeybees hovering over the rooftop of my house, like a crowd during a sports event. I felt an unadmitted happiness watching them on my phone screen, and wished I was there to see them.

The house is off the grid: water from the well and electricity from the sun. Neither is available from the grid in the middle of nowhere, so we adapted. I assumed they had settled on the roof under the solar panels where they could feel protected from the Atlantic wind. A good place for bees I thought.

The reality turned out to be more challenging. They had found their way into the guest room window. Through a tiny breach in the cement above the wooden shutter frame, a place where two years of salt air, Atlantic wind and moisture had diligently done their work. From the outside it is barely visible, just a small crack in the sandy beige surface. I had not noticed it, but the bees did. Behind it lay a deep rectangular hollow space carved into the thick wall during construction to house an electric curtain mechanism. We went for a different style so we never installed it. The bees assessed what the elements had revealed and judged it perfect. They moved in and began to build.

It is almost spring in Essaouira, the season when honeybee colonies grow too large for their current home and send out a swarm to find a new one.

What I kept wondering, watching that video, was how they had decided. How does a colony of thousands agree on a single place? Does the queen go and inspect it first? Does she give her approval? Or does she simply trust?

The queen waits. A few hundred of the colony’s oldest and most experienced workers, the scouts, go out ahead of the swarm and search alone. Each one finds a potential site and inspects it with extraordinary care, spending nearly an hour inside, walking every surface in the dark, measuring the space with her own body. When she is satisfied, she flies back to the swarm and dances. The waggle dance, a figure-eight of vibration and direction that tells the other scouts exactly where to go and how promising the place is. The more vigorous the dance, the stronger the recommendation. Other scouts fly out to verify. They come back and dance too. The conversation builds democratically, until enough bees have independently confirmed the same place.

Then the scouts produce a signal that warms the flight muscles of every waiting bee. The whole colony lifts off and moves, with the queen “carried” by the worker bees at the center, protected on all sides, heading somewhere she has never seen, chosen entirely by others on her behalf. She too was chosen once, an ordinary egg, made extraordinary by the devotion of those around her.

The queen bee is not literally “carried” in the sense of being physically picked up and transported like a package. Instead, she flies under her own power as part of the swarm cloud, but the workers enable and support her flight in key ways.

According to Thomas Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy, there is a pre-flight preparation phase. Before the queen could swarm, she must lose up to fifty percent of her weight. Her daughters, the worker bees, restrict her food intake. They also push her around the comb and make her run around. This “fitness program” makes her light enough and physically capable of sustained flight, something her normally heavy, egg-filled body wouldn’t allow.

For 100 million years this system has been moving colonies toward new beginnings. This spring, they chose my home.

The guest room is simple and warm, with handmade terracotta tiles on the floor and handwoven curtains on the windows. It faces east, toward the hills that roll away from the city, and away from the sea. It is the room that receives the first light of every morning before the rest of the house wakes.

I have welcomed many friends and family members in that room over the past couple of years. Even my children like to hang out in it because it has the best wifi connection. The room has always known how to hold others. It appears it still does, even when I am not there to open the door.

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In Morocco, bees arriving uninvited are not an intrusion. They are baraka, a living blessing that has chosen you. You receive them the way you would any honored guest, with gratitude and without question. You certainly do not harm them. In my culture, harming bees belongs to the same unspoken code as not wasting bread, not turning away someone hungry at the door, not disturbing what has been sent to you in peace.

So when my gardener told me that he was reluctant to seal the crack in the wall, reluctant because doing so might harm the queen, I understood immediately. The queen’s life is the colony’s life. You protect her the way you protect anything that holds a community together.

In the Quran, bees hold a rare distinction. Surah An-Nahl, The Bee, describes how God inspired them directly, gave them an instinct so precise it reads like wisdom. They are shown where to build, what to gather, how to transform what they find in the world into something that heals. I am not a scholar, but I grew up with these words, and they came back to me watching the video of the bees hovering over my rooftop.

Something intentional had landed in my home. And I found myself wondering, as I sometimes do when life arranges itself this precisely, how much of this I had wished for without ever saying so out loud.

So in addition to whatever work I have on my plate, I found myself coordinating a small operation out of Warsaw to tend to the honeybee relocation.

A local fisherman from a nearby village who knows about bees came to assess the situation. On the first day, he left a traditional straw basket and explained to my gardener how to use smoke to gently lure the colony into it. Smoke is the oldest beekeeper’s tool, triggering in bees an ancient instinct, making them believe fire is near, causing them to fill themselves with honey in preparation for flight.

In addition to the beekeeper, I also had to find a carpenter. The plan was that the carpenter would remove the wooden panel so the beekeeper could do his job, then seal the wall afterwards.

But in reality, plan A didn’t work. The carpenter never arrived after I sent him the photos of the bee nest. He was scared to be around that many bees without a special suit.

So the beekeeper removed the wooden panel himself with the help of my gardener, and I watched most of it on a video call from Warsaw. I cried at the sight of the colony. In just two weeks, the bees had built a perfect nest of fresh golden wax comb, attached with dark propolis to the wall. A true miracle.

I had to leave the beautiful scene to go about my business, with the intention to call back Rachid, my gardener, and check on the outcome.

“The colony broke,” he said in Arabic.

I assumed he meant the nest, that something had cracked or collapsed during the move. I asked for photos and told him to explain it to me the way you would explain something to a child, because I am no bee expert. What do you mean it broke? That was when I understood. The colony had not broken. It had split.

Most of them left without hesitation. When the honeycomb was detached from inside the curtain box and placed in the basket, the colony followed its world, the brood, the wax, the invisible pull of the queen’s scent moving through the air like a thread. The nurse bees went with it. The young ones, who had never yet mapped the sky, simply followed the comb as if it had always been home.

But a small group stayed behind. They were the foragers, the oldest and most experienced workers in the colony. For weeks, perhaps months, they had been navigating by the angle of the sun, by the salt in the air, by the particular feel of this wall. And when they returned from the fields that afternoon to find the colony gone, their bodies still knew only one address.

They gathered around the curtain box, loyal to a map that was no longer accurate. The queen’s pheromone still clung to the wood inside, a ghost signal that said: she is here, this is home. The foragers responded the only way they knew how, releasing their own scent to call the others, reinforcing the cluster, deepening the error.

A bee alone is a dead bee. So they stayed together, hovering over the empty curtain box, waiting for a colony that had already moved on. Without a queen, without brood, without comb, they had no way to begin again. They would persist for a few days, maybe a week, before fading one by one into the garden they had spent their lives learning to read.

That evening, I sat with them in my mind. Too dark to do anything.

The image of that small cluster at the curtain box broke my heart, those few bees circling a place that no longer held anything. I went looking for answers.

What I found made sense. A small piece of comb placed in an empty basket near the old spot would give the stragglers something real to follow, an actual trace of their world. Some smoke to carry the scent toward them, and they would find it. Once inside, the basket could be moved next to the first one, and the colony, all of it, would be whole again.

I typed it out and sent it to Rachid on WhatsApp.

He followed the instructions. The next day, everyone was back together.

The beekeeper got stung three times. He survived, as beekeepers do. The thing about him is that he does not normally get stung. Some people have that quality around bees, a particular stillness, or a scent the bees read as harmless. But even the most patient colony has a limit. These bees had been lifted from their home, split from their queen, left circling an empty box. They tried to stay calm about the whole situation. Then they could not, and I completely understand.

I love my Essaouira garden the way I love few things in this world, its seasonal rhythms, its relationship to what I cook, the way it connects me to the land when I am there and holds my imagination when I am not. Bees would do wonders in that garden, moving between flowers, pollinating everything around them, weaving the plants together in ways invisible to the eye but essential to life. It takes a single forager visiting two million flowers to make one pound of honey. Every jar is a small accumulation of lifetimes. I want that kind of devotion in my garden.

I had wished for bees for years. I just never imagined they would arrive through a crack in the wall, make a home in a room meant for guests, and leave me coordinating their relocation from Warsaw.

The wish came true. The way it did was not mine. The bees already know this — that you move toward what feels right, trust those who went ahead, and let your soul arrive somewhere it has never been, carried by something larger than your own wanting.

With Peace & Baraka

Sanaa 🐝💛

PS: Most of the images are stills taken from WhatsApp videos sent from Essaouira. The quality is what it is!

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It started with a message from my Mexican soul sister , Pili as friends call her, who shared the program for her extraordinary course, Transitar los 40s: El desafio de inventarte. Navigating your 40s: The challenge of reinventing yourself. I stayed late at night listening to her and watching her. She is exactly the same person I have known for the past ten years. Only now she has a confidence and a way to share her wisdom I rarely saw in any other person.

Pili speaks about the two halves of life, the solar stage and the lunar stage. The solar years are the years of building, proving, achieving, belonging. The ego, magnificent and necessary, constructs its identity like a house of careful bricks. Then, somewhere between 35 and 55, a stone appears in the path. You trip. And the trip, Pili says, is not a mistake. It is the beginning of the real journey.

I had heard about archetypes before, but it was Pili who made them easy to understand. In her two-hour workshop, she draws on the work of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who first mapped the archetypes as universal patterns living in the human unconscious. American scholar Carol S. Pearson, later developed a framework of twelve archetypes that together trace the journey toward wholeness.

The twelve archetypes are not stages to complete and discard, but energies to embody, integrate, and carry forward. And I thought: what if each of these archetypes had a food? What if our relationship with food is actually the story of our soul’s journey?

This is my kitchen. These are my archetypes.

The Innocent — Stuffed Fresh Tomatoes

The Innocent trusts the world completely. She sees beauty in the ordinary and goodness in others, and she believes, with her whole heart, that things will work out. Her gift is wonder, the ability to approach life with openness and without armor. Her shadow is naivety, a trust so complete that it has not yet learned to discern.

I was six years old or maybe younger. Alone, but not lonely, not yet. I took fresh tomatoes and filled them with white rice mixed with a simple vinaigrette, then decorated each one with cured black Moroccan olives. I don’t remember being taught this. I remember just doing it and I felt proud of my tiny creation.

What strikes me now is that even as an Innocent, I was already a Creator. I was not receiving nourishment, I was making beauty. The Innocent in me was never passive. She was a child who believed the world was a kitchen, and that she had permission to create in it.

She is still with me, that little girl. I don’t always let her out. But she is there. And on the days I do let her out, the cooking is always better.

The Orphan — Impossible Tagine

The Orphan arrives when innocence shatters and the world reveals itself as less safe than we believed. She is the part of us that has been abandoned or left to figure things out alone. Her gift is resilience and a deep solidarity with others who suffer, because she knows what it is to be without a net. Her shadow is the wound that never quite heals, the part that keeps expecting to be left.

My parents were in another town for work. A family member was caring for me. My older brother had just died. I had lost him, and in losing him, I had lost my parents to their grief. They were there, and they were not there.

Once, my caretaker made an artichoke and green peas tagine with lamb. Typical winter vegetables you would find in any Moroccan market. I decided I would eat the peas through a straw. Or at least I tried. But that image remains in my memory, a little girl trying to eat some peas with a straw, and everything she had counted on, gone.

The Orphan finds ways to fill what is missing. For years, I ate too much, and not always the kind that nourished anything. It was never really hunger for food but hunger for something food could never give. I did not know this yet. I was just trying to survive.

The Orphan teaches resilience. She teaches you that you are stronger than the abandonment. I have visited her many times across my life and each time she came, I learned something harder and truer about my own survival. I’ve made peace with her and learned from her. Every time I make an artichoke tagine for my family I remember the straw.

The Warrior — Pizza on the Floor

The Warrior sets goals and fights for what matters. She builds her identity through will and discipline, and she is magnificent and exhausting in equal measure. She is also, simply, necessary.

I have been a Warrior many times. In investment banking meeting rooms where I was often the only woman, and certainly the only Moroccan woman. In the sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic, camera in hand, documenting the lives of Haitian families in the bateyes who the world had chosen not to see. In the bureaucratic labyrinths of international organizations where I learned to fight for children’s rights.

And after every battle, the last thing I wanted was to cook. The Warrior’s food, in my life, is pizza on the floor, surrounded by moving boxes.

I have lived in six countries across thirty years. Each move was its own ordeal, paperwork and pet documents, new schools, new languages, new social codes. And at the end of every moving day, when the movers had carried the last box and stood there sweating and done, I would order pizza. We would all sit on the floor, me, the movers, whoever was there, and eat from the boxes.

Just hunger satisfied after a long day of hard work. That is the Warrior’s real celebration because it’s the moment when the sword finally goes down.

I am still a Warrior but I have learned to choose my battles.

The Caregiver — Couscous The Slow Way

The Caregiver nurtures and feeds. She is the one who shows up, who anticipates needs before they are spoken, who makes sure everyone at the table has enough. Her gift is love expressed through action, the kind that asks nothing in return and transforms ordinary gestures into devotion. Her shadow is giving until she disappears, becoming so devoted to others that she forgets she too needs to be nourished.

Couscous was never meant to be eaten alone. In Morocco, it arrives in a wide communal dish, shared by everyone at the table, sometimes everyone in the neighborhood. It is food that assumes community, that only makes sense when there are others around it.

Couscous is not a quick meal and you cannot fake it. The grains must be steamed, then hand-rolled, then rested, then steamed again. It takes hours and your full attention.

When I make couscous for someone, I’m telling them: honey, you are worth the slow way.

I spent years giving this kind of devotion to others, to causes, to institutions, to people, while forgetting to make couscous for myself. The shadow of the Caregiver is martyrdom dressed as generosity. I know it well. What saved me was learning that I cannot pour from an empty vessel. My own nourishment is the source of it.

Now I make couscous for those I love deeply. And sometimes, just because I’m craving it.

The Seeker — Guacamole with a Crunch

The Seeker leaves home in search of something she cannot yet name. She is pulled toward the foreign, the unknown, the experience that will crack the world open and reveal its unexpected largeness. Her gift is the courage to keep moving, to choose growth over comfort, to trust that what she is looking for exists even before she knows what it is. Her shadow is the bittersweet feeling that comes from loving many places and belonging completely to none.

In Mexico, a friend served guacamole topped with toasted grasshoppers. Chapulines, as they are called in the land of the Aztecs. They came lime-kissed, chile-dusted, and completely foreign to everything I had ever tasted. My curiosity was stronger than my hesitation. I tried them and I did love them. Now chapulines are part of my pantry everywhere I go.

That moment felt like the Seeker’s entire lesson in a single bite. The world is always larger and stranger and more nourishing than our fear would have us believe.

Thank you, Pili’s Mexico, for this lesson that tasted of lime and courage.

I have been a Seeker my whole life, moving through six countries and as many kitchens, each one a different version of home. I am not sure the Seeker ever fully stops. But she learns, eventually, that the searching itself was making her whole all along.

The Lover —Kefta Rolled with Devotion

The Lover is the archetype of full commitment. She loves fully and completely, giving herself to people, to beauty, to a cause, to a place. Her gift is passion and deep connection. Her shadow is losing herself in what she loves, forgetting where she ends and the other begins.

Kefta is one of those dishes that every Moroccan cook makes differently. Same ingredients on paper, but a completely different result depending on who prepared it. A little more cumin here, fresh coriander instead of parsley there, a touch of cinnamon that no one admits to but everyone secretly adds. Love is the same. It looks universal from the outside. Inside, it is always entirely your own.

Kefta tagine is made with your hands, and there is something meditative about it, almost devotional. That’s why it can taste entirely different depending on why you make it. Prepared exhausted after a long day, it is sustenance. Prepared for someone you love, it becomes a language. The archetype lives in the intention as much as in the food.

The Destroyer — Everything Fried

The Destroyer lets go of what no longer serves. She tears down what has outgrown its usefulness to make space for what wants to come next. Her gift is transformation through release, the courage to end what needs ending even when it is painful. Her shadow is destruction without purpose, tearing down out of anger or fear rather than wisdom.

The Destroyer arrived through my body, uninvited. My auto-immune disease rewrote my relationship with food without consulting me. Everything fried and crispy became off limits.

The body as Destroyer is one of the most humbling versions of this archetype, because it simply makes clear that the chapter is over, without offering explanation.

But here is what I have learned from the walking palm, the only tree that moves toward light, leaving behind roots that no longer serve it, to make room for new growth. Release is not necessarily loss. Release is the only way to move forward.

And now and then, when I feel like it, I have the fried thing anyway but with full presence and zero guilt. Because the Destroyer integrated is discernment.

The Creator — Moroccan Empanadas

The Creator is driven by a need to make something that did not exist before. She feels the need to reshape her world and leave her mark on it. Her gift is imagination and the courage to bring her inner vision into the world. Her shadow is the paralysis of too many ideas at once, the feeling of running after too many rabbits and catching none.

When I am creating in the kitchen, there is rarely a recipe or a plan. There is only a kind of listening. Something tells me to add the ginger, to try the chilies, to fold the Moroccan spices into the Mexican dough. It feels less like cooking and more like following some secret channel of energy that knows where it is going even when I do not. And when the dish arrives at exactly the right place, it feels like I have finished telling a story.

My Mexican empanadas filled with spiced ground meat and Moroccan herbs taste of coexistence. Two traditions meeting in my hands become a dish neither culture could have invented alone.

This is what I have always been doing in the kitchen without quite realizing it: making coexistence edible. On the plate, cultures become something richer together.

The Ruler — Confidence Seasoned with Instinct

The Ruler takes full ownership of her life. She stops waiting for the right moment and the right conditions. She builds her domain with intention and accepts full responsibility for what happens inside it. Her gift is leadership and the ability to create order from chaos. Her shadow is the grip that tightens when she feels things slipping, the belief that only she can do it right.

Much of the food I prepare has no recipe and no name. It changes every time. It could be whatever I find in the fridge and the pantry on any given day, prepared with confidence and seasoned with instinct.

There is something radical about opening the fridge or the pantry and trusting yourself completely with whatever you find there. No recipe in mind, just instinct, some confidence and a lot of hunger. In the kitchen as in life, sovereignty is trusting yourself completely with whatever life puts on your plate.

The Magician — Second Life Buckwheat Crepes

The Magician transforms. She changes the conditions so that something new becomes possible, working with intuition, timing, and the invisible thread that connects seemingly unrelated things. She trusts what cannot always be explained, the exact right moment, the exact right ingredient, the gesture that shifts everything. Her gift is alchemy and her shadow is losing the ground beneath her feet when the invisible world pulls her too far from the practical one.

My most magical dish began with leftovers. Roasted cauliflower, red peppers, spinach and artichokes that gave everything they had the night before, suddenly found a second life inside a buckwheat crepe folded around melted cheese and quail eggs, each one nestled like a small, precious crown.

Nothing was discarded or wasted. What looked like the end of one meal became the beginning of something more beautiful than the original. The quail eggs, tiny and perfect, make the whole thing feel like it was planned all along.

The Magician knows that the most powerful transformations rarely require new ingredients. They require a new way of seeing what is already there. In the kitchen and in a life.

The Sage — A Grandmother’s Recipe - Mderbel

The Sage has lived enough to know that knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing. Wisdom can only be earned through time, through loss, through the willingness to sit with what is hard and let it teach you. Her gift is the clarity that comes from having seen enough of life to distill it into what is essential. Her shadow is detachment that becomes coldness, or withholding wisdom because the world does not seem ready to receive it.

What my grandmother taught my mother, my mother taught me. And now I carry the Mderbel tagine across borders and decades, a dish that lives in three women’s hands.

The Mderbel is layered and patient. The aubergines are prepared two ways: part fried like frites; part slow-cooked with the lamb and chickpeas until they surrender into the sauce entirely. The dish demands attention and rewards care. It cannot be rushed without revealing that you tried to rush it.

The secret ingredient is caraway. Just a pinch, and it goes a long way. A small, invisible thing that transforms the whole pot.

My grandmother is gone. My mother carries her on and I carry them both. And eventually, I made the tagine my own, because that is how wisdom survives. You receive it, you honor it, you master it, and then you bring yourself to it.

The Sage does not only preserve. She transmits. And in transmitting, she transforms.

The Jester — A Scoop of Poetic Joy

The Jester knows something the other archetypes sometimes forget. Life is also an experience to be enjoyed. She lives in the present moment because that is the only place joy actually exists, and she speaks truth through humor and lightness in a way that makes people lower their defenses long enough to actually hear it. She also happens to be the one who sees most clearly. The Jester always knows what is actually going on. Her gift is delight and her shadow is the laughter that masks what has never been allowed to grieve.

My Jester enjoys a scoop of saffron ice cream with pistachios, the most precious, poetic flavor combination I know, the saffron golden and faintly floral, the pistachios green and earthy.

Since I cannot find it at the store, I learned to make it myself, with a shortcut I learned from a dear friend. The Jester does not bother with ceremony. She finds the playful path to pleasure and takes it without apology.

People who carry big missions can easily forget the Jester. They are so busy building stuff and writing novels and changing the world, that they forget to eat ice cream in the afternoon for no reason at all.

The Jester is the archetype that keeps all the others from taking themselves too seriously. She reminds us that a soul awakened is also a soul that can laugh. Lightness and depth are companions. They always were.

Where It All Comes Together

Pili spoke about becoming real around the age of 60. About moving from collective purposes to individual meaning. About the courage of desobediencia, disobedience as a path to freedom.

Her explanation of Pearson’s archetypes gave me clarity. The understanding that all these archetypes live inside each of us, some more developed than others, each with its own energy, gifts and shadows.

Listening to Pili felt like being handed a map of myself. I became more understanding toward who I had been, and more patient with who I was still becoming.

And I, sitting in my kitchen between Morocco and Poland, between past and future, between the five-year-old stuffing tomatoes and the woman making saffron ice cream with a shortcut, understood something I had always felt but never quite named.

The kitchen has always been my laboratory for coexistence, the capacity to appreciate our differences while remaining loving and respectful. Every dish I make carries that belief that we are richer when we learn from one another, across cultures, across generations, across the distances we travel and the borders we dissolve.

All of it, every dish, every archetype, every country, every loss, every reinvention, has been in service of one single vision: adding, one by one, people who feel connected to their souls. People who are awake inside themselves and remember they are fully human.

The kitchen is where I have always known this. Before I had the words for it.

Now I want to ask you: Which archetype are you living right now? And what are you eating?

With love,

Sanaa

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My first food fuss episode as an ‘entitled global citizen’ was not being able to find dried fava beans or dried split peas in Belgrade to make Moroccan Bissara. I too have those moments of food nostalgia. I miss certain foods from the places I called home.

I am as guilty as anyone who wants fresh and buttery avocados all year long.

I remember having the typical expat conversation with a Moroccan friend who expressed her frustration at not finding the dried goods. Let me explain. For a Moroccan, there is nothing like a hot Bissara soup with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of cumin during the cold season.

My friend and I would each make our own way to check every market and every Zdrava Hrana (health food store) to inquire about the precious dried legumes. After a couple of months, my friend’s mission ended with success. Mine did not, but she did share a generous quantity with me, which made my family very happy.

When Saveta, my Serbian friend, saw my face holding the bag of dried fava beans, she understood how I felt about Bissara. She made it her mission to search for it in her town of Paraćin.

Interestingly enough, I learned from her that some of the old Serbian generation still eat dried fava beans but only in the small towns. “This young generation doesn’t know what it is,” she said.

My love for Bissara began near Marrakesh, in the Ourika Valley.

As a single woman who had recently returned home after many years abroad, I longed to reconnect with old places and discover new ones. I would drive to the Ourika Valley to stay at my cousins' saffron garden. Both had studied medicine in France and now practiced in Casablanca. They returned to their roots with a serious hobby of saffron farming, and spent their free time in the valley giving back to their community.

Their enchanting saffron garden became one of my heavens on earth - a place where I could contemplate in nature, away from the demands of work and city life. During the evenings, I would gaze at the beautiful starry nights over the Atlas Mountains and the lush Ourika Valley, finding peace in the quiet.

Jmiaa, a local village woman who worked as a housekeeper at my cousins’ cozy adobe home in the heart of the saffron garden, would take care of me and prepare food. My favorite dish was bissara, a split pea soup made with garlic (lots of it), cumin, and olive oil, and served with fresh homemade bread.

Jmiaa would laugh at me every time I told her I wanted to eat bissara, again and again. Bowl after bowl, evening after evening, with a saffron flavored Moroccan tea, I felt simply happy under the stars and the quiet Atlas Mountain nights.

Known to be the most satisfying soup, bissara is considered both a poor man’s food and a comfort food in Morocco, especially during winter season.

It is a thick soup we enjoy for breakfast, lunch or dinner with all types of breads. Bissara is also one of the easiest and healthiest soup one can make. I am grateful that my children love it. What adds to its magic is simply a good olive oil and cumin. Some crushed chili is always a lovely addition.

Dried Fava Bean Soup with Cumin and Olive Oil (Bissara bel Foul)

Both versions of bissara are prepared by cooking the pre-soaked legumes with garlic, extra virgin olive oil, and cumin, then puréeing it to a smooth consistency. Bissara tends to get a bit solid overnight so adding some hot water to reheat it the next day is highly recommended.

Yield: 4–6 servings

Ingredients

3 cups dried split fava beans, soaked overnight

½ cup olive oil

6 cloves garlic, peeled

3 liters water (more if needed)

3 teaspoons ground cumin

2 teaspoons salt

Some ground cumin for garnish

Some ground cayenne, optional

Some olive oil to drizzle

Method

1. The night before, wash and place the dried split fava beans in a bowl and let soak in cold water overnight.

2. The next day, wash and drain the soaked fava beans and place them in a pot. Add cold water and garlic cloves and bring to a boil.

3. Scoop any foam that has formed and simmer for one hour, until the fava beans become tender.

4. Add olive oil and cumin. Stir well and cook for 10 more minutes.

5. Remove any extra liquid from the fava beans and reserve, in case you need to add some liquid.

6. Purée to a smooth consistency using a stick blender or a traditional potato masher. I personally prefer using the latter because I like my bissara with a bit of chunkiness. For smooth consistency, use the stick blender.

7. Reheat the bissara gently over low heat before serving. Add water, if the consistency is too thick.

8. Sprinkle with some paprika and serve with olive oil, cumin, salt, and cayenne on the side.

Silky Split Pea Bean Soup with Cumin and Olive Oil (Bissara bel Jelbana)

This is the variation of the bissara that Jmiaa used to prepare for me at the saffron garden in the Ourika Valley.

Yield: 4–6 servings

Ingredients

3 cups dried split peas, soaked overnight

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

6 cloves garlic, peeled

3 liters water

3 teaspoons ground cumin

2 teaspoons salt

Some ground cumin and paprika for garnish

Some ground cayenne, optional

Some olive oil to drizzle

Method

1. The night before, wash and place the dried split peas in a bowl and let soak in cold water overnight.

2. Wash and drain the soaked split peas, and place them in a pot. Add cold water and garlic cloves, and bring to a boil.

3. Scoop any foam that has formed, and simmer for one hour, until the peas become tender.

4. Add olive oil and cumin and stir well. Cook for 10 more minutes.

5. Remove any extra liquid from the peas, and reserve in case you need to add some liquid.

6. Purée using a stick blender or a traditional potato masher. I personally use the traditional way because I like my bissara with a bit of chunky consistency. For a smooth consistency, use the stick blender.

7. Reheat the bissara gently over low heat before serving. Add water if the consistency is too thick.

8. Sprinkle with some paprika and serve with olive oil, cumin, salt, and cayenne on the side.

The Best of Both Worlds

Bissara in the north part of Morocco, around Tangier, is considered the best one in the country because northerners make theirs with both dried fava beans and split peas. I call it 'the best of both worlds bissara.' But I think the real best of both worlds is this: when we're brave enough to mix and mingle and to share our stories and our culture, magic happens. A Serbian neighbor understands a Moroccan food craving, a humble soup becomes a bridge between hearts and kitchens thousands of miles apart, and we discover that coexistence is both possible and delicious.

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Zarmineh can make any kitchen feel like home.

I’ve watched her do it in Washington D.C., Rabat, Belgrade, and Warsaw. An American of South Asian descent, she’s brilliant at keeping both her cultures alive through her cooking, and she’s been like family to me for decades.

Zar and I met in D.C.’s tech start-up world back when Amazon had just 50 employees. We’ve lived on different continents since, pursuing different careers, but food has always brought us back to each other’s kitchens.

I shared her Sheer Khurma recipe last year as the perfect dessert to welcome spring in Warsaw. Now winter is here, and I’m returning to another of her family recipes.

My first taste of Zar’s chicken rezala was twenty years ago for my birthday at my mother’s home in Rabat. The house was basic. It was a place my father had bought for my mother and us after their divorce, in a nice neighborhood she’d chosen, hoping he would renovate. He never did.

The kitchen was depressing. Rotten cabinets, no proper windows, no real doors. The kind of space that would have given Martha Stewart nightmares.

Yet somehow, Zar cooked in that rundown kitchen with such elegance and generosity, turning a cold house into something warm. This was, after all, the woman who had launched Discovery Channel India out of a hotel room. A modest kitchen wasn’t going to stop her from creating greatness.

I stood beside her, handing her ingredients and bowls as she needed them. She asked for a blender to purée the onions, luckily the only electric kitchen appliance we had. My mother, stepdad, and my three younger brothers gathered to watch. You could see she had the recipe memorized by the rhythm of her hands, by the way she moved through each step with patient explanations.

She worked in stages, the traditional South Asian bhuna technique.

First, she fried the onion purée with garlic and ginger in coconut oil until it turned golden. The house began to smell different, warmer and richer. She added turmeric and black pepper, then splashes of water each time the pan threatened to burn, building a concentrated base through patience. More frying, more water, deepening the color. Then the chicken pieces, milk, salt, paprika. Finally, yogurt stirred in briefly before everything simmered together.

The spices filled our sad kitchen with something close to joy. When we sat down to eat, the Bengali curry, mild yet deeply aromatic, with a thin yogurt and onion sauce, was utterly delicious over plain basmati rice. That night left such an impression that I never dared changing a single thing about the recipe. It was just perfect.

The word “rezala” comes from Urdu and Persian words meaning people of modest origins. It once referred to dishes enjoyed by lower-ranking Mughal officials. Over time, this humble curry evolved into something refined, especially beloved in Kolkata.

Perhaps that’s what happens with true friendship too. Something that starts simply becomes more precious with time.

We’ve made this recipe together in Belgrade, Warsaw, and all the places in between. Last spring, when Zar visited me in Warsaw again, we cooked it one more time so I could finally document it for my cookbook.

The recipe hasn’t changed, but we have.

Bengali Chicken Rezala Recipe

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

4 tablespoons coconut oil

3 medium-sized red onions, pureed

About 1 ½ cups of water

4 garlic cloves, grated

2 tablespoons of fresh ginger, grated

1 tablespoon turmeric powder

A pinch of black pepper

1 teaspoon salt

2 whole chicken thighs and 2 chicken breasts, cut into pieces, washed and dried

A pinch of paprika

2 tablespoons plain yogurt

¼ cup whole milk

1 green chili, halved

Fresh cilantro, chopped (for garnish)

Method

1. Blend the onions with 1/2 cup of water to make a smooth purée.

2. Heat the coconut oil in a large pan over medium heat. Add the onion purée, garlic, and ginger, and fry for 10 minutes, stirring frequently, until golden. Stir in the turmeric and black pepper. Add 1/2 cup of hot water to deglaze the pan and continue frying until the water evaporates and the onion sauce thickens.

3. Add another 1/2 cup of hot water to the pan and fry the onion sauce again until it thickens and turns slightly darker.

4. Add the chicken (or coquelet) pieces to the pan, along with salt, paprika, and the milk. Fry for 10 minutes, turning the bird to coat it in the sauce. Stir in the yogurt and fry for another 5 minutes, stirring constantly to prevent it from burning.

5. Lower the heat and add the green chili. Cover and simmer the rezala for 25 minutes, or until the chicken is tender and the sauce has thickened.

6. Garnish with fresh cilantro and serve hot with fluffy basmati rice.

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On the last day of 2025, my husband took me for a walk along the shore to show me a Eurasian stone-curlew he’d spotted earlier with our son. This year I decided to always remain in a yes attitude. To keep my heart and mind open for the unknown and just go with the flow. So off I went walking miles to look for the bird that, though it’s found along our Moroccan coast, catching a glimpse is always special.

But nature had other surprises in store.

There it was, nestled in the salt marsh where the tide whispers secrets, a fascinating coastal treasure that’s been gaining hearts in culinary circles. Sea asparagus, they call it, though some know it as glasswort or pickleweed. The botanists speak of genus Salicornia, but I saw only green magic on my shore.

Despite its name, this plant shares no kinship with asparagus. It rose from the tidal flats like small, bright green fingers, segmented, fleshy stems that reminded me of tiny emerald cacti, clusters of the ocean’s own sculpture. Crisp and juicy when I touched them, they glistened with possibility.

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I tasted one, and the sea flooded my tongue.

Naturally salty, briny, the flavor of the ocean itself. For centuries, coastal peoples have known this delicacy, and now I understood why. I imagined it raw in salads, quickly blanched or sautéed beside evening meals, pickled in jars like memories, garnishing the fish that swim in these same waters. So salty that it needs no seasoning. The plant is the salt.

Sea asparagus is not rare, mind you. It grows along coastlines worldwide in Europe, North America, Asia, yet it felt rare enough, like a secret on my beach. Seasonal, spring through early fall, appearing and vanishing like the tides themselves. I’ve never seen it in the markets here, and even the locals don’t know about it. It was my dear husband who told me in his French accent, “C’est de la salicorne.”

I was in heaven!

This low-calorie sea treasure is rich in vitamins A and C, blessed with calcium, iron, and of course iodine, and it grows wild where I walk.

May this new year bring many more such beautiful discoveries, treasures hidden in plain sight, waiting to be found by wandering feet and curious hearts.

With Love,

Sanaa

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“Why don’t you take the bicycle?”

A few weeks ago, my almost fourteen-year-old son looked at me as I was scheduling a taxi to the gym. Streets covered in snow. No winter tires on the car yet.

“What a good idea!” I heard myself say as I pressed the cancel button.

His face lit up, then clouded with doubt once we found out the bicycle wasn’t in the garage but parked under the backyard stairs, blocked by the car. “Just take a taxi. Maybe it’s too complicated,” he backpedaled.

That morning, before my son came downstairs, I’d been standing at the kitchen counter slicing cucumbers for his lunch box. My hands were moving on autopilot. Wash, slice, pack. Add the pasta container. Fold another napkin, which he never uses. My body dreaming to go back to the warm bed I had just left upstairs.

Of course I went anyway. Through the laundry room, out to the stairs, wrestling the bike through the narrow gap between car and garage wall.

My heart was already racing, and I hadn’t even mounted the bike yet. When I finally freed it and pedaled off into the grey morning, I felt like a kid again. Like I was embarking on some major adventure.

Cheeks burning from cold. Legs shaking a little. Alive.

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Earlier that week, I’d started drafting an essay about coexistence, about celebrating holidays across all the countries I’ve lived in, how food bridges cultures. But when I came home from that bicycle ride and sat down to write, my fingers wouldn’t type the essay I’d planned.

That physical aliveness, the contrast between the fog of my morning routine and the exhilaration of pedaling through snow, had cracked something open. A question kept pulsing in my mind. Feeling trapped? Feeling grateful? Which one do you feel?

The coexistence that needed examining first was the one within myself.

Who was I? Spouse? Mother? Writer? Cook? How did I inhabit all my roles at once without splitting apart?

I come from a culture where mothers cook everything from scratch. Where ordering out feels like failure. Where maternal devotion is measured in how much you give up, not how much you choose. For many years I thought being a good mother meant wearing sacrifice like a badge of honor.

Some mornings, waking at 6:30 to hit the kitchen feels like moving through fog. My body protests. But even then, I know this truth. I am choosing to feed my family. And that choice, though it comes from half-asleep hands slicing vegetables, tastes like love.

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Earlier this year, when my daughter started her IB program, grief and gratitude collided in my heart. I started counting. Two more years until she’s off to university. Four more years until my son follows. Then I realized what I was really asking. How little time is left before they leave the nest?

The question hit me like cold water. I gasped. Because suddenly “two more years” transformed from countdown to call. Not time to endure, but time to savor.

The arithmetic of motherhood suddenly felt precious rather than punishing. That morning on the bike, counting breaths in the cold air, I thought about counting years. Both finite. Both worth living fully.

When I pack a lunch box versus develop a recipe, I’m not two different women. I ask the same questions. What do they like? What should I avoid? Is this nourishing? Whether I’m working professionally or mothering, the methodology is the same. Only the context shifts.

As a mother, I’ve finally shed one unnecessary root, the famous “I sacrificed my life for you.”

I refuse to pass this down.

My love for my children will not come with an emotional price tag attached.

The walking palm moves toward light by growing new roots while letting the useless ones die. It doesn’t choose one identity over another but grows multiple root systems simultaneously. Spouse. Mother. Writer. Cook. Badass when necessary.

When my son suggested I bike to the gym that morning, he was actually asking something. Are you brave enough to try? Are you still cool? Can you still surprise yourself?

The answer, it turns out, was yes.

And that yes felt wonderful. Navigating snowy streets, heart pounding, feeling simultaneously scared (what if I slide and fall?) and exhilarated (I’m doing it! I’m actually doing it!.)

I was saying “look ma, no hands“ to myself. That wonderful childhood feeling of mastering something scary.

That’s adaptive motherhood. That’s the walking palm in badass mode. Moving toward light. Shedding old beliefs about what a good mother looks like.

I came across only one other person riding in the snow. As she biked past in the opposite direction, she smiled at me. Her eyes said it all. “Aren’t we the brave ones this morning?”

I smiled back, breathing hard, feeling the sisterhood.

This year, I’ve said goodbye to internal negotiations. I’m done negotiating between my roles. I’m wearing all the hats at once. And some days, one of those hats is a bicycle helmet on a cold November morning, pedaling through snow because my son dared me to be brave.

The many versions of myself, finally at peace with each other. Finally moving in the same direction.

Finally home.💛

Sanaa

To End on a Sweet Note

To celebrate saying yes to challenges, wearing many hats, and creating traditions that travel with us, I’m sharing my favorite red fruit tart recipe, which I’ve been making since we left Mexico in 2020.

I used to order it from Bakéa, chef-owner Vicente Etchegaray’s Basque-French restaurant, for every celebration.

I spent days reconstructing it from memory, translating taste into technique. Pâte sablée, amandine, berries, glaze and lots of love.

Hope you enjoy it!

Bakéa Inspired Red Fruits Tart

Yield: 8 servings/ 28 cm removable bottom tart tin.

Ingredients

250 grams flour

100 grams confectioners’ sugar

½ teaspoon salt

6 eggs, divided (1 for the dough, 1 for the dorure, 4 for the almond filling)

325 grams soft unsalted butter, divided (125 grams for the tart and 200 grams for the filling)

2 tablespoons cream

350 grams white sugar, divided (200 grams for the filling, 150 grams for the glazing)

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

200 grams almond powder

1 tablespoon of Rhum or Rhum flavor

150 grams water

3 sheets of gelatin

About 600 grams of mixed fresh red berries (raspberries, blueberries, blackberries)

Method

Preheat oven to 170°C

To make the dough

1. Sift the flour and confectioners’ sugar into a clean flat surface. Add salt and mix with a spoon. Then, using the spoon, make a crater (a dip) in the mixture. Add 1 beaten egg in the middle of the crater and mix well. Add 125 grams of soft butter and mix all with hands. If the dough is liquid, add some flour. Form dough into a ball, wrap tightly in plastic and refrigerate for 2 hours or keep overnight.

2. Stretch the dough ball thinly into the shape of the bottomless tart mold, so that it is crispy afterwards. Fold in four so you can transfer easily into the mold. Place the angle in the center of the mold. Using your fingers, gently push the dough against the inner edges of the mold. Remove excess with a knife. Make holes with a fork, cover with film and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

3. Bake the tart shell for 10–15 minutes.

To make the tart impermeable:

Prepare an egg wash (dorure) by combining 1 large egg with 2 tablespoons of cream. Remove the tart shell from the oven, brush with the dorure, and bake until golden. This makes the tart impermeable.

To make the almond filling (amandine):

1. Place 200 grams of sugar and 200 grams of butter in a mixing bowl and mix well with an electric mixer. Add 4 eggs one by one. Add the vanilla extract, the 200 grams of almond powder, and the Rhum (or Rhum flavor), and mix well. Cover with plastic wrap touching the surface of the amandine to avoid drying out the top of the almond cream. Refrigerate for 15 minutes. Remove from fridge and mix well again.

2. Place the almond filling inside a pastry sleeve to fill the tart shell. Flatten with a spatula. Bake for 15–20 minutes, depending on oven.

To make the neutral glaze:

1. Soak the gelatin sheets in a large bowl of cold water for 5 minutes.

2. Mix the water and sugar in a saucepan and bring to a quick boil. Remove from the heat.

3. Squeeze the water from the gelatin sheets using your fingers and add it to the pan. Whisk lightly to help it dissolve. Pour the preparation into a glass container. Let cool, cover with a plastic wrap and refrigerate. Reheat the neutral glaze before using. Apricot jam (30 secs in microwave) can be used as a shortcut.

Assemblage : Gently remove the tart from the mold and place in a serving plate. Brush the top of the tart with some neutral glazing. Arrange the red fruits on the tart starting from the center and brush with the neutral glazing.

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When I first encountered the name ‘salsa macha,’ I couldn’t shake the notion that it was the feminine counterpart to ‘macho.’ As a non-native Spanish speaker who had recently moved to Mexico City, I refrained from vocalizing this observation. Too embarrassed to ask.

For those yet to experience salsa macha, it is a spicy sauce made from dried chili peppers, nuts, seeds, and garlic. It has a smoky and nutty flavor with a kick of heat. It’s often used as a condiment or topping to add flavor to dishes such as tacos, grilled meats, pasta, or as a dip.

I later learned that ‘salsa macha’ does indeed embody the feminine form of ‘macho.’ As I tasted the sauce, I began to understand how it could seamlessly embody both feminine and masculine qualities simultaneously. It made me reflect on the duality within each of us, akin to the Yin and Yang.

In Spanish, ‘macha’ translates to ‘brave,’ a fitting descriptor for the robustness and crunchiness of the sauce. It’s fascinating how a simple name can hold layers of meaning and symbolism. This makes the experience of enjoying it all the more enriching.

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Carlos Moreno, a chef from Tabasco who now runs Comer restaurant in Paris, offers a similar take: “It must get its name from the word ‘macho’, because of this somewhat outdated idea that you have to be a brave man to eat it, because it’s very spicy,” he explains in the August 2025 issue of Le Magazine du Monde.

His observation reminded me of my initial hesitation to voice what seemed obvious, only to discover the name does indeed carry that bold, brave spirit. Though I’d argue it takes a brave woman just as much as a brave man to handle the heat.

When my friends ask me “What can we eat with salsa macha?”, I like to respond: “What can we not eat with it?”. To me, macha adds magic to anything it touches. It is smoky, nutty, and spicy at the same time.

Back in Mexico, I sometimes took it for granted, as I could easily buy it or whip up a batch at home while adding my own touch.

No two Salsa Machas Are The Same

Making Mexican salsa macha is a lot of fun. Handling hot chiles with bare hands is not. After my first experience I now make sure to wear kitchen gloves to avoid burning my skin and face with my delicious mixed hot chili sauce.

Since its preparation requires few steps, I usually prepare a large batch that I can store in glass jars for months. It also makes great gifts for friends who appreciate homemade spicy salsas. If you decide to make a large quantity make sure you fry the chilies in batches, so they fit properly in the pan.

In Mexico, no two salsa machas are the same. Some versions, like the one chef Carlos Moreno created in his Paris restaurant, focus on “more substance and less oil. A balanced approach accessible to all palates” (Le Magazine du Monde, 2025).

Mine is packed with substance too (nuts, seeds, and toasted chilies). Good olive oil is non-negotiable. I save neutral oil for frying. I’m generous with the green gold, which acts as both preservative and flavor carrier for all that smoky, nutty heat. Perhaps next time I’ll experiment with argan oil.

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My Salsa Macha Recipe

I use five types of dried chilies: ancho, guajillo, chipotle, morita and pasilla. I also make a fancy version using pine nuts and almonds instead of peanuts and sunflower seeds. Pumpkin seeds are great too.

When it comes to proportions, I tend to combine mild, medium and hot chilies so as to stay below the 30,000 threshold of the Scoville Heat Units scale (SHU). The SHU measures a chili’s spiciness. The higher the number, the hotter the pepper.

For reference, a bell pepper is 0 SHU, jalapeños range from 2,500 to 8,000, and Pepper X, which dethroned the Carolina Reaper in 2023 as the world’s hottest pepper according to Guinness World Records, clocks in at 2.6 million.

If you are a black belt in spicy contests, you might want to use more morita chilies in your version. Below I am including the amount of each dried chili pepper and its corresponding SHU level in case you prefer to customize.

Each ingredient is prepared individually (ground, toasted, fried) for maximum flavor and distinct texture.

Yield: 8-10 jars (250 grams each)

Ingredients

2 Ancho chilies = 1000 to 1,500 SHU

1 Pasilla chili = 1,000 to 1,500 SHU

2 Guajillo chilies = 2,500 to 5,000 SHU

1 Chipotle chili = 2,500 to 10,000 SHU

1 Morita chili = 15,000 to 30,000 SHU

1.3 liters of olive oil, divided (1 liter to mix the salsa, the rest to fry the chilies and garlic)

5 cloves garlic, chopped and fried

2 tablespoons salt

1 cup apple vinegar (lemon is not a substitute here)

½ cup dehydrated chapulines (small grasshoppers) optional

½ cup toasted almonds, chopped coarsely

½ cup toasted pine nuts

1 cup toasted sesame seeds

Method

Two days before: wash the dried chilies and let them dry thoroughly on a tray for a couple of days.

Remove the stems from the dried chilies and use scissors to cut them for easy seed removal. I personally leave some seeds for extra heat.

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet and place the chilies. Lightly fry them while constantly stirring them to prevent them from burning. Transfer the fried chilies to a baking tray and allow them to cool down. Using the same pan, fry the garlic in the remaining oil from the chilies.

In small batches, use a food processor to combine chilies with garlic and chapulines (if using). Process briefly to crush the chilies. Do not make a paste. Repeat with each batch.

Combine all processed chilies in one large mixing bowl. Add toasted sesame seeds, ground toasted almonds, toasted pine nuts and mix well. Pour the olive oil, vinegar and salt over the chilies and stir well. Cover and let the salsa macha mingle overnight.

The next day, stir the salsa and add more olive oil if needed as the dried chilies tend to absorb some of the oil.

After two days, salsa macha should be ready for use. Mix well one more time before transferring into small glass containers. Store in the fridge for up to 6 months.

About Chilies

Chilies are native to Mexico and Central America, where they’ve been used for over 8,000 years. Archaeological evidence from Puebla’s Tehuacán Valley dates to 6500 BC, with domestication occurring around 6,000 years ago. Today, chilies remain vital to traditional Mexican cuisine, which UNESCO recognizes as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Beyond flavor, these little warriors pack medicinal punch. The compound capsaicin boosts circulation, relieves pain, lifts mood, and supports heart health. Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicines have long used chilies to stimulate digestion and treat inflammation. No wonder they’ve been treasured across cultures for thousands of years.

Sources:

“La salsa macha mango chipotle : Une sauce généreuse, équilibrée en piquant, et accessible à tous les palais,” Le Magazine du Monde, August 28, 2025

https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-passe-a-table/article/2025/08/28/la-salsa-macha-mango-chipotle-une-sauce-genereuse-equilibree-en-piquant-et-accessible-a-tous-les-palais_6636936_6082232.html

“Why You Probably Can’t Handle The World’s Hottest Pepper,” Tasting

Table.https://www.tastingtable.com/1932481/hottest-pepper-world-pepper-x

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I miss everything about Mexico City: its vibrant chaos, the mercados overflowing with bright green nopales and corn in every shade of purple, white, and gold. I miss the scent of copal incense curling skyward like prayers.

I miss the carpets of orange and yellow cempasúchil (marigolds) burning bright as small suns, and the papel picado fluttering overhead like captured butterflies. I miss the human warmth of the mercado sellers calling out, “Qué le damos, señorita?”

Mexico’s traditions, architecture, kindness, and beauty taught me to celebrate life and death with grace during the six years I called it home. In that megalopolis of 22 million souls, I found solace after nearly 40 years of unresolved grief for my older brother, whose loss I was too young to process.

Through the rituals of Día de los Muertos, I learned to say goodbye and weave remembrance into joy, to understand that love never ends, it only changes form.

Discovering Día de los Muertos

When I moved to Mexico in 2015, Día de los Muertos felt foreign, even unsettling. Sugar and chocolate calaveras (skulls) of all sizes grinned at me in every mercado, their empty eyes seemed full of mystery.

I avoided them until my children brought home sugar calaveras they’d made at school. That’s when I had to face them for the first time. I had nowhere to hide.

I found it strange to leave food for the dead. The colorful altars with their offerings of lovingly prepared dishes seemed to shimmer between worlds.

And why would the dead care about music? Yet the music pouring from cemeteries felt both festive and defiant, as if joy itself were an act of rebellion against forgetting.

But with time, Mexico worked its magic on me and all the baggage I’d carried about death. I started to see calaveras as a tender and playful symbol of eternal love.

Welcoming the Dead

During the first two days of November, the holiday summons the souls of the departed to visit the living. The blend of Aztec and Catholic traditions gave birth to a unique celebration of love and continuity unlike anywhere else.

On those nights, the veil between worlds becomes paper-thin, and the air itself seems to shimmer with the presence of those we’ve loved and lost.

My first Día de los Muertos was in San Angel, a neighborhood where colonial architecture meets bohemian soul. That’s where Frida and Diego lived too. I went not knowing what to expect, still uneasy about the sugar skulls, still uncertain about celebrating death.

The plaza overflowed with altars. There were dozens of them, each more elaborate than the last. Families gathered around their ofrendas, faces painted as calaveras, some elegant, some scary, all beautiful in their defiance. Children ran between the crowds eating pan de muerto. Musicians played.

I was struck by the spectacle and the way Mexicans moved between reverence and joy. No one was performing grief. No one was hiding from it either. Mexicans celebrate life and death with a wisdom the rest of us have forgotten.

The Altars of Mexico

Across Mexico, altars bloom in homes, schools, cafés, and cemeteries like night-flowering jasmine, each unique yet united in their purpose of welcoming the departed.

Mexicans make stunning community altars throughout cities for their poets, painters, and unknown ancestors. These ofrendas celebrate life and the kind of love that survives war, distance, silence, even death itself.

During one of my many visits to the Museo Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán, I saw the annual ofrenda. It honored Frida and Diego with tamales, tequila, and painted self-portraits. The beauty of the altar made them feel present, as if they’d never left.

My Brother’s Altar

Each October, no matter where my nomadic life takes me following my husband’s job, I unpack my Día de los Muertos decoration box, much like others unpack Christmas ornaments.

I begin my ritual with papel picado, those delicate cutouts that dance like memories. Then comes the calavera, no longer frightening but friendly. My brother’s photo, forever five years old, forever smiling, takes its place of honor. Candles stand ready to light his way home through the night.

When I’m lucky enough to find cempasúchil, they become the altar’s crown. European marigolds aren’t quite the same, but they carry the same intention. Their bright orange petals and intoxicating scent create a path of light and fragrance that guides souls back to the world of the living.

A small bowl of water quenches their journey’s thirst. A pinch of salt purifies their path and represents the continuance of life. I add candies to honor my brother’s five-year-old sweet tooth, the part of him that will never age, never change.

When possible, I add pan de muerto. As I arrange these offerings with intention, my brother’s photo watches over me like a guardian angel.

Pan de Muerto

Weeks before Día de los Muertos, bakeries and supermarkets start selling pan de muerto with the same enthusiasm retailers have for pushing Christmas in September. Apparently even honoring the dead can’t escape the early-bird special.

Pan de muerto, a brioche-like bread Mexicans enjoy with hot chocolate, is a cornerstone of the ofrenda. Its circular shape represents the eternal cycle of life and death, while its “bones” and central knob evoke skulls, teardrops, or hearts, depending on the tale. There are many types of pan de muerto, but the Moroccan in me loves the version infused with orange blossom.

Yield: Makes 10-12 small loaves, approximately 10 centimeters diameter

Ingredients:

150 milliliters warm milk

500 grams all-purpose flour

150 grams sugar, divided

11 grams active dry yeast (or instant dry yeast)*

¼ teaspoon salt

3 whole eggs + 3 egg yolks

2 tablespoons grated orange zest

1 tablespoon orange blossom water (agua de azahar)

150 grams butter, room temperature

For finishing:

1 egg, beaten

50 grams melted butter

100 grams sugar for sprinkling

Method:

In a medium bowl, combine warm milk, 125 grams of the flour (taken from the 500g), 2 tablespoons sugar (taken from the 150g), and the yeast. Mix well, cover with a towel, and let rest for 20-30 minutes until bubbly and foamy. If no bubbles appear, start over with fresh yeast.

*Note: If using instant dry yeast, you can skip this step and add the yeast directly to the flour mixture, though the sponge method gives better texture and flavor.

In a large bowl or stand mixer, combine the remaining flour, remaining sugar, and salt. Mix to combine. Make a well in the center and add the sponge mixture and eggs. Begin mixing.

Add the orange zest and orange blossom water. Mix until combined. Add butter one tablespoon at a time, kneading well after each addition. Do not add all at once or it will be difficult to incorporate.

If using a stand mixer: knead for 10 minutes until smooth and elastic. The dough will be slightly sticky at the base of the bowl.

If kneading by hand: the dough will seem impossible to work with at first, sticky and shapeless. Do not add more flour or you will end up with brioches like I did the first time. Knead in intervals: 10 minutes kneading, then rest covered for 10 minutes. Repeat. Lift the dough from the edges, slam it down on the work surface with force. Continue for about 30 minutes total until the dough is smooth and elastic.

First rise: Place dough in a lightly greased bowl, oil the surface and sides of the dough, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm spot until doubled in size (about 1-2 hours).

Shape the bread: Punch down the dough to release air. Reserve a small portion (about 150g) for decorations. Divide the remaining dough into 10-12 equal portions (approximately 100 grams each) and shape into round loaves. Flatten slightly with your hand. Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet with space between them.

With the reserved dough, make decorations: divide into small pieces. For each bread, you need to roll two pieces into thin strips for “bones” (make indentations with your fingers to create bone segments). And also roll one small piece into a ball for the “skull.”

Brush each loaf with beaten egg. Place bone strips in an X pattern on top of each loaf with the ball in the center. Press gently to attach.

Second rise: Cover and let rise again in a warm spot for about 40 minutes to 1 hour until puffy.

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown. While bread is still warm, brush generously with melted butter. Immediately sprinkle with sugar so it sticks. Let cool slightly before serving.

There is no celebration without music

I love listening to these songs while baking, while lighting candles, while building my altar. Let the music fill the spaces between memory and now.

“La Llorona” by Mariachi Juvenil de Tecalitlan & Lila Downs

“Mezcalito” by Lila Downs

“México en la Piel” by Luis Miguel

What Mexico Taught Me

“La muerte no existe, la gente sólo muere cuando la olvidan; si puedes recordarme, siempre estaré contigo.” (Death doesn’t exist. People only die when they’re forgotten. If you can remember me, I will always be with you) - Isabel Allende, Cuentos de Eva Luna

As I arrange my offerings, I feel Mexico’s presence as surely as I feel my own heartbeat. Its ability to weave reverence into joy, to make death beautiful without denying its sorrow, has transformed me in ways I’m still discovering.

Mexico taught me that death is not the opposite of life, forgetting is. Food can be prayer. And love, real love, doesn’t end when the heart stops. It only changes form. It moves from the body to the everywhere. It becomes the air we breathe and the light we see by.

Con amor y paz 💛

Sanaa

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Preface — October 2025

In October 2025, as the Middle East mourns and hopes, and relations between Jews and Muslims worldwide have been strained for generations, we offer this table to honour shared grief and dream of healing through food.

The land trembles with memory — Israel’s trauma after October 7, Gaza’s devastation, the fragile promise of ceasefire. When words divide and compassion feels scarce, perhaps food still knows how to speak.

We gather here — Jewish, Muslim, human — to cook, to listen, and to remember that coexistence is not a relic of history but a choice renewed at every meal.

Authors’ Note

“Ecumenico” imagines a table where Jews and Muslims — past and present — meet through food, philosophy, and memory.

Opening Scene – 12th Century Córdoba

The Guadalquivir drifts beyond the walls, carrying the hum of merchants and students. In the courtyards, orange blossoms fall, their fragrance caught by warm Andalusian air.

Down a narrow side street, behind an unmarked door, a small courtyard kitchen glows with lamplight. Copper pots hang from hooks; the scent of cinnamon and smoke mingles with night jasmine.

Even here, among fire and spice, books remain, because philosophy refuses to leave. Tonight, a round wooden table is set beneath the open sky, and four of us gather under an invisible umbrella wide enough to cover centuries.

We call this meeting Ecumenico — not to erase our differences, but to sit long enough for food and words to cross the boundaries that history too often raised.

The Guests

Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon, 1138–1204) — rabbi, physician, jurist and philosopher. Author of The Guide for the Perplexed, he sought to reconcile reason and revelation, law and life. For him, food is regimen and discipline; balance is the servant of the soul.

Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) — Muslim philosopher, jurist and commentator on Aristotle. He taught that reason and faith share one light, refracted through different lenses. For him, food is metaphor: spice as diversity, grain as reason, variety as truth.

Sanaa () —Moroccan Muslim, nomadic cook and writer. She carries preserved lemons and ras el hanout across oceans. For her, food is memory, culture, and coexistence.

Elli (Beyond Babylon) — Jewish writer tracing Baghdadi roots through India and Europe. For him, food is migration — turmeric and cardamom marking the roads of exile.

Between us sits a wide platter of couscous — golden, fragrant, piled with lamb, pumpkin and chickpeas, perfumed with saffron and cinnamon, sweetened with a touch of caramelised onions.

Beside it glows a bowl of matboucha — red, fiery, slow-cooked, shimmering with garlic and chilli.

One carries the warmth of North Africa; the other, the spice of Baghdad and Calcutta. Together they taste like exile remembered and home reinvented.

Ritual

Maimonides rises. From a copper ewer, he pours water over his hands and makes the traditional blessing.

“Purity before food is as vital as balance within it. The body must be fit, for without the body the soul cannot serve.”

Ibn Rushd nods.

“We too wash before meals — a reminder that reason, like the body, falters without discipline.”

Sanaa smiles.

“Water purifies more than the hands; it quiets the heart before the meal.”

Elli adds.

“I wash and think of travel and exile. Dust falls away; memory clings.”

Outside, the call to prayer fades; the city holds its breath.

The Ingredients

Maimonides:
“The pumpkin is gentle — moistening without burdening. Chickpeas sustain, but too many slow the stomach. Cinnamon warms; saffron inflames if excessive. Balance in food is balance in life.”

Ibn Rushd:
“Saffron is fire, cinnamon its shadow. Spice is like philosophy: it burns, but it illuminates. Truth appears when contrasts converse.”

Sanaa:
“I bring ras el hanout — warm, layered and lightly sweet, a blend of many spices that become one. It turns a simple meal into something alive. One spoon carries the sun of my Morocco into every dish. Spice is how memory learns to travel.”

“Elli listens, the scent of tomatoes and garlic waiting its moment.”

The Conversation

Ibn Rushd:
“Power silenced us once.”

Maimonides:
“Yet we found ways to speak again.”

Elli:
“And still we cook, to keep the dialogue warm.”

A moment of silence.

Maimonides:
“Excess destroys harmony. Too much spice, like too much desire, unsettles body and soul.”

Ibn Rushd:
“But restraint without daring is silence. Law without reason is as bland as couscous without stew.”

“Sanaa stirs the pot quietly; sometimes listening is the truest form of dialogue.”

Silence settles, broken only by the simmer of the stew.
Outside, the Guadalquivir flows on, carrying centuries with it.

Couscous and Matboucha

Sanaa:

“Humble and golden, couscous is as old as our two guests. Light as cloud and patient in its making, it gathers people in joy and in grief. Couscous is a dish that was born to be shared.”

Elli:
“And I bring matboucha — not my grandmother Ruby’s relish, for she made kasondi in Calcutta. In Israel I learned matboucha; now I make both in Munich, switching between fiery-sweet and fiery-savory. Garlic, chillies, tomatoes, turmeric — slow-simmered until sweet, hot, and thick. I prefer matboucha beside couscous; both begin as chaos and end in balance. Like our history.”

Sanaa:
“I steam mine three times, but what matters is that each grain stays separate, never drowned. It’s patience in edible form.”

Elli:

“In India there was no couscous. Rice took its place, but the form endured — grain below, stew above, balance between. Diaspora adapts; it never forgets. And with matboucha on the side, the meal sings east and west together — one grain, one spark.”

The Shared Meal

The stew is ladled onto the platter. Pumpkin melts into chickpeas; saffron stains the broth gold; cinnamon perfumes the air.

Beside it, the matboucha glows — red as sunset, a thread of spice binding memory to the present.

We lean in, eating together from the same dish — hands, spoons, silence, steam.

Maimonides gives thanks:

“We have eaten and are satisfied. Gratitude sustains more than food.”

Ibn Rushd replies:

“Eat of the good things, and give thanks.”

Sanaa:

“May this table linger in memory beyond tonight.”

Elli:

“The table is never permanent, but while it stands, it matters.”

The Recipes We Leave Behind

Sanaa’s Moroccan Couscous with Lamb, Chickpeas & Pumpkin

Serves 6 | Time ≈ 1 h 45 min.

(See PDF for full recipe — this summary keeps main method and flavour profile consistent with Sanaa’s original two-pot recipe.)

• Meat and chickpeas simmered with onions, ginger, ras el hanout, saffron and herbs.

• Vegetables cooked separately in seasoned broth until tender.

• Grains steamed three times for lightness; or the quick way.

• Tfaya of caramelised onions and raisins crowns the dish.

• Served as a pyramid: couscous at the base, meat in centre, vegetables and chickpeas above, and broth poured over.

Sanaa's Moroccan Coucous Recipe By The Walking Palm

1.15MB ∙ PDF file

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Elli’s Matboucha (Spicy Tomato Relish)

A sweet-hot companion to couscous — fiery, rich, and red as sunset.

Elli’s matboucha — fiery, sweet, and savoury; a companion to couscous and conversation alike.

Ingredients
1 cup neutral oil (canola or corn)
20 garlic cloves, crushed
3 kg ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp oil (for frying peppers)
4 green chillies, thinly sliced
2 tbsp hot paprika
1 tsp cumin
½ tsp turmeric

Method

1. Fry garlic gently in oil until pale gold.

2. Add tomatoes, salt and sugar; bring to a boil, then simmer 2 hours, stirring until thickened.

3. In a small pan, heat 3 tbsp oil; fry chillies and stir in paprika, cumin and turmeric.

4. Add this to the tomato pot. Cook 20 minutes more, until jam-like.

5. Cool. Serve alongside couscous or bread; it should glisten, never run.

Matboucha is a discipline of patience: the oil carries the heat, the slow simmer draws sweetness. Like a good conversation — it thickens as it deepens.

Download full recipe

Elli’s Matboucha (spicy Tomato Relish)

1010KB ∙ PDF file

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Coda - A Call to Coexistence

This table never truly existed.
Maimonides and Ibn Rushd walked the same Córdoban streets but never dined together.
Both were exiled for their ideas — one a Jew driven from Almohad Spain, the other a Muslim cast out for daring to interpret Aristotle.

And yet tonight, in imagination, they sit with us — philosopher, physician, nomads, Jew and Muslim — in peace, at one round table.

We cooked this scene to life not for nostalgia, but for a fragile hope:
that cooking and eating together may still be a language of repair.

Host a meal. Steam couscous. Simmer matboucha.
Share a story. Listen. Mend.

Join us — cook, write, taste, or tell.
Let the table grow until every voice finds a place.

🕊️ If this table spoke to you, share it — that’s how our conversation grows.

About the Authors

🌙 Sanaa Boutayeb — Warsaw-based Moroccan writer and nomad exploring memory, migration, and coexistence through food and story.
🕎 Elli Benaiah — Munich-based former criminal lawyer turned chef and food writer, whose project Beyond Babylon traces Jewish foodways from Baghdad to Shanghai.

Follow our work:
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I do. Rosemary was the first language I ever learned: sharp, camphor-rich, carried in steam from my grandmother’s kitchen in Taourirt. Before I knew letters or lullabies, I knew that scent. It spoke to me in bowls of cracked barley soup where garlic softened in rosemary broth and a final drizzle of olive oil gave it a silky finish.

My grandfather, both entrepreneur and farmer, used to say: “When you truly love the land, the land loves you back.” I think rosemary was how the land first spoke to me, through my grandmother’s hands.

Ma Aicha: Small in Frame, Titanic in Spirit

Born in 1912, my grandmother was petite but strong in spirit. She ran a traditional Moroccan family house with an efficiency and leadership no MBA program could ever teach. Generous to a fault, she was the family’s problem solver, the kind of woman who would help a widow or an orphan while managing a household of twenty. Though wealthy, she was indifferent to luxury, and her legacy of kindness and wisdom continues to inspire me.

We called her Ma Aicha, “Ma” like mama. She passed away when I was about six, yet her presence lingers in my kitchen every time I reach for rosemary.

The Kitchen Table

When I was a toddler, she’d carry me from my parents’ room to the kitchen of our home in Taourirt. Back then, children didn’t leave home at eighteen; they stayed, married, and raised families under the same roof.

I’d sit on a cushion pulled up to the low round family table, the kind you would find in many Moroccan homes. The air was thick with rosemary’s camphor kick, garlic and barley softening in the broth, and the promise of olive oil at the end, smoothing everything into silk.

That soup, dchicha, was my grandmother’s signature.

Taste Memory

In her culinary memoir Climbing the Mango Trees, Madhur Jaffrey recalls helping the legendary James Beard teach a class.

He asked her a question that stopped her in her tracks: “Do you think there is such a thing as a taste memory?”

Her answer was yes. She realized her palate had recorded millions of flavors: cumin, cardamom, ginger. All were stored in her head long after she left India to study in England, even before she knew how to cook.

Taste memory is real. Even today, whenever I smell rosemary, I’m carried back to the savory breakfasts my grandmother made for me when I was about three years old. I don’t recall her face clearly or even the toys of my childhood, but I remember her rosemary soup.

For me, that scent is my first language of memory. Flavors are some of the roots we carry with us when everything else gets left behind.

Debdou’s Fierce Rosemary

The rosemary she used came from her small town of Debdou, where wild shrubs thrive in rocky, sun-scorched hills. Unlike decorative rosemary from a garden center, it was camphor-rich, medicinal, and unpretentious. Boiled or distilled into hydrosol, it became food, a natural remedy, and memory stitched together.

To this day, the scent of any rosemary transports me to that breakfast table, tying me to my grandmother, her hometown, and Morocco’s herbal heritage.

Debdou is known for its historically multi-ethnic population. It was not only known for its rosemary but also for something far rarer, something I am proud of and deeply miss nowadays: the coexistence of Muslims and Jews who lived side by side for centuries.

In this small mountain town, they offered the world a lesson in how roots can intertwine and nourish one another.

The Many Lives of Rosemary

Rosemary takes its name from the Latin ros marinus, meaning “dew of the sea,” because it grows wild along the Mediterranean coast, thriving on sea spray and sunlight.

In Morocco, rosemary (azir in Tamazight, Iklil al-Jabal in Arabic) is used fresh or dried in roasted meats, stews and breads. Rosemary water is less common, more of a traditional remedy, added to soups or used for hair care. Rosemary oil is far more familiar, rubbed on sore muscles and aching joints.

Elsewhere, rosemary sprigs flavor focaccia, roasts, potatoes, and soups, while its water and oil appear in skincare, aromatherapy, and even in lemonades, or the occasional infused drink. Recently it has resurfaced as the latest craze for hair growth on social media, usually just sprigs steeped in hot water for a few minutes.

Martha Stewart’s website recently ran an article by Jamie Cuccinelli, “How to Make Rosemary Water—and Everything You Can Do With It.” It shows how the tradition is being rediscovered today, suggesting steeping sprigs in hot water for 30 minutes to 2 hours, then using the infusion for hair rinses, facial sprays, or refreshing drinks.

I love seeing rosemary water travel into new spaces, from kitchens to beauty counters to social media trends. In my grandmother’s kitchen, it had another life. She boiled it slowly for soup and kept bottles in the fridge for healing. Different methods, different purposes, yet the same plant linking memory, care, and everyday life.

Science and Tales

Modern research confirms what tradition long knew: camphor-rich rosemary carries antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial power. In Morocco, there is even a rhyming proverb, “azir kaydawi el khanzir”, meaning rosemary heals the boar. The story goes that wild boars chew rosemary to disinfect bullet wounds during hunting season. I have yet to see that myself — maybe not!

Spiritually, rosemary has symbolized remembrance, clarity, and protection for centuries. It has been burned to purify spaces, carried to ward off negativity, and offered as a sign of loyalty and love. In the end, science and memory, myth and practice, all point to the same truth: rosemary heals the body and the mind.

Rosemary and Garlic Cracked Barley Soup (Dchicha)

Traditionally served warm for breakfast, though I enjoy it any time of day. Its beauty lies in its simplicity: just barley, rosemary, garlic, salt, and olive oil. No bread needed.

You can prepare the rosemary water a day ahead to make the cooking easier. To watch the video of the recipe on my Instagram click here

Rosemary Water (Traditional Method)

Ingredients

2 large handfuls dried wild rosemary sprigs

2 Liters water

Method

1. Rinse rosemary sprigs well.

2. Place them in a large pot with the water. Bring to a boil, then simmer gently for 45–60 minutes.

3. Strain and cool. Store in glass bottles or jars in the fridge for up to 1 week.

Rosemary and Garlic Cracked Barley Soup

Serves: 4
Time: About 1 hour

Ingredients

100 g cracked barley (dchicha)

700 ml rosemary water (see recipe below)

4 garlic cloves, peeled

1 ½ teaspoons salt, or to taste

4 tablespoons olive oil, for finishing

Method

1. Rinse the cracked barley under cold water until the water runs mostly clear. Drain well.

2. In a large pot, combine the rosemary water, barley, and garlic. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer gently, uncovered, for 50–60 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the barley is tender and the broth thickens to a porridge-like consistency. If it gets too thick, add a splash of hot water.

3. Add salt, taste, and adjust if needed.

4. Ladle into bowls and drizzle generously with olive oil just before serving.

Do you speak rosemary? Maybe you speak cumin or cinnamon.

Taste memory is the dialect of belonging, the way we recognize ourselves when everything else has changed.

Like the walking palm tree, I’ve shed many roots and grown new ones in different soils. But rosemary has remained a permanent root, the anchor I carry across borders, the thread that always leads me back to my grandmother and her kitchen.

With love and Peace 💛

Sanaa

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I came back from my holiday in Morocco with pneumonia and it’s really taken me down. Still, in between moments of rest and coughing fits, I put this fig story + recipe together.

The figs were gifted to me by Hassan, an old farmer from the countryside where argan trees thrive in the arid heat, about an hour’s drive from Essaouira.

We’d wandered onto a spot by the lake that borders his land so my teenager could fish. Five minutes after our arrival, Hassan appeared, greeted us warmly, and we struck up a conversation about the region, fishing, and life out there.

In Morocco, it is common to offer and share food with strangers. As a token of appreciation, I handed him a bag of chips from our miserable picnic. With 42 degrees Celsius (about 107.6 °F for my transatlantic friends), it was too hot for a proper picnic anyway, and I had packed only what was easy.

He smiled at the small gesture, and in return insisted on showing us his orchard. After we finished fishing, Hassan led us into his little heaven: rows of fig, olive, Beldi lemon, and pomegranate trees. Beldi lemons are an heirloom variety: small, thin-skinned, intensely fragrant, the kind used in traditional preserved lemons.

Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, Hassan produced a straw basket, lined it with fresh fig leaves, and began filling it with ripe figs. Next to the fig trees stood a beautiful olive tree. He caught me admiring it. “They are not ripe yet,” he said with a smile.

“Do you like Beldi lemons?” he asked. I smiled and said yes, humbled and a little embarrassed that my bag of industrial chips was no match for his generosity.

Across many cultures, the fig and olive have long been seen as sacred. The olive tree as a symbol of peace and resilience; the fig as abundance and sweetness.

For me, their meaning is also deeply spiritual. Standing there between the fig and olive trees, I thought of Surat At-Tin, one of the shortest chapters of the Qur’an, which opens with oaths by these very trees: “By the fig and the olive.”

The surah speaks of the dignity of humanity created in the best of forms, the risk of falling to the lowest of the low, and the path back through faith, good deeds, and Divine justice.

In that moment, it felt alive before me, not only in scripture but in the orchard itself, in the shade of the fig and olive trees, in the stillness of the land, and in the hands that tended it with devotion. Overwhelmed with gratitude, I wept in awe at the beauty, generosity, and peace that flowed through this place.

“All my brothers and sons went to the city,” Hassan said. “I’m the only one who stayed. If I leave, who will take care of this? And what would we be without it? This is who we are. My grandchildren come here and love it.” His words were simple, but so touching, so true.

We exchanged phone numbers. Hassan told me I was welcome anytime. He also grows vegetables: eggplants, beans, courgettes, and was delighted to hear I keep a tiny garden myself.

The next day, my husband and son returned to fish in the same spot and got lucky. They caught nine fish, but they were too small, so they released them back into the lake. Hassan sent me more figs, each one tasting of kindness and sun.

On the third day, I sent Hassan a box of handmade Moroccan sweets as a small token of gratitude. He joined my son and husband for fishing, and this time they were lucky, catching several large fish that were big enough to keep, but they happily left them with their new friend.

Ever offered a bag of chips? Next time, try a basket of figs and maybe some lemons too.

With peace & love 💛🌴
Sanaa

Gluten-Free Almond–Fresh Fig Cake

I wouldn’t add a thing to this cake—it’s delicious on its own with tea or coffee. The first time I made it, I skipped the springform with a removable base and parchment, and unmolding turned into a sticky situation.

Ingredients

200 grams almond flour

100 grams buckwheat flour

150 grams sugar

200 grams unsalted butter, melted & cooled

1½ teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

Zest of 1 lemon

3 eggs, room temp

120 grams full-fat plain yogurt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

8–10 ripe figs, stems trimmed, halved

1–2 tablespoons granulated sugar, for sprinkling

Equipment

23 cm springform with removable base

Parchment paper + a little butter for greasing

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180°C. Lightly butter the base and sides of the pan so the parchment sticks. Fit a parchment round on the base and butter it. Cut a strip about 8–9 cm tall for the sides; line the pan with a 1–2 cm overlap, butter the strip, and let the collar stand about 1 cm above the rim to catch any spilling.

2. Dry mix: Whisk buckwheat flour, almond flour, baking powder, salt.

3. Wet mix: In a large bowl, whisk sugar, melted butter, lemon zest, vanilla until smooth. Whisk in eggs one by one.

4. Add dry mix in 2–3 additions, alternating with yogurt, mixing just until smooth. Batter will be thick.

5. Spread batter in the pan. Arrange figs cut-side up, pressing them (gently) halfway into the batter. Sprinkle evenly with granulated sugar.

6. Bake for 35–45 minutes, until golden and a tester in the cake comes out clean.

7. Cool 15–20 minutes. Release the springform, peel away the parchment collar gently, slide onto a plate, and cool to room temp before serving.

What else?

While nursing pneumonia I watched Season 1 of High on the Hog (Netflix) and loved it—I laughed, cried, and learned so much.

Big thanks to John Paap and Patrick Kelly, hosts of The History of Fresh Produce podcast, for the recommendation. 💛🌴

If food history is your thing, High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America is a must-watch; it follows many of the same threads I’ve been exploring in my Sea Island peas post.

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Once upon a time, Sea Island red peas, an heirloom variety of cowpea native to West Africa, crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans nearly three centuries ago. Some say they were carried by enslaved men and women in their clothing, though the exact details are not clear. What is known is that they took root in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, becoming a cornerstone of Gullah Geechee cooking (a West African–influenced cuisine and culture preserved by the descendants of enslaved Africans in the Lowcountry), and they’re still grown there today.

My peas came from Marsh Hen Mill, a family-owned South Carolina mill devoted to preserving these heritage crops. Last year, my dear Southern friend Amy gifted me a small bag. Back in January, I cooked some in Warsaw, where I live most of the year. I made a stew with lots of onions and garlic, just the way I cook my lentils (recipe here). They tasted earthy, tender, and comforting against the Polish winter cold.

The rest of the Sea Island peas took a different path. I kept them in the fridge, then carried them to Morocco, where I sprouted and planted them in my coastal garden. Now they bloom under the North African sun — a beautiful homecoming nearly three centuries in the making.

I feel grateful for the hands that carried these seeds across oceans and generations, and for the chance to honor their journey. So many never made it… planting them in their ancestral soil feels like remembering them.

When I shared their homecoming story with a photo, I was touched that Micheline Mongrain Dontigny , the queen of Quebec cuisine, replied with her Texas Caviar recipe, a colorful black-eyed pea salad beloved in the American South and is said to bring prosperity when served on New Year’s Day. I instantly knew I had to make Micheline’s recipe using my Sea Island peas, with a few adaptations for my family: I skipped the jalapeños, Tabasco, and Worcestershire. Instead, I added crisp diced cucumbers and tangy Moroccan preserved lemons, and served a luscious homemade harissa on the side.

Micheline’s version is vibrant and zesty. My version tones down the heat for the kids, but leaves room for spice lovers to add their kick. Both cold salads keep beautifully in the fridge for a couple of days.

I’m also grateful to John Paap and Patrick Kelly, hosts of podcast for recommending a Netflix series called High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. It is a must-watch for anyone interested in learning more about this history.

Currently in the middle of nowhere on Morocco’s southern coast with a slow internet connection, I couldn’t watch the series yet, but it’s on my list for when I’m back in Warsaw with fiber optic speed. From what I’ve read, I’m sure I’ll love it. High on the Hog seems to beautifully trace the same threads of history I see in these peas.

You can find Micheline’s Texas Caviar recipe here. Below is my Moroccan adaptation: Homecoming African Caviar Salad.

May it bring you prosperity and peace of mind at any time of year. 💛🌴

Sanaa

Homecoming African Caviar Salad
Adapted from Micheline’s Texas Caviar

From West Africa to the Sea Islands, and now back to Morocco, this salad celebrates a seed’s journey home. It blends the heritage of the Sea Island red pea with bright North African flavors, creating a salad that’s as vibrant in taste as it is in history.

Ingredients

4 cloves garlic, grated

2 teaspoons dried oregano

½ teaspoon ground black pepper

1 tablespoon salt

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

5 cups cooked Sea Island red peas

1 cup red onion, finely chopped

1 large green pepper, diced

2 tomatoes, diced

1 cucumber, diced

1 cup fresh parsley, finely chopped

2 Moroccan preserved lemons, finely chopped

Harissa on the side

Method

1. Whisk garlic, oregano, pepper, salt, mustard, vinegar, and oil in a large bowl.

2. Add peas, vegetables, herbs, and preserved lemons; toss gently.

3. Rest at least 1 hour before serving. Serve chilled or at room temperature, with harissa for heat lovers.

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Argan oil, a global darling of beauty and culinary worlds, comes solely from Morocco’s sun-baked hills. Every drop is an opportunity to be reminded of the precious heritage carried by generations of Moroccan women.

I recently wandered through an Argan forest near Essaouira. It’s harvest season—from June to August, when the ripe fruit falls naturally to the ground. I spotted a few glossy green fruits still clinging to the trees, and then noticed others scattered below. I picked one up. Then another. I slipped them into my pocket. And then, I’ll admit, I got greedy. I took off my hat and started collecting every little dry nut I could find.

Argan trees (Argania spinosa) grow to 8–10 meters and live up to 200 years. They have twisted trunks and wide-spreading crowns. They are particularly adapted to the semi-desert southwestern Souss Valley. In 1998, the argan forest there was designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve, as a tribute to its unique ecological value and cultural importance.

The tree's deep root system helps prevent desertification by holding the soil together, making it an environmental cornerstone in the region. Outside of its native habitat, attempts have been made to cultivate the Argan tree in similar climates, but these attempts have not been successful, thus, the argan products on the global market are predominantly sourced from Morocco.

What most people don’t know is that Argan trees are thorny, and so is everything growing around them.

I was wearing flip-flops—not the smartest choice. My feet and hands caught more than a few scratches and pricks. So much for the nut that promises soft skin. I kept glancing around—this region is home to scorpions and snakes. Meanwhile, women do this every day. Probably in sandals. No gloves. Under a hard sun. I lasted twenty minutes.

The Corporate Takeover of Argan

But today, our tradition is under threat. In The Great Argan Appropriation, Morocco World News (MWN) notes “The sustainability of Morocco's 'miracle oil' has long been threatened by climate change — but it also faces a more immediate danger: international exploitation in an era of globalization.”

Since 2005, the French multinational Olvea has taken control of nearly 70% of Morocco’s argan oil exports. Women’s cooperatives—the heart and soul of the industry—have been pushed to the margins, reduced to subcontracted, low-paid labor, while foreign companies dominate processing, branding, and profits. Access to raw fruit has become increasingly difficult, and traditional ecological practices like the agdal are often ignored.

Agdal, an Amazigh word meaning “protected or forbidden pasture,” refers to a communal system of seasonal rest where specific lands or forests are left untouched to allow for natural regeneration. In the case of argan, this means not allowing goat grazing. For centuries, it ensured the sustainability of argan groves.

To add insult to injury, even the word argane (as spelled in French) was trademarked in France. Ironic, coming from a country that also happens to be mine, where nearly every type of cheese is fiercely protected by trademarks.

Weak legal frameworks have allowed foreign dominance. MWN states: “The strategic and cultural significance of argan oil makes it vital to ensure that access to this natural treasure remains fair, inclusive, and beneficial to local communities.” Women rise daily, braving thorns and heat with baskets in hand, carrying a tradition that deserves ownership, not exploitation.

In 2023, Médias24 published a four-part investigation titled Argane: Hold-up sur un patrimoine national, highlighting the corporate takeover of Morocco’s argan oil industry, which has recently sparked outrage on social media.

I trust Moroccan authorities will take note. This is no longer just about argan oil. It’s about sovereignty, and about ensuring that ancestral knowledge, local labor, and natural resources truly benefit the communities that sustain them.

What Argan Means in the Kitchen

Beyond its cosmetic fame, argan oil has always had a sacred place in Moroccan cuisine. Toasted argan oil adds rich, nutty touch to dishes, drizzled over roasted peppers, stirred into a steaming tagine, or blended into amlou, a traditional spread made from toasted almonds, honey, and argan oil. Think of it as Morocco’s Nutella, but better.

At home, I often blend pure raw argan oil with extra virgin olive oil to make a weekly salad dressing. It’s neutral in flavor, rich in antioxidants and vitamin E. While the roasting process deepens the taste, it also lowers nutritional value. That’s why I like to use both, depending on what the dish calls for.

Let’s also clear up a myth: raw argan oil is not just for cosmetic use. It’s been used in Moroccan kitchens for centuries. What’s marketed globally as “for hair and skin” is often the very same oil we drizzle on food—just labeled differently and mixed with essential oils such as lavender or roses.

A Word on the Cosmetic Industry

Most commercial cosmetic products contain only tiny amounts of argan oil, if any. And once mixed with water, shampoo, or preservatives, much of its benefit is lost. Good quality argan oil is expensive. But it’s worth it. The only way to truly experience its richness, nutritionally or cosmetically, is to use it in its pure form.

What Needs to Change

If argan oil is to remain a symbol of Moroccan wisdom, women’s resilience, and ecological harmony, it must be protected, legally, economically, and culturally.

Because what’s at stake isn’t just a luxury anti-aging oil. It’s the right to tell our own story. To preserve the knowledge carried by generations of Moroccan women—women who continue to rise early, brave the thorns and heat, and work by hand to produce something the world can’t seem to get enough of.

Their labor is invisible in most marketing campaigns, but it’s present in every drop. And if the world really loves argan, it must start by honoring the women who make it possible.

Have you used argan oil for cooking? If so, how?

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It has drawn dreamers from around the world. Orson Welles filmed Othello in the fifties. Jimi Hendrix floated through in the golden haze of the sixties. They came for the waves, the light, the colors.

Essaouira has been my adopted home for years. Every time I walk through the spice stalls of the ancient medina, I feel hypnotized by the melody of the waves crashing against the 18^th century stone ramparts.

And yet, even with all that legend swirling around, it’s the preserved lemons that always stop me - stacked like golden marbles, nestled between pyramids of olives: the cured black ones, the harissa-laced mix, the garlicky greens with red chilies arranged like little edible flowers.

You’ll want to take all of them, and the shop owner will gladly let you taste every single one. Just make sure you bring some bread.

It’s always the same scene: a tourist pauses, tilts their head, and asks, “what are those?”

They don’t realize they’re looking at the soul of a cuisine.

Inside those glossy preserved lemons lives salt, patience, and ancestral common sense.

This ancient preservation method concentrates the flavors, mellows the acidity, and diminishes the bitterness of the peel.

The lemons taste as if they have been through something and came out wiser- softer and more forgiving. It is a transformation through preservation. Perhaps we should call them transformed lemons.

They are an indispensable ingredient in Moroccan cooking, especially for flavoring some dishes and salads. We add them into chicken and olive tagines, or shred the rind into herb-laced salads such as the carrots with chermoula (our North African chimichuri), zaalouk (eggplant caviar), fresh fava beans, and bakkoula (a sautéed spinach and kale salad).

We mix the pulp into marinades, drizzle their brine into sauces. But one thing we never do, is question their place in the kitchen. They are the kitchen.

You buy them when you don’t have time, but it’s always preferable to prepare them at home.

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I’m a Paula Wolfert fangirl. I return to her work every time I write about Moroccan food. I often think of her, wish her good health, and secretly hope I’ll get to meet her one day.

Now, back to preserved lemons.

When Wolfert wrote about food, it was a different time. People approached other cultures with curiosity and care, not for clicks. Nobody was belly dancing for the algorithm. Hashtags hadn’t replaced humility. And the term "cultural appropriation" hadn’t yet entered the conversation.

Writers like Wolfert weren’t trend-chasing. They were trendsetters. They paid attention and wrote with reverence.

In her glorious book The Food of Morocco, she writes:

In Morocco many types of lemons are preserved in salt for use in salads, couscous, fish dishes and tagines. I'd go so far as to say that preserved lemons are the most important condiment in the Moroccan larder. Fresh lemons are never an adequate substitute. The taste, texture and aroma of preserved lemons are unique and cannot be duplicated by other means (no matter what some food writers tell you).

And she’s right. No matter what some food writers say.

What is the point of preserved lemons?

I beg your pardon. Is that even a question?

If you search “preserved lemons,” the first thing that comes up is “what is the point of preserved lemons?” Since when have we decided to simplify a millennial tradition into a point? Does everything need to have a point?

According to whoever decided to explain the “point,” preserved lemons “add a big punch of flavor, instant umami, and complexity to any dish.”

When was the last time you had a good meal and said, “Wow, the umaminess is really out of this world”?

The answer is sterile at best. In Morocco, we say it’s yummy, not umami.

Culinary appropriation has gone off limits.

Let me be clear: preserved lemons are not a trend. They are not some elevated “Mediterranean lemon confit” or some flavormaxing trick to make your food “pop” (read Dianne Jacob’s What is Flavormaxing and Will it Impact Recipe Writing?).

Preserved lemons are a region’s heritage, salted and sealed in glass. They are how we remember. And when I see food writers, celebrity chefs, or TikTok’s latest kitchen clown tossing them into a dish with zero context, no mention of Morocco, no nod to North Africa, I get tired.

If you’re asking what the point of preserved lemons is, you’re asking the wrong question. The point is: not everything needs a point. Some things just need to be honored.

So when you use them, make sure they carry preserved heritage too.

With love & peace

Sanaa 💛🌴

Preserved lemons recipe:

To make preserved lemons, for the first time I recommend starting with 5 lemons. Use a one-pint heat-proof glass jar with airtight lid and leak proof rubber gasket. You can either sterilize the jar in boiling water or run it through a dishwasher cycle. Also, pick fresh unwaxed lemons.

Once you preserved lemons are transformed, use a clean fork to take them out of the jar to avoid contamination.

Some say you should rinse preserved lemons before using them. I don’t. I just skip the salt in the recipe instead.

Container type:

One-pint heat-proof glass jar with an airtight lid and leak-proof rubber gasket.

Ingredients

5 medium unwaxed lemons, washed and dried

1/2 cup salt, more if needed

Method

1. Sterilize the jar in boiling water or running it through a dishwasher cycle. Dry thoroughly and set aside

2. Remove and discard the stem ends of the lemons.

3. Slice each lemon into quarters lengthwise but not all the way through. Leave enough uncut rind at the base to hold the lemon together.

4. Over a large bowl, use your fingers to gently squeeze the juice from each undetached lemon wedge, collecting the juice in the bowl.

5. Still working over the bowl, generously fill each juiced lemon with approximately 1 tablespoon of salt.

6. Close the lemons, and pack them tightly in the glass jar.

7. Pour the collected salty lemon juice over the lemons. Add more juice if necessary to completely cover the lemons. Finish by adding two teaspoons of salt over the top.

8. Seal the jar and store in a cool dark place for two weeks, shaking and turning every two days without opening it.

9. After two weeks, move the jar to the refrigerator. The lemons will be ready to use once the rinds have softened after about one week. Once preserved, they can last for up to eight months.

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