By Prime Sarmiento  

On my first night in Casablanca, I had roast chicken, pickles and flat bread for dinner in an eatery just a stone’s throw away from my hotel.

The dinner was nothing special but I did remember the huge servings and the fact that I could have a lot of bread for such a cheap price. That was also the first time that I tasted the Moroccan staple – the khobz – a round, flattish bread that looks like a giant pandesal – the breadcrumb-covered breakfast rolls of my childhood in Manila.

I would cap that hearty dinner with a shot of the so-called ‘Moroccan whiskey’ aka mint tea – in a nearby café. The mint tea is a combo of gunpowder green tea and mint leaves steeped in hot water and served in a brass teapot known as berrad. I then poured the mint tea in a drinking glass, put in a cube of sugar, mixed it and sipped this non-alcoholic digestif while relishing this alone time.    

This is the same tea that I would drink over and over again (that, plus some of the best and cheapest café noir that I have found)  in one of those coffee shops that I can find just find about anywhere as our tour group moved from one place to another – by train, van and bus – before concluding the week-long northern Morocco tour in Marrakech.

Because this is how I remember my first trip in Morocco – walking around the ruins, visiting one of Africa’s biggest mosques,  bargaining and getting lost in the maze that is the medina, drinking coffee and tea, eating bread.

But it was mostly about the bread – and the fact that no matter how much I loved eating it, I also spent some days Morocco, craving for and searching (in vain) for a warm bowl of rice.   

Daddy died in August 2023 – after five years of dialysis and hospital treatments that nearly wiped out the family’s savings.

I took a leave from my media job in Hong Kong so that I could spend three weeks in Manila helping my nanay and siblings to bury daddy and say goodbye to him for the last time.  

A few days after daddy’s remains were laid to rest, we celebrated nanay’s first birthday party as a widow.  We went to a restaurant where nanay finally had the chance to order the famous mango caramel cake that she was craving for. It was a bittersweet party for us – there was a reminder of our loss (one less seat at our table), there was also a celebration of nanay’s long life (she just turned 75 years old), and gratitude (for the blessing of having a close-knit family).

But mostly we were grateful that we could move on with our lives despite the tragedy – my kuya and nanay stayed with the family in Manila, bunso returned to Vancouver, while I went back to Hong Kong and purchased a round-trip ticket to Casablanca.

I landed at Mohammed V International Airport around mid-November. That was not just my first time in Morocco but also my first time in the African continent.

And since it’s situated in North Africa and a Muslim-majority country, I lumped Morocco with other countries in the MENA region.

This is why weeks before my trip, I deliberately avoided any Middle Eastern or Indian restaurants in Hong Kong because I was dreaming of eating lots of flat bread, hummus and baba ganoush and then alternate that with basmati rice, shawarma and kebab.  

The same basmati rice with melted butter on top and paired with beef kebab and grilled tomatoes that I used to eat with my daddy in our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant in Manila. Daddy worked in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, one of the first batch of overseas Filipino workers who were posted in the Gulf, where he developed a taste for shawarma, pita bread and kebab.

I should have known better though. Or at the very least, I should have learned to manage my expectations had I did a bit of research.

I would have known, for example, that wheat is widely grown in Morocco, and has been cultivated here for thousands of years. I should have seen the giant clue when – while checking the colorful tiles that decorated the walls of the Hasan II mosque on my second day in Casablanca – the guide said that Moroccans are not Arabs, they’re Berbers, thank you very much. Better yet, call them the Amazigh as the word “berber” is derived from an Arabic word which means barbarian. The Amazigh are the indigenous group in North Africa and the guide said that the Arabs came to Morocco to spread the Islam religion and then left.

I do love bread – it’s not easy not to, even if my Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor has advised me to eat more rice as this is better suited to my body.

‘Eat what your ancestors eat’, Doctor Clara told me as she inserted a thin steel need into the skin on my upper back while I laid face down on the therapy bed in her clinic located at one of those high-rise buildings that abound in Hong Kong’s central business district.

But how can I resist bread?  I grew up having pandesal for breakfast. In Hong Kong where I have been based since 2018, there’s at least one or two bakeries in any densely populated neighborhood, each store offering an array of egg tarts, sliced bread and sweet buns.

But bread is not something that we Filipinos ALL day. Bread is like an ‘in-between’ food, something to fill our tummies while preparing for lunch and dinner.

And yes there’s breakfast, and there’s pandesal which we buy from the nearby panaderia in the morning, freshy-baked and warm and eaten either with a dab of butter or some fried eggs and hotdogs.  

And then perhaps for meryenda (or what the hobbits call the second or third breakfast), we’d probably have some slices of white bread, eaten with any number of palaman – coconut jam, peanut butter, liver spread or pimiento cheese spread.

For merienda cena (high tea), there’s an array of sweet bread – pan de coco (sweet roll filled with shredded coconut), ensaymada (round, fluffy pastry covered with cheese and sugar), and Spanish bread (oblong-shaped roll filled with breadcrumbs, margarine and sugar).

But the main two meals will always be warm freshly-cooked rice and ulam – whether that ulam is made of pork, chicken, vegetables or fish, it doesn’t matter as long as there’s rice . My parents, despite being diabetics, never gave up their rice as it’s not considered a real meal when there’s no rice on the table.     

In Morocco – in my first two to three days there at least – I enjoyed the novelty of eating different kinds of bread during breakfast. My favorite was my breakfast at a guesthouse in Meknes – Morocco’s capital once upon a time. I am no morning person but I enjoyed waking up at dawn to go to the balcony, listening to the sound of azhan and then going down to the dining room for a spread of coffee, mint tea, boiled eggs, orange juice and baguette. There’s also the sfenj – which looks like a fried doughnut and msemen – a square, pancake-like flat bread. We ate them with cottage cheese, olives, honey and jam. We needed all that carbo load as we hiked the nearby archaeological site of Volubilis – where we walked around the ruins of the temples and buildings that were once part of the ancient Roman empire.

In the evening, as the residents prepare for maghrib prayers, we explored the narrow alleyways of Meknes, where we got to see the furan – the communal oven where we observed two men baking dough in a wood-fired furnace. The baker gave us pieces of khobz. I ate some of it, bust mostly enjoyed hanging around the area as I savored the aroma of newly-baked breads and the warmth of the oven amid a chilly autumn evening.

I can’t pinpoint the time that I started to get tired of all the bread that I was eating. But I did remember that the last time I enjoyed eating khobz was when I tasted camel burger for the first time in a guesthouse in Fez. I never thought that camel meat could be that tender and tasty. I was disabused of that impression after the guide told me that the burger was mixed with beef because pure camel meat is tough.  

Never mind. I just used those extra calories getting lost in the maze that is the medina of Fez, where I went to see a tannery and then bought a leather handbag.

And then had my picture taken in front of the Royal Palace – which to this day remains the palace of the country’s monarch. We can’t enter though so I just had to content myself looking at the bronze door and the elaborate mosaic tile work that I had assumed decorates most of the historic and grand buildings in Morocco.

I was just so amazed with all the novel things that I have seen that after years of enjoying traveling solo or traveling with my peers, I suddenly missed my parents – wishing my daddy was still alive (he would definitely try that camel burger)  or that my nanay still have strong knees so that she could walk around without the aid of a walking cane.   

The problem with bread, according to my Malaysian friend Evelyn, is that eating a piece of bread is not as filing and satiating as eating a cup of rice. Unlike rice, you can eat a lot of bread and still don’t feel full, she told me. I sort of agreed – I do get satiated after eating a tuna sandwich or about two to three slices of bread. But bread, even if it’s homemade and freshly-baked, feels cold and heavy in my stomach. A cup of steamed rice, meanwhile, feels warm, nourishing and familiar.

And it’s that longing for rice that spurred me to order basmati rice when I saw it in in a menu in a restaurant in a medina in Tangier.  

Not only did it take the waiter almost an hour to serve my order, but the rice was soggy and cold. It was such a bad lunch that I had to leave asap and went to the famous Café Hafa where I had another cup of cafe noir in a café located at the cliff top overlooking the Bay of Tangier. The coffee was warm, the weather a bit nippy, and the view was fantastic.

Of course, I did try again when we had dinner in this rooftop restaurant in the medina in Marrakech – but with the same result. Long wait. Disappointing plate of cold rice. I tried to bury that memory by having a glass of wine afterwards.

I spent the day after wandering the oasis that is Jardin Majorelle – a botanical garden in the middle of a city, but it is more known as the museum (and once upon a time the vacation house) of the late French designer Yves Saint-Laurent.

A week later, I returned to Hong Kong. And in the next few weeks, or probably months – I cooked rice, ordered rice – Thai jasmine white rice, organic Philippine brown rice, Japonica rice. And ate rice. Lots and lots of rice.