Ras-El-Hanout

Stephen and I are deeply attached to a Moroccan restaurant lately (which, I promise, I'll eventually write about). One of my favorite dishes is giant lima beans in ras-el-hanout tomato puree with shaved feta and olive oil. It is a simple preparation that, I think, finally gives lima beans the starring role they so deserve. The tomato puree is warmly fragrant, not exactly sweet, not exactly hot and exactly the sort of thing I'd like to make at home.

The first question I had to tackle was, what exactly is "ras-el-hanout" and how do I get my hands on it? It turns out that ras-el-hanout is a generic phrase sort of like curry powder. It's a spice blend common in Moroccan cuisine and the recipe can vary wildly. Sometimes it uses up to 26 different ingredients including everything from cumin and cayenne to rosebuds, lavender, belladonna leaves, and cantharides (a.k.a. the ground beetles that also make up the famed aphrodisiac Spanish Fly). Clearly, to even approximate the elusive taste of ras-el-hanout, I was going to have to simplify a bit.

Thankfully, epicurious.com yielded a recipe that consisted of spices more readily found in my kitchen. I mixed cumin, ginger, coriander, allspice, cayenne, cinammon, and cloves with salt, ground pepper and a pinch of cardamom in deference to some of the more authentic recipes I'd read.

Tonight I'm going to play with a tomato sauce perfumed with my new spice blend. If it smells half as great as my kitchen does right how, I may be in for a treat. Maybe I can convince Stephen to belly dance a little. . .

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