Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Moroccan Chicken with Pumpkin, Dates, and Almonds

The burden of pumpkins. Why do they grow so many? Just for us to smash or carve out and then throw away? Hardly anyone actually cooks with pumpkins; when people make pumpkin pie they almost always use canned. The pumpkin crop in the Northeast seems crazy to me. How many ornamental pumpkins can one household have? Three, four? To keep on display until they collapse into a mush of rot? Then even the deer won’t eat them. I’m sad for all those pumpkins, and I feel it’s my duty as a cook to try my best to cook something with them. Being so into Moroccan cooking lately, I thought a tagine would be a good idea. When I cooked at Florent, we always added pumpkin or butternut squash chunks to our couscous, and it was delicious.

My new recipe here is a mellow tagine. No preserved lemon, or olive, or caper. No sharp edges. I let the warm spices do all the talking. I did, however, add a few drops of sherry wine vinegar at the end to balance the sweetness of the dates. You might want to do that, too. Taste at the end of cooking, and see what you think.

Most people, if they cook pumpkin at all, roast it. It’s hard to skin, but I don’t care. I really like doing it, and I have sharp knives. If you don’t want to skin and cube a pumpkin, you can absolutely use butternut squash instead, which is much easier to deal with, and if you get one from a farmer’s market right now it should be excellent. Pick one with a long neck and just use that part, which is easiest to skin. Save the bulby end for roasting.

As you probably know, Paula Wolfert is my cooking idol. She introduced me to the beauty of Moroccan cooking. I return to her books often. But I’ve just discovered a new Moroccan book written by Nargisse Benkabbou, a daughter of Moroccan immigrants who now lives in London. It’s called Madaq, which means flavor in Moroccan Arabic. The book is filled with traditional and contemporary takes on Moroccan cooking, and almost every recipe looks good.

She offers her version of a classic tagine makfoul, which is lamb braised with ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon and then covered with thick slices of sweet onion and tomatoes. It looks beautiful, and I’ll be trying it soon. And I’m going to try m’semen, a traditional skillet flatbread, which she stuffs with herbs and cheese.

When she goes nontraditional, most of her ideas make sense, like when she takes the classic chicken tagine with preserved lemon and olives and turns it into a quick sheet pan dinner. I can see that. No longer a tagine, but the spirit is there.

Since I’m already in love with Moroccan food, I expected to take away something good and new from this book—I love expanding my knowledge of traditional Moroccan cooking—but I didn’t expect to be so drawn into her contemporary recipes. I love the idea of her harissa Caesar salad with roasted chickpeas, and of her cumin and paprika roasted carrots with almonds, olives, and herbs, served over yogurt, which I plan to try as soon as I get a beautiful bunch of Greenmarket carrots.

She also gives us a bunch of interesting spice and herb mixes. I had never made a completely raw green harissa before, and I zeroed right in on her recipe, making it the day I bought the book.

Here’s my version of Nargisse’s green harissa: She calls for all jalapeño, but I used three jalapeño, one poblano, and one Italian frying pepper, just because I had them in the fridge and needed to use them up. They all get roughly chopped. Next you want  a big handful of Italian parsley and a few big sprigs of mint (she uses cilantro, which unfortunately makes me gag), one chopped garlic clove, about a teaspoon of freshly ground cumin, some salt, and about a teaspoon of sugar. Everything goes in the food processor. I drizzled in about ½ cup of good olive oil and then whizzed it all smooth. Took about 5 minutes to make, and it was absolutely delicious.

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Recipe below: Moroccan-Style Chicken with Eggplant, Tomato, and Almonds

I was trying to figure out something deep and exciting to do with the last eggplants and tomatoes of the season when I recalled this mix: chicken, eggplant, tomato, almonds, and a big assortment of spices. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The sweet memory was from a recipe I used to make from Paula Wolfert’s The Foods of Morocco. She was my kitchen hero when I first started out, and I still think of her often. Much of my cooking style I picked up from her, especially when I needed to branch out from my family’s Southern Italian flavors (I love all those flavors, but sometimes a cook’s got to mix it up, you know what I mean?). She let me breathe in something new but not so far away culturally.

I went back to look at her recipe, and it still looks good. However, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted right now, so I changed up the spices and added two herbs I’ve still got plenty of in my garden, marjoram and spearmint (actually my mint variety is called berries and cream, a lovely, not-too-sharp, dark green, mellow mint that’s great in drinks, too). I especially liked the way all the spices and herbs blended with the eggplant and tomato, which formed a thick sauce for the chicken.

So scroll down to a cool-weather dish made with some of summer’s grand finale. Get it while it’s hot.

I have one thing to point about how I prepared the dish: I didn’t cook it in the classic Moroccan tagine way. First, I left the skin on the chicken and browned the pieces before braising them. Moroccan cooks would usually remove the skin. Also, I sautéed the onions and garlic along with the spices, letting them open up. That is European style and the way I prefer to cook. Moroccan cooks would more likely put onions, spices, meat, and liquids in the pot all at once and leave everything to slow simmer.  I guess my approach is more in the Parisian Moroccan style.

Meanwhile, anyone out there who remembers Alleva Dairy on Grand Street may be interested to learn that they’ve just opened a branch at Chelsea Market.

As you may recall, Alleva’s lovely little shop was on Grand and Mulberry, right down the block from Di Palo. It opened in 1892 and was known as the oldest cheese shop in America. I used to go there all the time for their house-made mozzarella and ricotta, fresh pasta, all sorts of salami, and, most important, for their friselle, the tooth-cracking lard-and-black-pepper biscuits my mother always placed in the bottom of the bowl of her Christmas Eve zuppa di pesce. I haven’t been able to find those things anywhere else, and they don’t have them in the new Alleva shop. Alleva had a hard time during Covid and closed in 2023 and moved to New Jersey.

Now they’ve showed up at Chelsea Market. An odd choice, considering that Buon’Italia, an incredibly well-stocked Italian food store, thrives on the bottom floor, where almost all the serious food shopping now happens. Alleva is on the main floor, next to Anthropology and Moscot eyeglasses. There’s not much in the new store, at least not yet. There is some cheese and salami, and there are meatballs. I heard one of the shop people talking about chicken “parm,” but I didn’t see any. They have cannoli. I don’t understand the place. I can only imagine that in opening in a place already filled with first-rate Italian food they wanted to get in on the nostalgia for all things Italian American, figuring that tourists want meatball heroes, chicken “parm,” and cannoli. That’s what it looks like to me.

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Recipe below: Braised Chicken with Morels and Marsala; also, in the text, how to make Japanese Turnips with Butter and Thyme

I haven’t yet found any morels growing in the ground here in Dutchess County, New York, but they’re selling them at Citarella for a shockingly high price. Here’s the good news, though: Since morels are hollow and therefore deceptively light, they never add up to the exorbitant expense their by-the-pound price would suggest. This is really worth remembering.  

Buying morels this year reminded me of something my old cookbook editor Maria Guarnaschelli said to me when I was working with her on my first book. She said never mention anything about price when you’re writing about food. That’s not your job. It’s demeaning to the reader. Peculiar thing to say, I thought, since I always figured it should be part of my job to talk about how much ingredients could cost, if it seemed relevant, like now, for instance. I’m not sure what her thinking was, maybe wanting to appeal to the highest common denominator of cookbook readers in some snobby way. She brought this up several times and was pissed I hadn’t listened to her the first time. Maria was frequently pissed by a lot of things and not always fun to work with. Many of her reprimands, as a result, kind of blew by me. That was a while ago, and now I’m free and on my own and able to pass on any type of cooking wisdom to you. So remember, morels are never as expensive as they seem.

Chicken with morels is a classic dish I try to make at least once every spring. This version, with dry Marsala, I thought came out particularly well, so I’m passing it along. I also recently took the same morel sauce I used here for the chicken and tossed it with fettuccine, adding fresh peas (you could add favas instead, or asparagus tips). You might want to give that a try too.

And if you’re in the mood for another good spring cooking experience, do yourself a favor and get your hands on a bunch of Japanese turnips. They’re in season now. The things are really delicious, and they have no bitterness. In fact they’re sweet. I got mine from Migliorelli Farm at the Union Square Market, but many farm stands have them this time of year. What I did to prepare them was to peel them, cut the big ones in half and leave the little ones whole, sauté them in butter, adding a splash of dry vermouth and some salt and black pepper, and then cover the pan until they were tender, which took about 8 minutes. Then I added fresh thyme. I served them along side my morel chicken. It was a very good combination.

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