Tomatoes are small, pock-marked, and incomparably sweet. Maria likes to make salads of cucumber with mint, green pepper marinated with cumin and coriander. She flavors grated carrot with rosewater, and sweet potato with cinnamon and sugar. The spice market is a world of its own, shaded, redolent, the merchants sitting cross-legged with hanging scales in one hand. The butchers, too, are apart.
Chickens are generally tough, well-aged hens from the farmyard, and appreciated as such.
Maria makes bread twice a day, shaping shallow round loaves of a simple flour and water dough, flavored with salt and raised with a starter from the previous batch. Beside it there's one in the shape of an hour-glass, belonging to a family with twins. To make it, Maria slaps a soft yeast dough on the heated drum, then lets it bounce back again and again to form a thin layer. Couscous, with lamb of course, and carrots, turnips, zucchini, and white cabbage. I flavor it with ginger, pepper and saffron, and finish with plenty of chopped fresh coriander.