My home kitchen and our restaurant kitchen is the same person. In a minor identity crisis. Deciding whether it gears towards an old village kitchen, a kitchen that can serve dozens of restaurant guests or a kitchen I want. First I thought I would give her time to make up her mind, but since she has been taking a while, I am going to open the wooden door (that we removed upon declaring this possibly the most robust part of the whole kitchen obsolete) and get you to meet her.
Moroccan Preserved Lemons
It started with pomegranates. One of the four trees in our garden brought a load of them. “Sweetest I have ever eaten,” my visiting mother-in-law confessed. Mind you, she grew up amidst pomegranate trees unlike me, a child of Russia, who used to treat this exotic fruit as a questionable pleasure. Pomegranate, always sold at premium, was sour and hard to peel. It stained tablecloth, dress, pants, sofa or carpet depending on the consumption situation. In the Russia of my childhood pomegranates arrived in winter to the market stalls run by the men who spoke with the accent as thick as their black eye-brows. The sellers addressed every female shopper “young woman” and at times even asked out. Think of it, along with the pains of buying the overrated fruit you get an unsolicited evidence of your sexuality.
