However, after eating it with my host family at every Iftar during Ramadan, I started to love its unique, savory flavor especially when I would add lemon or spices and eat it with a sweet date and delectable piece of shebakia.
This past week, I actually made harira for the first time. Although every region apparently has their special method for preparing the soup, in Rabat, Morocco’s capital city where I have been living for the past year, the soup is prepared first by boiling finely chopped onions. Next, tomatoes are grated and their skins removed before they too are added to the boiling pot with olive oil, tomato paste from the store, and all the spices we mentioned above except for coriander powder. However, we did add some chopped up leaves from the coriander plant, which in the US we call cilantro. We also added chickpeas and lentils which had been soaking in water.
Next, we covered the pot with a lid and sealed it tight. We used a special pressure cooking pot that cooked the soup at high pressure, so that it would be ready faster. Otherwise, we would have had to wait two hours for it to cook! Luckily, we only had to wait about twenty minutes.
Finally, when the soup was cooked, we added some short vermicelli noodles, some more tomato paste, and a flour and water mixture which gave the soup its characteristic thickness.
Harira uses many traditional ingredients that are grown locally and that make up a large part of the Moroccan diet. Lentils and chickpeas, for example, are two very common foods that grown in right here in Morocco.
