I’m sorry to say, dear readers, that week nine will be a bit of a letdown. One of the downsides of working so much is that by the time I get around to blogging, I’ve already forgotten everything I did the previous week. Most of my waking hours last week were spent at work, and most of the things I did there are wildly exciting to only a select few people.

I supervised the creation of a middle school book club. Made a publication timeline for the student literary journal. Read more books to tiny children. Created a fabulous dinosaur-themed corner in the library, complete with illustrations of various species and a memorable pun.

This is a special post dedicated to Alyce, the mother of my good friend Alan Levine. Alyce, who passed away unexpectedly two weeks ago, would get up every Sunday morning, bake cookies, and hand them out during the week to anyone who looked like they could use cookie-inspired happiness. A couple of days later, Martha Burtis threw together Cookies for Cogdog, inviting Alan’s friends to bake cookies and share them as a tribute to Alyce.

So last Saturday I got up early and made an enormous batch of sugar cookies, coating myself, my kitchen, and far too many kitchen implements in flour.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been here over a month already. Sometimes I feel like I just arrived, and other times I feel as if I’ve been here for years. A strange feeling, like making a new friend who becomes close so quickly that you forget there was ever a time when you didn’t know each other.

My workweek was action-packed, and by “action-packed” I mean “hours in front of the computer preparing a pretty exciting edtech project”. More on that soon. I mostly remembered to eat food: I made harira again, ate liver by accident for the second time, and probably devoured my weight in homemade Moroccan treats.

I received a request last week to share a little more about work, about religion, and about my sleeping habits. For those of you who don’t know, don’t care, or just haven’t had the time to meticulously stalk me on the internet, I’m working at the American School of Tangier as Educational Technology Specialist/Head Librarian. If you think that sounds like a lot of work, you’d be right.

There are advantages and disadvantages to being in charge of a library. Nonetheless, some pretty exciting things are in store for the library and AST’s one-woman EdTech department. Hold on to your hats, and stay tuned to my blog for further updates!

This post represents an important landmark: my first experience cooking traditional Moroccan food. After nearly three weeks of walking through my apartment building, surrounded by tantalizing smells, I finally learned how to make harira, one of the most delicious soups I’ve ever tasted. And lucky you, I’m going to post the recipe! This soup is usually the first thing served during iftar, and it’s a Moroccan specialty.

My workdays during week three were filled with reorganizing the library. Moving shelves, sorting out picture books and junior fiction, peeling tape, selecting featured books, and making to-do lists. I also spent a great deal of my week walking and cooking, though not at the same time.

I cooked two vegetable curries, pizza for six, meringues, countless fresh fruit smoothies, and tabbouleh with parsley from the Sunday market, picked fresh that morning. I scavenged some beautiful succulents from the edge of a beach and finally found a basil plant, both of which are sitting happily on my balcony. I even found time to argue about Shakespeare.

Week two was a bit more challenging for me, but not because I was having any less fun. I decided to fast for the first week of Ramadan, and gained a new appreciation for those who keep it up the entire month. Yesterday was my last day of fasting, and boy was I glad to start eating breakfast again today! During Ramadan, especially toward the middle of the afternoon, everyone in the city seems drained, crabby, lethargic. I was cautioned against taking unnecessary risks while crossing the road in the evening, have been dressing a bit more conservatively, and now know what it’s like to go fourteen or more hours without food or water. I’m glad I did it, but I’m also glad to be getting back into healthier eating habits at the start of my third week.

I’m aware that there’s a good deal of ambiguity in the title of this post. Could this be a chili consisting entirely of beautiful vegetarians? Or maybe after consuming it one acquires irresistibility. Or perhaps it is just an extremely mouth-watering concoction. You may select your favorite interpretation.

For those of you not “in the know”, as well as those of you who haven’t yet deemed it necessary to sneak GPS tracking chips onto my person, I moved to Morocco two weeks ago. In an effort to experience the culture here more fully, I have been fasting for the first week of Ramadan.

I’ll admit, I sometimes have odd cravings. Raw carrots, candy hearts, frozen peas… the list goes on. But earlier this week, after consuming some mediocre lentil soup at a mediocre falafel joint in my neighborhood, all I could think about was lentils. In a lentil-induced haze, I ran to my local supermarket and bought a handful of ingredients: carrots, celery, tomatoes, onion, garlic, and–you guessed it–lentils. After two hours of chopping, sautéeing, ransacking my spice cabinet, sprinkling, simmering, and stirring, something new and delicious was born.

Let’s imagine that you, dear reader, are filled with admiration for my cooking projects and immediately run to the kitchen to try out each of these recipes over and over. If this is the case, then you have a veritable swimming pool of pesto sitting around, waiting to be used. And you’re probably sick of eating it with pasta. Well, here’s some great news! You can have fresh, homemade pesto pizza! Yum yum! And it’s so easy!