Day 57 Tunisia

Tunisian legend has it that the amount of love that a wife feels for her husband is measured by the amount of hot peppers she uses in her food . This may not necessarily work in our favor here in the West, but I saw evidence of it in my search for a recipe . Most dishes are flavored with a fiery Harissa ( a hot paste found commonly in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia). Couscous is considered their national dish, but I found a recipe for Tunisian Chicken with Roasted Oranges that sent my salivary glands into overdrive and there was no looking back. To accompany it I am doing a Tuna salad or a Salade Michwiya.

The chicken breasts were rubbed with a Harissa paste made from scratch from a recipe found in my stash of old magazine clippings. Caraway seed, Anaheim pepper, coriander seed, garlic, olive oil and salt were ground to coarse paste, rubbed over the chicken and grilled. Oranges were quartered, sprinkled with powdered sugar and thrown on the grill. The grilled chicken was then garnished with the oranges and fresh cilantro. Nasal passages opened up as did tear ducts...

The Salade Michwiya is a colorful salad made with roasted tomatoes, yellow and red pepper, onion, dressed with a paste of garlic and Caraway seed. Arranged on a platter with boiled eggs cut into quarters and canned tuna, the salad was sprinkled with olive oil and lemon juice. Simple and satisfying it was like a twist on the Cobb salad.

Leaving Africa and heading out to South America. Argentina's up first....