Care for some 'American Chocolate' on your hardboiled egg?

Some interesting things have gone down on the two-way street of cultural exchange lately here in Morocco. A couple of weeks ago, we cooked dinner with our upstairs PCT neighbor Carly, for our host families. We tried to make a classic Miricanya breakfast-for-dinner with pancakes, omelets and hashbrowns, though for obvious reasons, we couldn't include that MVP of the breakfast table, bacon. Perhaps that should have warned us off, because the less said about dinner, the better. On the one hand, no one was poisoned by the food we served. On the other hand, we knocked the lid to the stovetop down on three frying pans while cooking, sending a skillet of boiling oil and the hashbrowns crashing to the floor.

The only unqualified success of the night was the peanut butter Carly bought for the pancakes. Our host family dispatched the jar with an efficiency I've only seen in my own family of world-champion peanut butter addicts. We picked up another jar this week in Fes for our host mother -she calls it "American Chocolate"-and she seemed thrilled. Thrilled enough that during kaskrut last night, first she ate it with her fingers and then off the knife until finally she smeared some all over half a hardboiled egg.

But that image is a nice one to keep in mind, because we know we must do something of equivalent weirdness every day. So every day a Moroccan watches us eat a hardboiled egg smothered in crunchy peanut butter. I'm okay with that. It's probably delicious.

We wanted to show you Bs'hara, a garlic and fava bean soup that is our favorite Moroccan lunch. These are the ruins.

Last Sunday we visited Moulay Yakoub and did a little hiking. It was the zwinest day so far in Morocco.

It made us miss California. It doesn't take much.

Our CBT: Carly, Britt, me, Melanie, Lemon and our LCF, Ahmad.

The master naturalist, doing what she must.

The Darija word for "Peas": Jlbana. Had jlbana bnina.

Our happiest moments in Morocco are meals. Just like in America.