Moroccan Christmas: M'hencha and More

Grab a cup of coffee or tea because it's a long post today.  For what I believe is my favorite family tradition (yes, even more than fourth of July fireworks), we have an ethnic dinner every Christmas eve.  This year the choice was Moroccan.  I made an appetizer, a chili sauce, and this dessert:  M'hencha with orange and pine nuts.

Here are some of the other dishes that showed up - starting with a couscous salad my aunt made.

There were themes in our dinner - there were a few dishes with couscous, a few with cilantro, a few with almonds or other nuts.  This is my cousin's Seffa - beef couscous topped with nuts, cocoa powder and powdered sugar.

My mother made a lamb tangine with carrots and potatoes.

To go with Mom's tangine, I made a spicy harissa sauce - first I ground together some garlic cloves, whole coriander seeds, salt and cumin.

Then I added in some rehydrated ancho and pasilla chili peppers, and a little lemon juice.  It ended up being pretty spicy, and very strongly flavored.

I also made a quick appetizer, which is basically a roasted and cooked salsa called taktouka.  Kyle was kind enough to make a quick run to the store for flatbread, which he toasted under the broiler to make some flatbread chips to eat it with.

There were lots of other dishes but I don't have photos of them all, but rest assured we were well-fed that night and it was all very delicious.  Some of the other dishes include salmon cakes, carrot-ginger soup, spiced nuts and apricots, and cinnamon orange slices.  The recipe I would like to share with you is one of our desserts: m'hencha. This recipe has moved to my new site, please check it out here!