Spices

Experimenting with spices: I roasted a chicken with cumin, tarragon, a bit of preserved lemon, and smoked paprika.
I basted it with apple juice. At the end I added lemon juice and more tarragon to the sauce. It's not really Moroccan,
but it blends in some of the Moroccan spices that I've also been trying out.

Carved and ready to serve. The sauce is at lower right.

On the table. The lentils were flavored with ras-al-hanout and onion -- another Moroccan spice.
We also had some very early peaches (origin: Mexico) that I dribbled with a tiny bit of rosewater.

Where I've been this week: visiting my sister in Indiana. We watched a
few birds singing in the Celery Bog near her house in West Lafayette.

Not far from the Celery Bog: another natural preserve called
Mulvey Pond, where we saw a few ducks and geese.

We ate several delicious meals at my sisters's. As an
experiment we got out her very old electric percolator
and made coffee to check what it would taste like if you
made percolator coffee from freshly ground good beans
instead of from horrible grocery store coffee!
It's not bad at all.