I am pleased to announce that I have just signed a contract with my publisher—Chronicle Books in San Francisco—for a new book on the rich, sensual, and sophisticated cooking of Morocco. My fourth cookbook for Chronicle, it will slide into the long deadline of The Country Cooking of Spain I am currently working on.

The book will contain around 80 recipes, a lengthy introduction on the foods, people, history, and geography of the country, and an extremely detailed glossary of Moroccan ingredients. As well, it will have 100 images from around the country capturing it diversity. I will be taking these on my travels as well as shooting the finished plated food shots. The book is slated to be published in 2012.

Although one can speak of a singular, unified “Moroccan cuisine,” each region has its own dishes and cooking styles that reflect a distinct geographic location, climate, and history. The goal is to get beyond the classical Fez- and Marrakesh-style cooking that fills most Moroccan cookbooks, and traveling to places that will offer other angles on what exactly “Moroccan cooking” means—from the Rif Mountains to Laâyoune, from coastal Asilah and Safi to the date-filled oasis of Zagora, from rustic Berber cooking of the High Atlas to the Spanish influences in the far north, from the dizzyingly complex flavors to Fez to simpler ones of the nomads in Sahara… Morocco, it seems, has it all.

Such scope means extensive travels around the country. I have traveled quite broadly in the country over the past decade but for this project I am aiming at 8 to 10 days a month “in country” focusing on a region at a time. These trips have begun and will continue into next spring.

I will be adding a page to this site soon with more details on the book, notes on my travels and updates on the books’ progress, and perhaps even a recipe or two that I am working on. Check back here from time to time.