'Hey lady! I love fish and chips!'

Ever since Jamie 'did' Marrakech as part of the 'Jamie does...' series, it seems Marrakech is 'doing' Jamie. I just spent a couple of weeks in Morocco, and although the attention directed at solo female travellers is legendary for being unpleasant, about half of the shout-outs now seem to be the result of Mr Oliver's fleshy English footprint. On day one I was walking down the street trying to strike a balance between inconspicuous and intrepid-chic, and a dude followed me on his bike for a while, before calling out 'fish and chips!' It was so absurd that I burst out laughing and he pedalled off. As it turns out, everyone yells that in Marrakech, as well as the odd 'lovely jubbly', and sometimes just 'Jimmy Holver!', as I saw it written down somewhere. Not that you can buy fish and chips anywhere, mind, and I became quite certain that most people don't know what it is, because occasionally someone would just yell 'fish 'n!' In retrospect, I should have turned around and yelled 'tajine!'

So on a related and unoriginal note, Moroccan food is delicious. As ever with cultures that aren't big on dining out, the street food and markets are where the yum is at. I ate at a couple of quite good restaurants and a couple of very bad ones ('What's wrong with your dinner, Sal?' -- '...just a few maggots') but for me nothing beat the Jma el Fna square in Marrakech and the fish souk in Essaouira. The former packs out with demountable stalls at night, selling everything from calamari with chilli sauce to sesame sweets and spicy teas; at the latter, 80p will catch you about twenty sardines, and another £5 will get them grilled and brought to a big table, with enough bread, salads, sauces and fries for you and your four friends. And not to forget all the stuff that you just can't avoid, like fresh orange juice stalls, mountains of dates and figs, big, beautiful pomegranates, mint tea, and a healthy dose of sunburn.

Now here's something interesting, they use margarine in Moroccan pastries because they're traditionally cooked in wood ovens and butter burns too easily. Oh, and I discovered that these ovens are often in communal bakeries, where homemade dough is dropped off to be cooked and picked up all brown and crispy later in the day. Mornings are for bread, while the oven is very hot, and it will be ready in time for lunch, while afternoons are reserved for pastries, when the temperature in there has backed off a bit. I was so excited to stumble across one of these places in operation that I jumped up and down a bit and asked if I could take photos. They were really accommodating, and then the teenager accidentally-on-purpose grabbed my bum.

I had Stein/Oliver fantasies of having my hands guided to make bread by a wizened old woman who speaks no English, but evidently I failed to realise them. Failed to the point of molestation, in fact, so I took a cooking class while in Essaouira to get around such difficulties. We made Zaalouk, which is a lightly spiced aubergine and tomato salad (although it's really more of a dip), a lamb, date, and almond tajine, some almond crescent pastries, and some sultana, lime and sesame biscuits. And, come to think of it, Mona at l'Atelier Madada, though not old, did not speak English and was definitely maternal. Go there! It is also a beautiful hotel, for all ye who are not 23 and some of ye who are and earn more money than me.

My friend James once said, 'I just don't understand why people travel if it's not to eat', and I'm with him there. Apparently television was designed to be an advertising medium, so that the programmes are essentially only there to break up the ads, and sometimes holidays feel a bit like that: cultural activities and museum visits are just ways to divert attention from the real, slightly surreptitious objective. I was pleased to be reassured that this is even true of vacationers whose worldview is less food-centric than my own.

Big ups to imperialism for consistently good patisseries, crepes, and coffee, too.