Morocco is half a world away from Port Townsend by geography, history, culture and cuisine. But Carolyn Watts, a Port Townsend artist who has already lived a few lives, is living one more. It’s spent amidst the swirl of Berbers and Bedouins coursing through the ancient cobblestone streets of Marrakech.

There, navigating through endless souks and markets, Caroline and her handful of students sort through succulent vegetables, local fruits and mountains of rich spices. Late in the day, they gather with Moroccan women in a kitchen to learn the secrets of Moroccan cuisine – and much more.

Picture this: Inside a 400-year-old casbah in a rural village, a young Berber woman prepares “Berber pizza” – spice-laden, plate-shaped bread – while squatting on a clean floor next to a blazing cooking stove. She shows visitors every step with a broad smile, and in the end she slathers it with spicy sauce and serves it up. For desert, a young man races up a tree and returns with handfuls of plump dates.

Or this: In a mud house in Maham’id, at the edge of the Sahara desert, an elderly imam breaks off a fist-sized chunk from a block of sugar and dissolves it in a teapot, then pours glass after glass of the ubiquitous sweet mint tea for his guests.

This is Carolyn’s new world, to which she returns to twice each year with a small collection of students, usually women. Marrakech, the ancient royal city of Morocco, is her part-time home, and she calls her school Hakima’s Moroccan Cooking School after her first Moroccan helper.

Diving into secrets

Carolyn, a small woman filled with dynamic energy and curiosity, first visited Morocco in 2000. The vast wealth of scents, tastes, sounds, hospitality and culture compelled her to return again and again. Since 2007, she has brought others into her discovery, with another trip planned soon. Her next class, done in conjunction with a yoga class and massage to be offered by Port Townsend’s Ilana Smith, starts March 12 and runs for four weeks.

She makes the trek in early fall and early spring, the most temperate times of the year, and when seasonal fruits and vegetables are at their best.

Her students, many of them Jefferson County residents and others hailing from distant corners of the country, live in her elegant riad, complete with its interior courtyard. They meet her loyal Moroccan friends and, with them, dive into the secrets of the cuisine of Marrakech and other parts of this exotic country on the northwest coast of Africa.

About the women

Carolyn, 67, has a particular commitment to the women of Morocco. They live within a traditional Muslim culture dominated by men. But in the marketplace, in the kitchen and in the home, they run their world. Carolyn is determined to empower women. By demonstrating their cooking skills and connecting with Westerners, they are elevated to a higher status.

With lead cook Nezha Kriz, her guests go to one of the endless markets in Marrakech, learning to pick out the freshest produce, the best cuts of meat and the best way to bargain. They pick up a few words of Arabic. Then they return to the kitchen and learn a classic way of cooking.

Often his involves cooking in a tagine atop a charcoal brazier with a low, even heat spread across the base and a distinct conical lid locking in moisture and flavors. Later, it reveals a simmering stew of potatoes, lemons, vegetables, tart olives and tender chicken. Then comes hours of eating, laughter and talk.

Moroccan network

Carolyn’s first guide into Moroccan cooking was a young woman named Hakima, who had cooked with her and helped her around a riad during a visit in 2007.

Besides Nezha, another of Caroline’s key helpers is a lanky, funny Bedouin driver and guide named Mohktar Moutayamine.

Caroline’s students are small, intimate groups. Sometimes they travel to other parts of Morocco, over the High Atlas mountain range, into the northern Sahara, or to the charming and blissfully quiet 18th century coastal city of Essaouira.

It’s not an intense curriculum. Whole days or afternoons are left open for exploration. Overnight excursions to other parts of the country are readily arranged. Guests are always in friendly hands, usually Mohktar’s.

In the same way that a dish cooked to perfection in a tagine is infused with all the spices and flavors trapped inside, so is Carolyn Watts infused with Morocco and its culture. Even during her nine or 10 months back home in Port Townsend, part of her is always in Marrakech, she said.

Desert roots

The journey from Port Townsend to Marrakech actually starts in eastern Oregon.

“I’m at home with the earth, having grown up in Modoc County,” she said from her Port Townsend home that overlooks Point Hudson. Modoc is the region where her family operated a vast ranch along a dry-land region bordered by Nevada, Oregon and California. She grew up raising chickens, canning, making bread and butter, and milking cows. Her high school’s graduating class had 24 students.

She was the first in her family to graduate from a university – California State University in 1966. She became a researcher, or bacteriologist, for various laboratories in California, including Stanford University’s. In 1978, she moved to Seattle with her young daughter and spent the next 20 years behind microscopes in the hematology department of Providence Seattle Medical Center, examining the tiniest units of life.

Carolyn was in her 40s and experiencing health issues when she found herself asking what kind of life she really wanted to lead. She found the answer was easy: an artist.

She graduated from Cornish School of the Arts, magma cum laude, at the age of 50 and began painting massive, wall-sized canvases of tiny organic forms familiar to her from the microscope. Her work drew regional and national attention, and she has been commissioned many times.

She met John Watts at the University of Washington and they were married in 1979. Watts was an attorney and in 1999, the couple moved to Port Townsend when John was hired as the city attorney. Carolyn spends most of her time at home in her studio painting large canvases.

Morocco connection

A light traveler, Carolyn describes herself as an insatiable collector of visual detail. Her pocket camera (a small sand-filled Sony) has been her constant companion, allowing her to explore details as small as insect prints in sand and as large as the dunes surrounding them.

Carolyn was commissioned in 2007 to paint a wall mural using a form taken from Arabic lettering at the Marrakech home of Jim Egbert, owner of Egbert’s in Seattle. It was there that she began cooking with Hakima. Drawing on a past life as a caterer in Seattle, she started to learn the art and science of making traditional Moroccan dishes.

“We exchanged culinary and cultural secrets,” said Carolyn. “We traded words and encouragement in French, English and Arabic,” the latter of which Carolyn learned bit by bit through a now worn phrasebook.

Later in 2007, she returned to Marrakech using the Egbert riad. A riad is a traditional Moroccan group home, usually a two-story square built around a courtyard with balconies facing inward. The original idea was to teach art, but it quickly expanded into cooking, she said.

And then it expanded further – into a mission to help Moroccan women.

Hakima was illiterate and wanted badly to learn to read and write. In Morocco, 60 percent of women over the age of 14 are illiterate. Carolyn decided that a cooking school using Hakima and other local women could provide a great experience for guests and could create job skills for local women, along with literacy and an introduction to English that vastly expands prospective employment in a country with a growing tourism trade. Hakima’s Moroccan Cooking School is organized as a nonprofit devoted to literacy and job training.

Her school’s first guests were Sarah Grossman and Jennifer Carl of Port Townsend. Since then, she has operated the cooking school six times, bringing in dozens of locals and many others.

She has changed locations to a riad that is virtually in the center of the old city of Marrakech, just minutes away from the world-famous Place Djemaa el Fna square, the center of Marrakech’s old medina, or walled city.

The food

“For the cooks of Morocco, cooking is an art that uses all the senses to reach the right flavor, texture and color,” said Carolyn. Moroccan cooking borrows from centuries of influences: Berber, Spanish, Corsican, Portuguese, Arabic, Mediterranean, Turkish and African.

In pursuit of ingredients, shopping trips are a highlight for students of the cooking school. Besides shopping for food, they snack and feast in the food stalls of Marrakech. A favorite stop is at a booth for a bowl of byesar, a light peasant soup served for breakfast with bread and olive oil. Moroccans swear that it is filling for six hours. The soup is made of fava beans, water, salt, ginger, paprika and cumin.

In the olive section, students sample olives of every size, shape and color. They try smen (fermented butter), and around the corner they sample nuts and seeds while happy merchants hover and present new samples. Around another corner are stalls teeming with nuts and dried fruits. A few booths further are the rich colors and scents of sculpted mounds of spices: coriander, black pepper, cayenne, paprika, cardamom, parsley, mint, turmeric and saffron – the most highly prized spice, introduced to the world by the Moors.

Then there are jars of Moroccan honey, flavored with eucalyptus and jasmine.

Back in the riad, the meal preparation begins, every hand involved. Today it might be a tagine of lamb with prunes, tomato and egg, or kefta, or the art of real couscous, the signature dish of Moroccan cuisine. All Moroccan dishes are served with flatbread, used to scoop food from a common dish or bowl. Silverware is optional.

Changing lives

Carolyn has an innate talent for connecting with Moroccans and once “in” with a family, she has found herself way in. She’s been an honored guest at weddings, births and funerals. She connects easily with shopkeepers in the souk.

“Each visit to Morocco is unique and changes people’s lives, and no one’s life more than her own,” she said. “It doesn’t take much to connect with people and make a difference.”

And for Carolyn Watts, making a difference – for her guests and for her Moroccan friends who help her – is what her latest life is all about.

(For information about Hakima’s Moroccan Cooking School, visit the website moroccancookingschool.com or call Carolyn at 379-2835.)

Morocco connection

A light traveler, Carolyn describes herself as an insatiable collector of visual detail. Her pocket camera (a small sand-filled Sony) has been her constant companion, allowing her to explore details as small as insect prints in sand and as large as the dunes surrounding them.

Carolyn was commissioned in 2007 to paint a wall mural using a form taken from Arabic lettering at the Marrakech home of Jim Egbert, owner of Egbert’s in Seattle. It was there that she began cooking with Hakima. Drawing on a past life as a caterer in Seattle, she started to learn the art and science of making traditional Moroccan dishes.

“We exchanged culinary and cultural secrets,” said Carolyn. “We traded words and encouragement in French, English and Arabic,” the latter of which Carolyn learned bit by bit through a now worn phrasebook.

Later in 2007, she returned to Marrakech using the Egbert riad. A riad is a traditional Moroccan group home, usually a two-story square built around a courtyard with balconies facing inward. The original idea was to teach art, but it quickly expanded into cooking, she said.

And then it expanded further – into a mission to help Moroccan women.

Hakima was illiterate and wanted badly to learn to read and write. In Morocco, 60 percent of women over the age of 14 are illiterate. Carolyn decided that a cooking school using Hakima and other local women could provide a great experience for guests and could create job skills for local women, along with literacy and an introduction to English that vastly expands prospective employment in a country with a growing tourism trade. Hakima’s Moroccan Cooking School is organized as a nonprofit devoted to literacy and job training.

Her school’s first guests were Sarah Grossman and Jennifer Carl of Port Townsend. Since then, she has operated the cooking school six times, bringing in dozens of locals and many others.

She has changed locations to a riad that is virtually in the center of the old city of Marrakech, just minutes away from the world-famous Place Djemaa el Fna square, the center of Marrakech’s old medina, or walled city.

The food

“For the cooks of Morocco, cooking is an art that uses all the senses to reach the right flavor, texture and color,” said Carolyn. Moroccan cooking borrows from centuries of influences: Berber, Spanish, Corsican, Portuguese, Arabic, Mediterranean, Turkish and African.

In pursuit of ingredients, shopping trips are a highlight for students of the cooking school. Besides shopping for food, they snack and feast in the food stalls of Marrakech. A favorite stop is at a booth for a bowl of byesar, a light peasant soup served for breakfast with bread and olive oil. Moroccans swear that it is filling for six hours. The soup is made of fava beans, water, salt, ginger, paprika and cumin.

In the olive section, students sample olives of every size, shape and color. They try smen (fermented butter), and around the corner they sample nuts and seeds while happy merchants hover and present new samples. Around another corner are stalls teeming with nuts and dried fruits. A few booths further are the rich colors and scents of sculpted mounds of spices: coriander, black pepper, cayenne, paprika, cardamom, parsley, mint, turmeric and saffron – the most highly prized spice, introduced to the world by the Moors.

Then there are jars of Moroccan honey, flavored with eucalyptus and jasmine.

Back in the riad, the meal preparation begins, every hand involved. Today it might be a tagine of lamb with prunes, tomato and egg, or kefta, or the art of real couscous, the signature dish of Moroccan cuisine. All Moroccan dishes are served with flatbread, used to scoop food from a common dish or bowl. Silverware is optional.

Changing lives

Carolyn has an innate talent for connecting with Moroccans and once “in” with a family, she has found herself way in. She’s been an honored guest at weddings, births and funerals. She connects easily with shopkeepers in the souk.

“Each visit to Morocco is unique and changes people’s lives, and no one’s life more than her own,” she said. “It doesn’t take much to connect with people and make a difference.”

And for Carolyn Watts, making a difference – for her guests and for her Moroccan friends who help her – is what her latest life is all about.

(For information about Hakima’s Moroccan Cooking School, visit the website moroccancookingschool.com or call Carolyn at 379-2835.)