Photo David Gill from Food of the Sun   Harira

 Last Saturday’s Globe and Mail featured an après-ski recipe for macaroni and cheese with mushrooms and sausage. The cover of this month’s Fine Cooking magazine is emblazoned with the headline, “The Ultimate Mac & Cheese!” and the cover shot is of a skillet filled with a pulled-pork macaroni and cheese with caramelized onions and not one but four – count ’em, four – cheeses. And if you head over to the foodie website of the moment, www.food52.com, you’ll find 13 recipes for mac and cheese dishes, including BLT Mac and Cheese, Orange Cauliflower Mac n’ Cheese, and Three Onion Mac and Cheese.

All this raises some questions: What’s with all the macaroni and cheese? Didn’t we all get our fill as kids feasting on neon Kraft Dinner? And, can a day on the slopes justify the consumption of such a calorific indulgence as a heaping bowl of crisp-topped pasta laced with cheese? I’m putting on five pounds just thinking about it.

The term “comfort food” is often used to describe dishes like mac and cheese, rice pudding, mashed potatoes and poutine. Yet those dishes don’t offer me any comfort; those just make me feel bloated and guilty. In winter, I don’t want something to weigh me down, I want something to pep me up.

Shunning North American comfort food, I set out in search of warm-climate comfort food, or, more specifically, the flavours of Spain, North Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean, whose cuisines are rich in spices, herbs, peppers and garlic.

From Moro: The Cookbook (Ebury Press, 2001), I made seared sirloin salad with barley, grapes and sumac. From Ottolenghi: The Cookbook (Ebury Press, 2008) I relished the marinated lamb rack with coriander and honey, and from Alastair Little’s Food of the Sun (Quadrille, 1995), I prepared the famous Moroccan soup called harira.

I have tasted harira in the home of a Moroccan friend and found hers to be spicy enough to mask all the other flavours. Though her harira was made with lamb, I prefer Little’s recipe because it calls for chicken and more herbs than spice. I also like this recipe because the resulting dish is more stew than soup. And all the flavour enhancers mixed in just before serving make this dish not only look ravishing, but taste summery and refreshing. It’s the perfect antidote to the mid-winter blues.

Take that, mac and cheese!

Recipe: Harira