Good Plain Cook

Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen suggests using "Creamed Cashews" as a substitute for heavy cream in sauces/soups/gravies etc. It won't whip, of course, but it does provide a nice fatty depth without that distinctive, distracting, arguably vile Soymilk Taste. Basically, you just soak 2 parts raw cashews in 1 part water and puree, then throw it in as you would the real stuff.

Oh, Morocco! Great street food, check; great food markets, ditto. Very inexpensive and reasonable places to stay (clean and quiet youth hostels, even) if you check around with locals and guidebooks. A red snapper in Essaouira, on the coast near Marrakech, was the single best meal of my life (and not impossibly the cheapest) -- the meal I'll remember when I'm dying. There are ranks of fishermen who drag their boats onto the beach and set up big drums full of superhot coals; you tell them which fish you want and hand them a few pennies. They grab the fish out of the bottom of the boat, gut it (or not), scale it (or not) and toss it still wriggling straight onto the coals till its skin is charred and flesh is just barely cooked. Then they hand it to you with nothing more than lemon and rock salt and you eat it, standing, flinging pieces of sooty skin onto the sand and happily licking the salty lemony juices off your forearms. A few hundred yards back from the beach are many variously upscaled versions of this.