Ode to Egyptian Food

You guys would be so impressed with how much weird stuff I have eaten this holiday, and most of it I’ve liked! (I’m not saying at ate it fast mind you, I was still always the last person at the table, as usual, but I ate it!)

Mangos & Mango Juice

Yeah, ok, Mangos are just gross. They’re really stringy and mushy and you have to scoop them out of the skin with a spoon. And Mango juice isn’t really juice it’s more like purée Mango. The ‘juice’ is so thick and stringy that you almost have to chew it. Mangos did not get the thumbs up.

Fayrouz!!!!!

Fayrouz was WICKED! The best tasting beer on the planet!! It’s a non-alcoholic beer made from apples and it tasted like carbonated apple cider. It was SO GOOD!!!! Big thumbs up!

Borio

Just like Oreos but brown instead of black. Thumbs up, of course!

Cactus Fruit or Prickly Pears

Like their name implies, these grew on Cactuses. The people would sell them on the street from the back of wagons would have cut away the spiky peel with their calloused hands that had become accustomed to the sharp brown spikes on them. Inside was this yellowy fruit. It was pretty good, quite sweet actually, but throughout the inside of the fruit were tonnes of very hard little seeds and I didn’t really like always biting into them and having to swallow them whole. With more practise I think I could have grown to like these a lot. But in my limited exposure to them this trip I would have to just give them a noncommittal ‘meh’.

So SO many GLORIOUS chocolates, cakes and pastries!!!!!

One of the nice things about constantly being invaded and occupied is that sometimes the invaders bring with them cultural traits that you like and decide to keep after the invaders have gone or disappeared into the population. In Egypt’s case, one of the things they kept with them after being invaded by France is the knowledge of how to make some of the most wonderful pastries on the planet. I imagine a symphony playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 when I look at these pictures!

Koshari

Koshari is like the equivalent of Toronto street meat. It’s what locals will often grab to eat when they’re on the run. I tried it while in a traditional Egyptian restaurant and my companions said that it was the fanciest Koshari they had ever seen. It’s a mix of caramelized onions, chickpeas, noodles, wheat seeds, tomato sauce, rice and it is usually wrapped up in a piece of flatbread but here it was served on a plate. I thought it was really good (of course, it’s hard to go wrong with me if you’re putting tomato sauce on something) so I give it thumbs up.

Uh, I don’t have any pictures of these but another kind of traditional food that you could grab on the run were shawermas. Shawermas can be made with chicken or beef and are cooked on those weird looking vertical grills like the one you see at Jimmy the Greek’s. Before the meat is cooked it is ground up, seasoned and then mushed back together in to a solid cone of meat (that resembles no part of a chicken or cow) and thin slices are cut off as they cook on the grill and served on flat bread with veggies and dressing. I have always been wary of this odd looking meat when I’ve seen it in Canada but they were great! So they get a thumbs up!

Molokhiya

Green soup. Basically the leaves of a presently unknown plant cooked in water and a lot of oil. Can be served with rice and Tomato sauce (whoo hoo!) At first I really liked Molokhiya but by the end of the trip I was pretty sick of it because we had it a lot. Still, I will give it thumbs up!

Veal bones and Mahhshi

This is baby cow bone and Mahhshi. The cow bone and baby cow meat is considered a delicacy. The bone is so soft that you can eat it, which we did. It’s hard to describe, it’s a very odd texture and it tastes like you would imagine bone to taste like – kind of chalky? Well I wasn’t a huge fan but Donia, as you can see, ate it ravenously.

The other thing on the plate is called Mahhshi. Mahhshi is rice, beef, seasoning and onions rolled up and cooked in cabbage or grape leaves. They were great and we had them all the time, thumbs up!

Pigeon

This is a whole pigeon on a bed of wheat. You eat the whole thing. You eat the skin, it’s stuffed inside and the spine. You eat the spine! You eat everything but the wing, rib and hip bones and even those the more expert of eaters (like Donia) could eat parts of. There was actually very little meat on it except for on it’s small breast. It tasted pretty alright but I never really got over the whole spine-eating thing. Everyone eats pigeon here, I guess it’s almost as common as chicken. You would see pretty pigeon coops all over the place where the pigeons could come and go to freely until they were caught for dinner that night. Donia said that they still use carrier pigeons for delivering messages sometimes too.

We often also had a bean paste called Foul on flat bread (kind of like Texas style beans) which was really good. And for breakfast in Ras Sidr we almost always had Taamias which are pretty much the same thing as Felafels. Also very good!

So all in all I thought I did quiet well for myself with the foreign foods on this trip. And when we were desperately needing a hit from home we could always order Pizza Hut!