dinner!

May 5, 2005
Subject: dinner!

Food. Mmm ...

As most of you know, I love to eat. By all rights I should be the size of a house; thank you Mom, Dad for passing on the skinny gene. I truly appreciate it!

Egypt is, of course, food heaven. Oh, sure, there are things here that I will not go near - "mukh" (brains) for example. I politely decline all offers of mukh. I was obliged to eat "kibda" (liver) one night. It wasn't inedible, and thankfully I didn't get the gag reflex while it was going down, but I'm definitely not going to dash out and order my own kibda saand-weech. I've also eaten "mish," a watery, white, stinky cheese that goes well with tomato and parsley, especially when scooped up with flat bread, even if it is vaguely disgusting. And pigeon. Yes, I ate flying rat; and yes, it tasted like chicken, if not a bit oily. Overall, I've been stuffing myself almost daily since I got here.

One of my favorite places to eat is at Hegazy's house. Hegazy's wife, Zeinab, is a fabulous cook. Anna and I have eaten there several times, although there is always some trepidation about this event. Zeinab, as Egyptians do, always cooks three times as much food as is needed. There is never enough room on the table, and Anna and I are expected to eat it all. We always accept these invitations with mixed emotions - yay! Zeinab's cooking! But then we have to set our plan of action - how to not overeat to the point where our bellies are in pain, and we're falling asleep on the couch in front of the tv. We fail every time.

For the most part our attempts to moderate our food intake on these occasions degenerates into finger pointing contests between Anna and I.

The setting: a fabulous fish dinner where Anna and I were compelled to eat 4 fish apiece, (two types - one fried, the other smothered with spicy tomatoes - tail, head and eyes intact, of course), along with piles of delicious spiced rice, Egyptian flat bread (mmm ... bread ...), and green salad. After declining a fifth fish (I really wished I could have eaten it!), and another huge dish of rice, when the salad plate had been wiped clean and the table was littered with the evidence of our over-indulgence, out came the fruit. Harankesh (Anna calls them gooseberries) and bananas. Hegazy's sister, Sousou began peeling harankesh and handing them to us one at a time. Anna and I looked at each other, our bellies beyond full - the unspoken thought being, "well, they're just little things, a couple can't hurt." Wrong. Here in Egypt, it's never just a couple. We ate harankesh, after harankesh until we couldn't take it anymore. Then Sousou began peeling a banana - and Anna cracked.

"Oh, Dawn, look! Bananas - you love bananas! Sousou," Anna chirped brightly, over her full stomach - and I'm panicking, my mouth still full of harenkesh - I know what she's doing! "Dawn loves bananas!" Hegazy translated while I tried to kill Anna with a look, I really did. But it didn't work. And Sousou handed me the banana. I ate it, slowly, and grinned while Sousou peeled another, Anna's eyes widened, the purpose of the second banana obvious. Then Anna, that traitor, suddenly had to use the bathroom, and excused herself. By the time she came back I had been pressured into eating her banana.

Subsequent meals, we agreed, we would eat slowly. This was advice given to me by Karen, who has extensive experience eating in Egyptian homes. So slowly we ate, the result being that the meal took much longer, and the whole time we were urged on by a frustrated Hegazy, "Anna, Dawn, eat ... EAT!" Long after everyone else had finished, Zeinab was still piling food onto our plates. At one point, after Hegazy had urged us to eat more for, like, the gazillionth time, I said, (in repayment for the banana debacle), "Zeinab, this chicken," I picked up the lone small piece on the plate piled high with huge pieces of chicken, "is sooo good!" Then I said, with a wicked edge to my voice, "Hegazy, Anna hasn't tried this chicken yet!"

hehehe ...

Thankfully the fruit never made an encore. Instead the Coke was trotted out. I can't stand soda, and neither can Anna. But drink it we did. I tried to keep the smirk off my face one night when Anna, in a poorly calculated maneuver to get the smallest glass of Coke, instead ended up with the giant mug. Ha! And then, when she drank it down, thinking that we could make a quick exit after that, Zeinab filled it again!

Eating in restaurants is always good. With every meal there is an array of "salatas" (do I need to translate that?) - tahine, baabaganoose, green salad, spicy potato salad, spicy eggplant - all served on small plates, eaten family style, scooped up with flat bread. Kebab (chicken, beef, lamb), schwerma (the carved meat sandwiches), fuul (beans) with olive oil, or cheese, or egg ... ahhh ...

The best places to eat are the local holes in the wall. Usually, literally, a hole in a wall. You go in, the conditions aren't exactly sanitary, but you choose a table - sometimes the place is so small that there is only one table! ignore the sticky grime and ask for whatever is being served. Kofta, schwerma ... koshery is favorite tasty treat ... I don't know anyone who can eat it every day, the starches are overwhelming to the system. Koshery is layers of white rice, spaghetti, vermicelli and macaroni topped with chickpeas, lentils, tomato sauce and fried onions. Tasty stuff, koshery! Anna and I go to this one koshery place with Hegazy and Ali (Ali is a hair dresser, and he is a true hair-dressing genius!) This place has an amazing hot sauce that Anna and I dump all over our dinner. It makes our mouths burn, and we figure it has the added effect of killing whatever cooties might be swimming in our food.

I personally like to walk over to Felfela in the mornings, which is just down the street, and go to the take out window. They have three sandwiches that I love, all served in a pita - fuul (beans), tamaiia (falafel) and eggplant. I usually order two of the three, for a grand total of 1.50 le (approx. 0.28 cents). It's like getting two burritos from Taco Bell. It's cheap, and it fills you up. And the guy there likes me because I'm the "ignabaya" (foreigner) that knows to tip him. He always grabs the fattest sandwiches for me.

One day Anna was telling me about a restaurant that her friend, Mohammed, had taken her to. It was in Dokki, a nice area of Cairo - upper middle class neighborhood - clean and quiet. The restaurant was called Radwan, and Anna was raving about it. She specifically mentioned the "kofta" (ground beef, wrapped around a skewer and grilled) and the "dee-roomi" (turkey) - a whole roast bird; they carve the meat off as it's ordered. So we had Mohammed take us. We enjoyed an incredible meal, the salatas, the dee-roomi, the kofta - I even ate the lamb. I'm not a big lamb fan, but as I commented to Anna, it didn't taste lamb-y to me. We mentioned our meal to Hegazy, the next day; he said he knew Radwan, and he'd heard that they had good food.

Less than a week later we were back at Hegazy's for another fish-feast. After the meal, while Anna and I were digesting in front of the tv, Hegazy's son, Ahmed, came home from work. He was telling Hegazy a story, in Arabic of course. Anna and I listened, but didn't really understand what he was saying. Then Hegazy began laughing; he was laughing so hard he couldn't speak, tears were pouring from his eyes. Anna and I waited anxiously for the punchline. Although, in retrospect, we would rather not have heard it. It turns out that Ahmed was working in Dokki that day. He just happened to be out in front of Radwan, when the police came out with the owner, in handcuffs. Apparently, it turns out, that the lamb wasn't lamb-y for a reason. Just like the persistent rumors about cat burritos at La Imperial in Hayward, the owner of Radwan had been saving on costs by utilizing the local wildlife - the dogs and cats that run freely by the hundreds throughout Cairo.

Hey. What are you going to do? And the kofta really was tasty.