When A Flight Cage Becomes A Jungle

When I moved to the country, I decided that my parrots should have more room to stretch their wings than they'd had before. I built three flight cages in the garden of my rental house, each a three metre cube that opened on a service room. My Amazons turned out to be two subspecies who didn't always get along (Cubans and Bahamians), and the two African Grey males each got their own flight, between which the female, Mona, used to bounce trying to decide who was the more attractive male. While the cage wire was strong, the holes in the cages were large enough to let in both rats and sparrows, so when I moved to the farm, I decided to replicate the cages but with a smaller gauge wire so that the sparrows and rats wouldn't be able to get in. Since I'd never seen the parrots chewing on the cage wires I opted for a lighter weight wire as well.

Ah, the best laid plans of bird owners and women often go astray. The parrots were initially very comfortable in the new cage, partly I suspect because I moved them into essentially the same cages that they'd had before, just with different scenery. Mona, the female Grey, had been the victim of a leg attack by creatures unknown last winter and was living in the house, as she still does at present, so the males were on their own with the company for Ali of the Bahamian, while the Cubans got the cage on the west side of the complex. Once we got everyone settled, I decided to get two pair of budgies to share Fritzi's cage with him. I like the sounds of budgies and their social life is very entertaining. We set them up with some nest boxes and sat back to enjoy the view. The first thing that I noticed was that the Cubans became bored and decided to chew a hole in the lighter gauge wire of their cage, and one of them got out. I was a bit concerned about predators such as the neighbourhood children, but since the other Cuban remained in the cage, and meals were still being served with regularity inside while not outside, I wasn't all that concerned that the parrot was going too far. In fact she hung around for about 36 hours trying frantically to remember how she got out (not called a bird brain for nothing!) until we left the service room door open and she flew in. That was the last bird to leave, but then the budgies and the lovebirds began arriving. We found ourselves with a pair of lovebirds who must have escaped from a nearby home and about four new budgies, all of whom appear to have been attracted by the sounds of the parrots.

Then we decided to get some new poultry, since our last group of chickens became soup when a farm within sneezing distance came down with the bird flu. The local vet called me to tell me to do in the chickens before they got sick and I obeyed. Once people began restocking poultry, I bought about eight young hens and a rooster who were moved in with the Cubans. A day or so later, my driver came home with what he said was a pair of bronze turkeys, both of whom later were shown to be hens. That's okay since turkey eggs are excellent, but one of these days we need to get a nice gobbler. The turkeys moved in to clean up after Ali and the Bahamian.

Our next arrivals were a trio of Muscovy ducks, two ducks and a drake (Daphne, Daisy, and Donald respectively) who were put in with Fritzi. One might ask why all the poultry was in the aviary, but the aviary is the safest place for these birds with 120 cm tall brick walls at the base to provide privacy from a pack of Rat Terriers who seem to think that they are all just feathered rodents. The dogs watch all the birds from the screened door of the service room, a sort of dog television. Daphne was obviously in a nesting mood and promptly began producing eggs in a nest in an old cat carrier, while the budgies and lovebirds were inspired either by cooler weather or by Daphne's devotion to the cause to begin laying millions of eggs in the wooden nest boxes above.

Other than an imminent population explosion, life in the bird house seemed pretty stable until Fritzi got bored over a couple of days and decided to chew himself a window/door to the service room where he could raid the sunflower seed stores. He was quite delighted with the arrangement and could be seen prowling the service room all during the day, though he was careful to be home for dinner in the evening or there for breakfast in the morning. He also took to rolling the duck eggs out of the nest box, a habit that did not endear him to the Muscovy's at all, and they were seen chasing him to the screen door where he would scramble to safety. In my concern for his piratical activities, I decided to move him into Ali and the Bahamian's cage for a while. This allowed the ducks to settle down a bit and Daphne began sitting on about a dozen eggs with a few chicken eggs as well that I tucked into her nest. But peace was not to reign.

During a trip to a local market with friends my driver disappeared for a while and reappeared with a cardboard box which he deposited in my friend's lap. As we drove off she exclaimed, "There are rabbits in here!" and in fact, Mohamed had bought me two albino does and a brown and white spotted buck who were named in honour of the visitors Casey, Sue and John...very imaginative names. The females are utterly indistinguishable, so we have no idea who is Casey and who is Sue.

Initially, the chickens, with whom it was decided that the rabbits would live, were terrified of them. The feeding time visits between cages that had apparently been motivated by a strong certainty that anyone else's food was better than that in the home cage, now took on an atmosphere of flight from the long-eared monsters. Chickens, however, don't seem to have very long memories and they soon settled down. The opposite was true of the parrots, however. After watching Fritzi come and go at will, the rest of the parrots decided to follow suit and they all chewed holes to the service room through which they began visiting each others' cages all day. At first they would all go home to their home cages at night, but that pattern has also gone by the wayside.

It is now anyone's guess where the parrots will be when I go to feed them or to visit and take some treats. Perhaps Ali the Grey will be with the Cubans, while Fritzi and the Bahamian hang out with the ducks or turkeys. And they don't bother to go home at night anymore either. I've been moving food dishes around the cages to try to accommodate the shifting populations, and I watch for any signs of aggression, but so far it's all peaceful. We still have the cocktail party atmosphere at feeding time when everyone goes wandering to check out what is left over at the neighbours' places, everyone including the rabbits at this point, who hop over to the ducks' or turkeys' places to check out the goodies. The ducks are not quite sure what to make of these fuzzy creatures who don't seem to care if they are hissed at.

The flight cages themselves are brick for the first metre or so and have concrete floors which are covered in chopped straw. The straw is very animal friendly material, providing scratching places for the turkeys and chickens, and comfortable sitting areas for the ducks and rabbits. The parrots and second story birds get a diet of chopped fruits and vegetables along with a baked parrot bread and sunflower seeds in the winter. All the extras get tossed to the ground floor birds and the rabbits who are learning that bird food in this neighbourhood is pretty good. We chop berseem, a type of clover that we grow for the horses, goats, donkeys, sheep and water buffalo, into short lengths for the poultry and the rabbits are happy to help devour it. The chickens and ducks have some old animal carriers to use as nest boxes, while the turkeys prefer a corner of their cage. The rabbits have a large terra cotta jar on its side to use as a den, along with a cardboard box and the corner of the cage between the chicken nest and the wall. So every species has its niche, and so far there has been no bloodshed in defending them, although the ducks get pretty testy if someone disturbs Daphne's nest. I've thought about getting better wire and separating everyone into neat boxes again, but they all seem to be having such a good time that I think I will just observe this little wild corner of the planet for a while and see how they all work things out.

Oh, and the sparrows? From day one they figured out that they could simply walk into the service room under the door and from there move from cage to cage. I have no idea how many are living in there or whether they stay or rotate in and out, but the population is very healthy.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Bread Baking

We built a wood-fired oven for making bread at home and decided last week that it was time to try it out. Mohamed Said went out and bought about 15 kg of flour, both white and whole wheat, some baker's yeast, some bran, and we organised the trays and baking equipment that we bought at the market a couple of weeks ago. Oh, and we also got a lot of wood for the fire. Magda came in and mixed up flour, water, and yeast in the largest plastic bin we had and left it to raise. Then once it had risen once, she formed it into balls and patted them flat to lay in the wooden trays to rise once again. After the second rising, the patties were flattened again and flipped a number of times on palm wood trays to reach the appropriate size and then slid into the oven.

The fire was built beneath the cooking tile on which the bread was baking and the tile would take two loaves. They were maneuvered around with a palm frond that had been carved down into a flat end. The entire process only took a few hours and we made rather a lot of bread...at least 10 kilos of it. Each loaf was about 10 to 15 cm (roughly 12 inches?) across and they were cut into quarters to put into plastic bags for freezing to use later. One quarter of a loaf is plenty for a sandwich that doesn't leave a millimetre of space in your stomach. BUT the bread is so delicious that it is really hard to eat just one.

I have no idea if this fresh bread is more economical than the bought bread but the flavour is so amazingly wonderful that I know we will continue to bake our own bread. We just had two couples from the US staying at the farm for about four days and they all couldn't get enough of the bread. It makes a great panini with a crunchy crust, heats up in the microwave without getting soggy like the commercial bread, all in all, it is just wonderful.

So now we will begin to explore the possibilities of the oven with perhaps pizza or tagens, the casseroles baked in ceramic pots in these ovens.
Tomorrow is bread day again. Our visitors did a pretty good job of emptying the stocks, but the guys aren't exactly slouches in the eating department either.

To Market To Market

A while back we built a woodburning oven behind my barbecue for baking bread. We brought in a skilled bricklayer, bought a special heavy ceramic plate to serve as the base in the baking section, and finally in that classic countryside style, plastered it over with mud. But an oven without any equipment isn't going to produce any bread, so today we did what any normal person would do under the circumstances. We went to the Menawet souq. Menawet is a village not far from the farm, somewhere near Badrishin. I don't believe that it has anything at all to recommend it other than the market that takes place there on Sunday, but from my point of view the Sunday market is pretty much worth the trip.

What we were going for was a selection of paddles made from palm wood that would be used to move the bread in and out of the oven. As well we bought a large shallow box into which the bread would be placed after baking. But, as so often happens on shopping trips, we found a number of other things to interest us. The first thing for me was a donkey barber shop that happened to be right where we were trying to park. Parking in the immediate area of the market is quite out of the question, as my trusty Mohamed Said kept reminding Farag and me. He and Farag had come once before to the market to get a harness for George, our donkey, and in order to fit him properly they had come with the donkey cart. In order to have the donkey, the cart and the harnesses all in the same place, they had driven right into the market area, a feat they had no wish to copy today. So while Mohamed was working the jeep into a tiny slot between a palm tree and a building, I watched the donkey barber shaving donkeys with his hand clippers. This guy must have a grip of steel, as he works these manual clippers all day long. Because all of my animals live out of doors, I don't clip my horses or donkeys in the winter. I figure that the longer hair has a very good use and just leave it, so the barber has never visited us.

Once we got into the market area, we immediately found something that we needed but had not thought of. A woman was selling various types of ropes and cords, so we bought about 40 metres of a medium weight pseudo yacht braid to make rope halters and horse leads with. The rope was soft enough to be comfortable in the hand, had a nice colour combination of black, brown and beige, but the fiber looks for all the world as though this cord is made of recycled plastic bags. All the better actually. Right next to the rope seller was a mat with handmade iron tools displayed on it for people looking for axe blades, chains, and the like. Business was pretty brisk and while Farag and Mohamed took care of the bargaining, I took pictures.

I had to watch myself as the street which would usually accommodate at least two trucks abreast was now so crowded with pedestrians that only one car at a time could manage to squeeze through. And what cars. I found myself nose to nose with truckloads of calves, donkeys, and poultry. At one point, a carter drove by with a young stallion of about four years or so tied to the back of his cart. No one was watching or monitoring the young horse who simply stood quietly when the traffic came to a standstill. Arab stallions have such a reputation for hijinks that I found myself chuckling at the sight of this steady young horse.

Down the road and across the street a group of men with donkeys stood around a doorway where a farrier was pulling shoes, trimming feet and shoeing donkeys on the side of the road. I have a pretty good blacksmith who comes to the farm to trim and shoe my horses and donkeys. We arranged with visiting farriers to have Omar trained to increase his skill level. After watching the farrier working on this poor donkeys, I was very happy to have Omar available to us. The tools were quite medieval and the skill level was best not discussed. A number of the donkeys gingerly made their ways down the road after having the hoof improperly trimmed. When I first took some photos, one of the men objected and asked me for money. I shrugged and told him that if he really didn't want me to take a picture I would delete it, but that I didn't have any money to give him. I explained that I own a farm with horses and have friends abroad who work as farriers who would be interested in his work and tools. Assured that I wasn't a tourist, he was all smiles at this point. It's ok to be a nosy neighbour. But it's hard to concentrate on one spot when people are walking past you with baskets of ducks on their heads.

Right across the street there is a wall and an entrance to a large piece of (probably usually) empty land which is currently wall to wall livestock, foodstuffs, and equipment. To the right are clusters of goats and sheep being offered for sale. Farag's family raise sheep, goats, and cattle so his attention is drawn to this area every ten seconds. Further back and to the left, cart horses are being sold and tried out. Some of these horses are beautiful and as the men buying and trying to sell them put them through their paces, a dust cloud is stirred up that just lingers over that quarter of the yard. I spot a dark bay mule and go over to take a look. A friend of mine has asked me to find him a riding mule, but unfortunately most of the mules in this area are actually hinnies. A mule's mother is a horse and father a donkey, while a hinny is the opposite and hinnies are smaller than mules. A casual question revealed that mom in this case was a donkey, but when I say "That's too bad. I was looking for one whose mother was a horse." I'm almost knocked over by the earnest assurances that that was the case. Well, thanks for the compliment, but just how young do you think I am anyway? With boundless enthusiasm, the handlers tell me that the hinny is very calm and trained to riding. Do I want to see? Well, whether I do or not, they are going to show me and they toss one of their number on to the back of the young male (I'm looking for a female mule) hinny. There follows one of the best bucking exhibitions through flocks of goats that I've ever seen in my life and we make our way back to the car hauling our boxes, paddles, and rope chuckling.

Eid...Interrupted by Technology

The chanting started at about 5 am. "God is great. God is great. God is great. There is no God but God. God is great. God is great. God is great. All thanks to God." I'd set the alarm for 5:30 so I just cuddled down into the covers and listened for a while. Today was the first day of Eid el Adha and I'd arranged with Ahmed, one of my grooms, to go to see the Eid prayer in the desert this morning. I'd gone out on horseback the first day of the Eid at the end of Ramadan, but this is almost January and we've been having a cold spell for the past week, so the Jeep was really in order. I pulled on jogging pants and a jacket, grabbed my camera and we headed out to see this. I've been hearing for years about how the people of the area gather for this important prayer in the desert and I wanted to experience it.

We drove down to the village of Abu Sir in darkness with the heater blasting away in an effort to defrost the jeep. It was 6 am as we slowly worked our way through the narrow alleyways but I was surprised to see market stalls open for business and housewives out sweeping the streets in front of their houses. We were heading for the desert near the modern village cemetery, but I do believe that there isn't a straight road in all of Abu Sir. Twisting and turning a decent size jeep through alleyways that were designed for donkeys can be rather daunting under the best of circumstances, and too early in the morning and freezing are not the best of circumstances.

We were early enough that most of the people hadn't arrived yet and neither had the sun. The antiquities' lights on the hill behind the spot chosen for the prayer were the only illumination. The place itself is extraordinary in that the modern cemetery abuts on the bluff into which pre-pharaonic tombs have been cut, so this morning's event was overseen by many generations of ancestors.

Men from the village spread woven mats on the sand as Ahmed and I sat watching and waiting for more people to arrive. I noticed that the mats were being spread with a gap between so that the men could walk in their shoes to find a spot to sit. Prayer rugs are never walked on with shoes. Gradually the rugs filled as the sky lightened. Men and boys streamed in from the village and from behind the tombs that line the desert. Sometimes women join in the prayer, but this morning they rather wisely stayed in the relative warmth of their homes.

Finally, as the sun crept over the Sakkara plateau, the sheikh spoke the Eid chant one more time and then roughly ten thousand men joined in prayer under the dawn sky. It truly was an awesome sight and one that filled me with a special peace. As the only woman in the area, I remained in the background as was appropriate so as not to be a distraction from prayer. Women always pray to the rear of the men or in another room, men being easily distracted from religious contemplation according to Muslim tradition.

This was certainly true for some of the younger set. A group of roughly ten year old boys kept turning back to look at my jeep during the prayer, and when it ended, they all appeared at my window to ask what I was doing and where I came from. I assured them that I had a farm down the road and was a neighbour who had heard that this event was a marvelous thing to see. They nodded sagely, agreeing with me but were still rather mystified. Seeing fathers leaving to take care of the next family chore on Eid el Adha, the slaughter of the sheep or goat, they scampered off.

Many people find this slaughtering practice to be hard to deal with, and I must admit that I do not slaughter personally. I don't eat lamb so I have no need for the meat and my staff all have their own animals, so I give them cash at the feast, something that they find a great deal more useful. A while back I participated in an online discussion of the pros and cons of various methods of slaughter with some American and European vets. The procedure for a halal slaughter is to use a very sharp knife to slice the jugular vein and carotid artery and then to let the animal bleed out. The vets assured us that the procedure involves a loss of blood that is so swift, there is little or no pain and the animal loses consciousness very, very quickly. I must admit that I found this reassuring.

With the prayer and the slaughter aspect of the Eid out of the way, the feast moved on to the enjoyment that everyone in Egypt looks forward to. Schools and businesses will be closed for at least three or four days, children and parents have holidays and everyone gets a rest. In Nazlit Semman some enterprising young fellows brought donkeys who would ordinarily be carrying cargoes of turnips or clover and began renting them out to the urban children for donkey rides, while other children played on the grass in the median of the main street. Parks, unfortunately, are in short supply in Cairo and medians make do on holidays and summer evenings.

I had some guests who wanted to go see the pyramids of Giza, so we headed to the Giza plateau. Tourism is alive and well in Egypt to judge from the crush of buses and minibuses lining up to enter. My friends decided to check out the interior of the medium pyramid, but having done way too many pyramid interiors in my mis-spent youth, I opted to sit in the sun and check out the United Nations at Giza. Everywhere I turned I heard another language: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, English, and a number that I couldn't identify for the life of me. The truly fascinating thing is how the camel men and postcard sellers keep up with this. They switch languages with an alacrity that any UN translator would envy.

The temperatures in the shade were still a bit chilly so many of those who were waiting for their pyramid-exploring kin opted for the sunshine. As we walked around the plateau, we were accosted by the usual number of oddly dressed individuals selling scarabs, pyramids molded from resin, glass pyramids, tacky tshirts, and faux Bedouin headcloths at every turn, but my assurance that "we live here" usually brought a sincere apology from the sellers. It's nice to know that they understand how annoying they are.

As someone who was more or less immune from the circus, I could really relax and enjoy some of the more common ploys. The favourite, of course, is to offer a sitting camel as a spot for a photo opportunity and then once the victims are on board to tell the camel to rise. Once the riders are about eight feet in the air, they are in a much weaker bargaining position and are then fleeced to be allowed to get off. It's a massively aggravating situation while you are sitting on some growling, smelly uncontrollable beast and being led in the direction of someone's perfume shop despite all protests, but pretty funny to watch from the ground and it makes a good dinner story.

As much as a resident gets tired of the usual tourist scenes, the people watching at the Giza plateau is second to none. Children dragging parents around massive piles of rocks or falling asleep in backpacks, awestruck teenagers estimating how long it would take to climb a pyramid (in your dreams, kid), and older visitors smiling calmly at something that, thank heaven, is older than them...it's all part of the magic of Egypt.

The Eid fell on the last day of the year and New Years Eve was a quiet potluck dinner at a neighbour's place. The mix was the usual for us, Norwegian, American, Spanish, Egyptian, and Canadian, and a roaring fire was most welcome. New Years Day for me was busy with some expat families bringing children out to the farm to play with the animals and blow off steam...a good omen for the coming year, I hope.

I had every intention of posting this on the first day of the Eid but the gods of the internet were not kindly disposed and my connection vanished for a while. Hopefully, all is well now.

Even Chickens Like To Eat Out

First of all, I want to wish everyone a belated Merry Christmas...or maybe it's an early one. We celebrate Christmas twice in Egypt, first on December 24/25 (Christmas Eve is often more celebrated by the Europeans) and second on January 7 with the Copts and Eastern/Greek Orthodox. Egyptians love a party and really have no problem with any excuse for one. This year the Eid el Adha, the Greater Feast that celebrates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son in obedience to God's orders, will be starting on New Year's Eve so we have that as well. Crowded holiday season we are enjoying.
How did I spend my Christmas? First of all, my children are in the US this year so we aren't together. That is a bit sad, but life is like that. Airfares are expensive and school holidays are not so long. On Christmas Eve, I went to my friend Kati's home in Maadi for a Christmas Eve dinner as I've done for the past three or four years. Kati is a Finn raised in the Middle East who was married to a Lebanese businessman and has raised her three daughters in Egypt. The oldest who is the same age as my daughter is currently studying in the UK, her middle daughter couldn't make it home from San Diego where she is studying, and the youngest is still in school here. Kati's ex-husband and our friend Mona and her son Ali joined us all for dinner. Ali, is an irrepressible seven year old, who gave people a good excuse to buy toys to put under the tree and then had all of us playing with him. I'd been so busy out at the farm that I hadn't been into the city for almost a week and I gave a selection of farm produce: fresh lettuces, homemade pesto, and chicken and turkey eggs. A lovely evening. Then Boxing Day (December 26 for non Brits or Canucks) I found myself with an invitation to a Norwegian Christmas brunch with my neighbours. Norwegians eat an amazing selection of smoked and cured meats and fish for Christmas; moose salami, reindeer paté, various types of salmon, trout and herring. Eating out is such fun.

The poultry at the farm are becoming more and more entertaining. Every morning when I go to feed the parrots, ducks, turkeys, and chickens they all rush around to try out breakfast at every one else's house. The poultry eat the leftover birdbread and fruit/vegetable mix as well as their own corn and greens daily. The food in every flight cage is identical, so it must be the ambience that causes the moving around. The chickens live with the Cuban Amazons and sleep on a wooden curtain rod that serves as a long perch in the center of the cage, while the Amazons seem to prefer to perch in a corner near the top of the cage. It's quite funny to go out to the cages and see a long line of baladi hens on the long swing. I have about eight chickens, seven hens and one rooster. While a friend was visiting a while back we began naming them after explorers and got as far as Erik the Red for the rooster, Henry (for the Navigator for a beige hen who is always wandering out of her flight, Vasco, Pizarro, and a number of others. But they are pretty hard to keep track of. They give me about 5 small eggs daily.

The turkeys live with Ali the African Grey and Bamba the Bahamian Amazon. They also seem to prefer to sleep at altitude, having taken over a corner perch for the nights. Otherwise they patrol the ground looking for fallout from above. African Greys are interesting diners in that they will look through the bowl for the most delectable bits and toss anything in the way onto the ground. It didn't take the turkeys long to figure out that standing around under the parrot dishes was a very good idea. My housekeeper bought me the turkeys who are lovely bronze birds with low chortling vocalisations. They were supposed to be a male and a female and were originally called Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemimah, but as it happens they are both females and Uncle Tom is now called Oprah. They give big speckled eggs that are collected for eating since they aren't fertile. We are planning to have a male join us soon, but for now the eggs are delicious and I love the sounds of the turkeys. There are no plans to eat them. Instead , I'd prefer the eggs and to raise the young turkeys. Turkeys are surprisingly good flyers and I have to be careful to herd them gently back to their flight cage after breakfast so that they don't go airborne and frighten the other birds.

When I was considering ducks for the farm, I went online to learn something about ducks. According to the sources that I found, most domestic ducks are descended from two duck lines, either the mallards from Europe and North America or the Muscovy ducks from South America. Most of the ducks in the farming area are Muscovy or a mix of Muscovy and Mallard. I have one male, called Donald naturally, and then there are the girls, Daphne and Daisy. They have a plastic tub to play around in and they live in the flight cage with Fritzi the African Grey and his flock of budgies and the lovebirds. Donald is black and white with a small crest of feathers that rise up if he gets excited. There are two eggs in the nest box right now so hopefully we will have some ducklings soon. Again, these three will not be for dinner but for parenting. I get a kick out of the ducks because they are the least shy of all the birds and will eat out of my hand. Although the picture of the ducks shows a bare concrete floor, they all have chopped straw spread over the floors to give them some warmth in the winter winds and something to scratch around in.

The eggs that you get from properly fed poultry are absolutely wonderful. The shells are hard enough that you have to work to crack them and the yolks are a deep red orange. The larger eggs in the bowl are the turkey eggs, the large white egg at about one o'clock in the bowl is a commercial chicken egg and all the tiny eggs are my baladi chickens' work. My arugula and basil are adding the green touches.

Downhome Cooking from Egypt

We have been planting plots of vegetables for the benefit of the guys working here, the people (mostly me) living here, and for sale if we get extra. One of the major perks of living in Egypt is the fact that the fresh fruits and vegetables here are truly FRESH and they are wonderfully delicious...so what better than having them immediately available? We've planted tomatoes, cabbages, molokheya, onions, garlic, sweet potato, regular potato, green beans, black beans, shallots, peas, corn, zucchini, peppers, eggplant, and probably a few other things.

While checking the vegetable plots the other day I spotted some leaves among the grasses in the area for animal feed and I began collecting them. I know the plant as khobeyza (lord knows if that's a correct spelling or not) and it is basically a weed. The word used to name the plant is the same word used for geraniums, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this is part of the geranium family. After all in Arabic, any mouse or rat is called by the same word, "far" and they are not so closely related as to be the same animal. One of my "have to do someday" items is to find out just what khobeyza is. What I did with it was much simpler to explain and I find it very tasty.

The leaves are plucked from the stems and set aside to wash carefully. Like spinach, this plant grows best in sandy soil and collects little bits of sand on the leaves. After carefully washing about 250 grams (about a half pound) of fresh leaves, I dropped them and a bunch (diameter about that of a quarter or slightly larger) of fresh coriander (likewise washed and picked over) into some hot soup, about the same amount of soup as vegetables. That isn't terribly clear since leaves take up a lot of space and soup doesn't, but basically you use about a cup of soup for half a pound of leaves. If it isn't enough, add more soup. No harm done. In my last cooking batch, the soup was some particularly rich beef broth that I'd prepared by boiling a couple of massive beef bones stolen from the dogs' stash in the freezer in a large heavy pot (Thank you, Nadim and Vanessa, once again for the Le Creuset that you left me) for 24 hours with onion, garlic and cardamom, but you can just use soup cubes for the broth if you are in a hurry.

Once the leaves are all sort of melted and cooked looking, and this only takes a few minutes, the soup/leaves mix is dropped into a blender and blended thoroughly to a creamy texture. This is then poured back into the pot and seasoned with a concoction of ground dry coriander seed, dried ground cumin seed, and crushed garlic which have been fried in butter until the garlic begins to brown. The amounts are about 1/2 to a teaspoon of the herbs and I use about 3 cloves of garlic, but then I am a garlic nut. Add a couple of tablespoons of washed dry short grain rice and cook the soup for about 30 to 45 minutes over a low heat until the rice is cooked. Season to taste with salt and pepper. You can add a soup cube if the soup part tastes a bit anemic. As you might note, I am not exactly a fanatic about measurements in cooking, but I believe that you have to work with your personal tastes too.

The resulting glop should be a dark green with soft bits of rice in it and quite thick. I particularly like it with grilled chicken and some plain white rice, but it could be eaten as a stew or soup, particularly if you add chunks of meat to it, also. I'm told that khobeyza is very rich in iron, which considering that it tastes a great deal like spinach, wouldn't surprise me. It is a rich dish and one really can't eat all that much of it, for all it is a vegetable, and it can be a bit overwhelming for some people's digestive systems.

The plants are most often found growing in the winter here, so Hussein (the gardener) has been bringing me those that he finds so that I can harvest the leaves and then we will replant the plants to ensure next winter's crop. It's easy to prepare the soup and freeze it until later, but this isn't really a dish that you want to eat in the heat of summer. It's very satisfying in the chill of an Egyptian winter evening. When one of my friends called me the other night as I was preparing this delicacy, I told him what I was doing and he went off into gales of laughter. Apparently, khobeyza is something like collard greens and pork bellies in Egyptian cuisine, sort of cooking for the very poor. I can't find it anywhere in any of my cookbooks or Egyptian recipe collections on the internet, so here it is for the first time ever. Only problem is that I don't know if you can find the same plant other places like California or the southern US or Europe where it might be expected to grow. If the US customs weren't so funny about things, I could probably mail some out.

If any plant experts are out there and read this, I'd be delighted for an identification.

So Good To Be Back

It's been a long time. I had a young friend of the family come to stay a month with me mid-November. Georganna went to high school with my son and daughter here in Cairo and then traveled to the US to study graphic design. She's an oil brat, raised all over the world by parents who get transfered to some pretty strange places every four years or so, and she's probably more comfortable in airports than most of us are in the corner store. While she was still in school, she was given an assignment of designing a children's book and contacted my daughter in New York wondering about where she was going to find a story for her book. Dependable daughter just told her to contact me since I have had a number of children's stories hanging around on my computer for a number of years, George did so, and I sent her a story. But her professor told her to wait to use it on her own, and we have ended up collaborating on a number of stories for four to roughly eight year olds that will hopefully teach them various things about Egypt in a gentle way. Having been away from Egypt for about five years, George felt that she needed some time here to absorb the time, the smells, the light, and the special balance between ancient and modern that infuses life here. Like many ex-Egyptians (what do you call an ex-pat from another country who would love to be able to stay here but hasn't been able to?) George has been frustrated by the astonishing lack of comprehension of the realities of life in Egypt and we both see the children's books as being a good possibility of reaching young minds before they are warped by the evening news, so we want the illustrations to be excellent. She traveled back to the States this morning with more than a thousand photographs to use as a base for her drawings for the stories.

One of the additions to the farm that we accomplished during her visit was a baladi oven, a wood-fired brick oven that was constructed behind the ridiculously large barbecue...well ridiculously large is relative because most of the men I've introduced to it begin drooling. The oven didn't take long to build from red brick and even before the mud coating was finished the grooms were building a big fire in the lower portion under the direction of the builder. The bread or the pan with a casserole goes into the upper portion of the oven where it rests on a thick plate made of some special concrete-like material that is heated by the fire in the lower part of the oven. Building a fire immediately in the oven apparently cures the cement properly. My housekeeper was looking forward to baking bread for her household and mine in the new oven but so far we haven't had the chance . Poor Magda, already the mother of five children, was pregnant with a sixth child and expected to give birth sometime in the next month or so. Last week one of her daughters came to say that she wasn't feeling well and the next thing I heard was that the baby aborted rather late in the pregnancy. She wasn't actually thrilled to be having a sixth child, but this definitely wasn't what she had in mind either. So life, already busy with my visitor, went into fast forward while George and I picked up the household slack, however slackly we did it.

Many days I was busy with clients at the farm and George went out with the faithful Mohamed Said to photograph parts of town, shops, museums, children, cats, houses....you name it...all over Cairo. Toward the end of her stay, however, a friend of hers from South Carolina en route to Lithuania for Christmas with her parents, stopped by. George and Asta wanted to go to old Cairo to see some of the old mosques, so I tagged along for the day. We started at Ibn Tulun, one of Cairo's oldest, built in 879 and modeled on a famous mosque in Samarra, Iraq. At the time of building, Cairo didn't exist as the capital of Egypt. This is one of the simplest mosques in Cairo, and to my mind one of the loveliest. The huge open area in the center of the mosque is open to the sky, while the arcades along the walls provide shelter from the sun. Just next door to Ibn Tulun is one of Egypt's less known museums, the Gayer Anderson house, which is probably best known as a movie set in the James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me...a film that plays hilariously with the geography of Egypt. The Gayer Anderson house was actually two adjoining houses dating to the 1500's and 1600's that were rented by a British army doctor and then renovated in the styles of various periods of Arab decoration. One of the most fascinating spots of this house is the series of small rooms overlooking the main audience hall. This hall was designed on the Mameluke model in which the male and female parts of the house were kept separate, so the audience hall was for the men of the house.
The women, on the other hand, had access to the events of the meeting from a vantage point high above the chamber. The wooden screens kept the women from the eyes of male guests below while also cooling the air that moved through them. Benches
provided places for the women to sit comfortably while listening to the male gossip and discussions below. Having been the victim of many, many business dinners during which the primary topic of conversation was usually a complex piece of machinery, the idea of being able to come and go, enjoy my own refreshments, and ignore the boring parts of the evening in private is rather appealing.




Most of the windows in the house are covered with the wooden mashrabiya screens, collected by the doctor from various buildings that were being demolished in the 1930's and 40's. Dr. Gayer Anderson's collection of screens, furniture, rugs, and marble fountains was donated to the Egyptian government for this museum when the doctor left Egypt. The house preserves the traditional spaces of medieval Egyptian homes, the winter rooms and the summer rooms and the interweaving of the sexes for us to wonder at.

From the museum and the mosque of Ibn Tulun we moved to a spot just under the wall of the Citadel where the Refa'i and Sultan Hassan mosques were built. The Refa'i mosque is the most recent, built in the 1800's and home to the tombs of many of Egypt's kings/khedives/sultans, as well as the tomb of the late Shah of Iran. The Refa'i is on the right of the passageway. It was built on the site of the tomb of a sufi sheikh from whom it takes its name. The stone work inside this massive building is astonishing. As time was getting along, we decided to move on to the much older Sultan Hassan mosque just across the road. Many years ago, in 1976 to be exact, I'd visited these same mosques with my husband on our first visit. Then, Cairo was in the grip of a housing crisis with many rural families having moved to the city.

I can recall families living in these enormous buildings and much activity of daily life taking place in the various corners of the buildings. Now that the families have moved out, the mosques are places of peace and tranquility. Both the girls found the mosques fascinating both architecturally and emotionally. Moving through the rooms that had been designed for schools in the 1500's and that were now, for the most part, empty other than isolated individuals praying, perhaps just resting, or chatting quietly with a friend. Given much of the sorts of things that one reads in the papers online or hears on television, it's a bit surprising to realise what havens of peace these places are in the rush of the city. It had been a long time for me since I'd seen these famous places, but I was very happy to renew acquaintance.

One of the tasks that the girls had was to buy Egyptian Christmas presents for their families. I took the chance to have some small gifts taken back to the US for my children and one of the items I sent back was a book that had been recommended to me by a good friend. "Sharon And My Mother In Law" by Suad Amiry. This book was based on a series of emails written to family and friends by Suad during the time when she was living in Ramallah, Palestine, while the Israelis had the area under curfew, making it impossible for the residents to leave their homes. Much of the incidents described in the book are disturbing, puzzling, or even heart-wrenching, but somehow Suad Amiry maintains a wry humour that brings even more poignancy to the tales. I've read many more "serious" books about Palestine, but I don't know when I've read one that made many things truly as understandable. This is definitely a book to read.