Time Enough To Eat

Egyptian food is wonderful. Much of the wonderfulness of it comes from the freshness of the ingredients. I was cruising the news on the internet and found an interesting piece on Time online (you can reach it by clicking the title here) about how much of the cultural aspects of eating are being lost in the globalisation of fast food. My closest fast food place is probably about 15 km, a fact which never fails to please me. In Egypt fast food places all deliver, making it even easier to destroy yourself with food. On the other hand, sometimes I get an invitation to Mabrouka's and that is much, much better. Mabrouka is a widow about my own age with four sons and two daughters. Two of the sons are married, two are not yet...all of them live in the family house. The daughters are married and live nearby. Mabrouka grows her own poultry and buys produce in the village that is grown by her neighbours. She is a wonderful cook, as you can see in the photo. Dinner included chicken cooked with sliced potatoes in a tomato sauce (fresh tomatoes of course...not a can in her house) that were baked in a wood burning oven. The roast chicken was also baked in the oven and the stuffed aubergine, peppers, zucchini, and cabbage leaves were cooked on a stone top to the oven. It's more work than I want to do, but boy, do I appreciate her work. Dessert is usually fruit.

I wish I could say that since moving to the farm I've lost a ton of weight and become sleek and svelte, but that would be fibbing. I haven't but I know that my diet is a lot healthier than it was in the city. The temptation to just call for a pizza was always really a tough one. Now most of my meals are prepared from the things that we are growing on the farm. This depends on the season, but being able to freeze or dry vegetables makes them last. Like most of our neighbours, we are growing the summer crop of bamia, or okra. Part of the reason for this is because I find the flowers lovely. Fresh okra is eaten while still small, but the parrots and poultry appreciate the larger pods. When dried and ground into a powder, the pods are the basis of a Sudanese stew, moolah, of which I am inordinately fond in the winter. The pods have small spines on them and I'm always struck by the dedication of the okra farmers who have to pick their crop in the summer heat while completely wrapped in fabric to keep the spines out of their fingers, arms, legs, and faces. Much of the crop is frozen to provide okra for winter meals, since when it is cooked with the rich tomato sauce and small chunks of meat, it makes for a very filling meal...much more filling than is needed in summer.

Another summer crop that is more appreciated in the winter is molokheya, which could be called the Egyptian national dish. Molokheya is essentially a weed called swamp mallow other places, a tall plant with shiny oval leaves and small yellow flowers. It grows almost anywhere wild and is also planted in fields. The leaves are chopped if fresh, or crumbled when dry, and cooked in a chicken, rabbit, or beef stock to which is added a fried garlic, coriander and a bit of cumin. Hot pepper can be added to taste as well. The molokheya makes a rather mucilaginous soup...another word for sort of slimy...but it is known to be good for digestion. Once you get past the texture, and some people never do, it is wonderfully delicious over rice. We have a small field of it growing next to the longeing ring and I find the plants all over the garden popping up next to roses or behind palm trees. Welcome.
My parrots like peppers, my grooms love peppers, and I like them too. This year we planted hot peppers and I learned that if you pick them young, they are usually sweet, but if you wait for them to ripen to red, they pick up a lot on the heat scale. Peppers have a ton of Vitamin C among other things and are very good for you. I never had any idea how many peppers can be produced by relatively few plants. It's quite astonishing and I haven't had to buy peppers all year. We also are still working our way through the braided onions and garlic in the verandah, while it is almost time to plant again.

Zucchini is a vegetable that is planted all year round and it only takes about two months to complete the growing cycle. One of my friends in Alexandria called Egypt "the land of the eternal zucchini" because of the omnipresence of this vegetable. Yesterday I made a salad from gargeer (aka: Arugula) cut fresh from the garden, tomatoes and red onions also just picked, the first zucchini from our garden sauteed with garlic and mushrooms (the only bought items), with chopped roast chicken. Zucchini just out of the garden tastes NOTHING like the stuff that you get from the supermarket. In another week I'll be sending zucchini home with my grooms because there really are limits to how much I can eat, even with the poultry, rabbits, parrots, and tortoises helping.

Finally, being on the cusp of the mango and date seasons, we have a number of sweet options. The mangoes this year had a hard time with the summer heat, but they are just as juicy as ever. The new dates are just coming on the market in time for Ramadan in a couple of weeks, and the sweet red Zaghlouls are already being sold on the roadsides. Left for a couple of days they turn brown and softer, resembling the dates that are more common in Europe and North America. The grapes, both seedless and with seeds are still in season as are the guavas. As the weather cools, apples, oranges, and bananas will take their places.

The farmers here for the most part eat a vegetarian diet. Vegetables grown in the fields, cheese and yogurt from the family cow or buffalo, and bread or rice are the staples. Breakfast is often cooked beans known as foul (pronounced "fool") cooked with onions, garlic, cumin and lemon, and eaten with cheese and bread. Lunch may be bread, cheese, onions, and then dinner might be a vegetable stew. It's a healthier diet than is followed in the city by a long shot. Sometimes it's easy not to miss junk food.
copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

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.