The Little Red Hen Moves To Egypt

 I have about ten people working for me on my farm, helping to care for the animals, working in the gardens and basically providing a lot of support for me. They've all worked for me for some time...like before the revolution.  After the revolution our busy schedules of school visits, equestrian tourism and so on pretty much died. A lot of stables around me unloaded their horse and cut staff right away, but I couldn't do that to families that I was supporting or to the  horses that I'd rescued. So we tightened belts and looked for ways to economise. One way was to turn the land between the horse paddocks and the garden into vegetable gardens for the use of all the staff and their families. The deal is that everyone chips in on the work and everyone benefits. So the other day after lunch I took a look at the beds and announced to the grooms and gardeners that everyone needed to put in some weeding time. Not all of them were thrilled so I told them a story, one I'd heard as a child,  The Little Red Hen.

My Arabic is functional, not perfect by any means, so the story was somewhat simplified for them. For anyone who doesn't know this story, it is a staple for North American children in their pre-school years. Briefly, a red hen is walking around one day when she finds some wheat on the road. She gathers up the grain and decides to use it to grow more wheat so that she can bake some bread. At various points in the process (planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, milling, and baking) she asks various animal friends (cow, donkey, duck, dog, cat, rooster) to assist her, but each one has a sort of excuse as to why they can't help her....until, of course, the bread was baked and everyone wanted some, but the little red hen tells them that since they were too busy to help, they must be too busy to eat.

The guys all listened politely to the end and then at the end, one of them began to laugh and said, "See? She fooled them!" Another slightly more socially adept groom suggested that it was something else. I laughed and said that yes, if they wanted to eat the bread (or in our case, the vegetables) they needed to be there for the work and announced that I was the red hen. All very simple, you'd think, but the young man who took the story as the hen taking advantage of and then laughing at her neighbours then spent hours trying to figure out who among them was the donkey, the cat, the duck and so on.


Sometimes stories don't travel all that well.






copyright 2012 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.