Egypt

When I started this blog, I asked my friend Blair, who spent a summer in Cairo, if she would cook with me. She immediately got excited about showing me koshari (or koshary), which she pretty much lived on while she was there. Months passed and we never got around to cooking together, but then last week she sent me this article about how koshari was pretty much feeding the revolution. It's peasant food: filling and frequently cheaper to buy than to make yourself. So we found a recipe she said looked reasonably authentic, and whipped it up on Thursday. Blair describes koshari as Egyptian chili. It was tasty, and my favorite thing about it is that it's a complete meal you can whip up with pantry staples. It wasn't quite as cheap as Ramen, but close, and much more nutritious.

We ate the koshari with some wine my friend Kenny brought me back from Egypt. We expected it to be terrible, but it was actually reasonably drinkable.