Egypt: The Food

Most of the time we ate in very nice places that had a buffet of European or American food, but there was always a chance to try something Egyptian. A typical Egyptian meal was: hummus (chick peas mashed with a seasame seed paste), baba ganoush (roasted eggplants with seasame seed paste), olives, tomatoes, and pita bread. They also had a kind of goat cheese that resembled feta. That was for the appetizer, and for dinner we had shish keebabs and grilled fish.

Normally for dessert we would just have a simple fruit, like small bananas (they call our large bananas 'candles' because they just taste like wax).

And then at the end of the dinner we would have Turkish coffee. Which is made with two teaspoons of ground coffee, two teaspoons of sugar and some water. After slowly bring the mixture to a boil on the stove three or four times, they would pour it in a cup (unfiltered). You basically had to wait a couple of minutes for the coffee grounds to settle to the bottom of the cup, and then only drink the coffee just before it started to have the consistency of mud.