First food post

Someone mentioned that they wanted to see some camels, so here's some camel (on the left):


This was kofte or kafteh or something like that....everything is phonetic but there's really no standardized way of representing the sounds in English letters, so any given word tends to be spelled around 74 different ways, depending on where you look. It may even be spelled differently on either side of a map. The good thing though is that it encourages you to try and pronounce the words, and once you get the hang of it, the same-word-spelled-differently dealie isn't as tricky anymore, plus then you learn how to consistently mispronounce words. Then you can insist on saying it wrong repeatedly to cab drivers, and end up in the middle of nowhere after work in a suit with a laptop bag, trying to find a metro station. Anyways, kofte is usually either camel or beef, camel being a little easier to procure. I really couldn't tell the difference between ground camel and ground beef, as spiced as it was. Plus, I was nervously trying the very tasty salad (in the middle) and seeing if fresh veggies would turn my insides into fresh battlefields for incompatible critters. Although I like the home team, I want the Egyptian buggers to eventually win so I can eat food here more easily. Ideally, it'll be a gradual infiltration, so that before I know it, Egyptian parasites will be all over my stuff like Asians in Vancouver or Jersey people at University of Maryland. The above meal cost abount 13 LE, which just over 2 bucks. I whined about them charging me 3 LE (a bit over 50 cents) for one cupe of shay (tea), and vowed to bring my own beverage next time.

Specimen 2: Koushari, kushari, kohsaree, the national dish of Egypt, at least according to Lonely Planet. It's actually a really tasty, safe-tasting, cheap dish of some tomato-based sauce on rice and/or macaroni, topped with fried onions. This bowl cost me about a dollar (~5.5 Egyptian pounds, or LE), and even then I think I could have paid less for it. I see myself doing a lot of koushari-hunting while in Cairo...because tomatoes are about as easy to kill as macaroni.


Specimen 3: A tasty little spread of goodness at Kazaz, a fast food joint near my hostel. Walked in the first floor and saw the all-Arabic menu, and just kinda stared for a bit wondering which one to randomly point to, before someone waved me to the upstairs seating area with English menus. Ordered until the waiter said "enough, enough" which was luckily not too far into the ordering process - hooray honesty, or at least not-wanting-to-clean-up-my-pukesty. From left to right: "Alexandria" falafel (Alexandria just meaning bigger-size apparently), ubiquitous pita-like bread, super-fun-mystery-fried-grilled-protein-plate, shaksouka (some meat-and-vegetable-chopped-up-tomato-onion-something served cold), another sketchy salad. Mystery-fun-meat plate was a little too much fried goodness for me, and the only non-fried area of the plate was this grilled-beef-looking thing. Fun fact: horrible flat-pounded grilled liver is very grilled-beef-looking, and very not grilled-beef-tasting. Reminded me of when liver kicked my butt in New Zealand.

Liver, you bastard, you are my culinary nemesis.