Abroad Outlook: Donut Have a Pun For the Title But Olive You Guys

Eating is one of the best parts of the day. One of the absolute best parts of being an exchange student is food and eating. I came to Egypt knowing exactly one kind of Egyptian food, and never I had never tried it. Not have I tried middle eastern food or anything like that. But in the couple months I've been here I have eaten lots of food.

I don't know when Egyptians eat. But I, in my Egyptian life style, basically eat when I'm hungry. I eat what I bring to school, which depends on how lazy or not lazy I am the day before. Normally like a sandwich or two and like an orange, or cake if we have it. Maybe. Then the big meal is lunch. We normally eat around four but it could be earlier or later depending on who's home, who's coming home, etc. Then around 8 or 9 I make my food for school the next day and eat something.

So Egyptian lunch in my host family is normally some sort of carb (rice, pasta, bread, mixture of those), a meat (beef, chicken, fish), veggies (salad, stew, or mixed into the meal).

With the help of my friends, I have come up with a list of Egyptian foods:

Goulash: It's kind of a meat pie.
Kofta: Meat with spices, onions, garlic, parsley, etc.
Foul: Fava Bean dip. Eaten with bread.
Tameya: Falafel
Molokhia: Green soup. Molokhia is a plant and that's what the soup is.
Mahshy: Basically any vegetable stuffed with rice and stuff. This recipe is for stuffed cabbage but it can be eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, onions, zucchini, etc.
Tahini: A sauce served with kofta and tameya and stuff
Hawawshi: Meat with spices in bread
Shwarma: Beef: explanation in "Suez" post. Chicken: spiced chicken with vegetables. This recipe is chicken.
Mombar: Stuffed cow intestines/stomach
Kebda: Liver
Mokh: Brain
Deil: Tail
Lessan: Tongue
Koshary: Rice, lentils, onion, macaroni. National dish of Egypt
Homos el Sham: Basically chickpea soup
Roz bel Laban: Rice pudding.
They also eat a lot of pickled vegetables, I tried them three times, and I am not a pickled anything person... sorry. But I like fish now. As long as it's cooked. I also eat peppers and tomatoes regularly.

There are probably many, many more Egyptian foods, this is just what we brainstormed. The names are links for recipes I've found. I have not used these recipes, I just googled "Egyptian [insert food name here] recipe". If it seemed right I used it. For the ones without links, I couldn't find anything. For my cooking followers, if you want to try these out I definitely encourage you to. Good Luck. If you want to cheat, I'm sure there are restaurants you could go to. If you live in/around Pleasanton. There is a falafel place on Bernal across from the "new" Safeway... I think. There's also an Egyptian restaurant in San Francisco. The rest of the country probably has other places.

I have not eaten all of these, I hope to by the time my year is up. I've helped make kofta and goulash. But today was a perfect display of my cooking skills. I decided that I wanted to make breakfast for my host family because I was the only one out of bed and I was hungry and wanted to do something nice. I broke a plate. And set a washcloth on fire trying to use it as an oven mitt. (It was fine. I put it out, only the corner burned). Also, my chocolate pie ended up being chocolate soup that we put in the freezer to make overly cinnamon-ed weird chocolate ice cream that melts really fast in crust. It tasted good, just not at all like chocolate pie. The crust was good though. I emailed my Grandma and she told me what I did wrong. Grandma's are good for that kind of thing.

In other news, my Arabic is better than when I got here, but still not good. However, my English is starting to demolish. An Egyptian corrected my English today...

I, being a human with an iPhone in the year 2014, have taken pictures of things I've eaten so here you go: