hamesh restaurant

There is no new food in this entry at all, but I would be seriously remiss if I didn’t mention Hamesh restaurant in downtown Amman. We ate here two of our three lunches in Amman and enjoyed every bite. They serve the basics – falafel, hummus, foul, bread, tomatoes, tea – but everything is seriously fresh and delicious. You can watch them make your falafel if you want! We left every day filled to the brim and very satisfied. The green stuff on the hummus and foul is a kind of spicy chili sauce, perfect for adding a bit of extra taste to a slightly dull bowl of beans.

If you find yourself in Amman, you absolutely must find your way downtown and grab a table at this institution. You will not be disappointed.

they eat all of the goat

We visited a little restaurant tonight that dealt in local specialties. Chris ordered the local version of baba ghanoush, known as moutabal, which was only mediocre compared to Egypt’s killer version. I went for the very special local specialty – boiled goat’s head. Due to the graphic nature of the pictures, I’m only posting links to them – before and after. Seriously, even Chris didn’t really like looking at them during and after dinner.

The meat was not nearly as good as the mensaf – it was little rubbery, and the cheeks were a little strange. The tongue was rather tasty. To be honest, it wasn’t all that filling – goat’s head does not have a lot of meat. Why anyone would order this except as a fun experiment (outside of old times when you ate everything because you had to) is a little beyond me. Maybe people who developed the taste when they were young and never lost it. Well, I’ve tried this anything once so that you don’t have to.

mensaf

Welcome to Jordan! There’s a lot of food here similar to Egypt, but a a fe differences for us to investigate. First and foremost of those is mensaf. We tried it three times in total – twice with delicious lamb (how it’s typically made, cooked to falling-off tenderness) and once with chicken. It’s actually not a lot more than meat cooked very well, often for hours, on rice with some nuts on top (we had it with roasted peanuts once and roasted almonds the other times). The special addition is the yogurt. Traditionally made from goat’s milk, plain yogurt is mostly used today. A sauce with the consistency of heavy cream is created with the yogurt and the meat drippings. It is usually poured over the rice and meat, though I enjoyed dipping every bit in instead, just so I didn’t waste any sauce and got a delicious taste of yogurt with every bite.

We tried the lamb in restaurants and the chicken as a semi-homecooked meal in our hotel outside of Petra. The traditional way of eating is with a lack of forks. There are thin pieces of unleavened bread provided, and you are supposed to use them to scoop up chunks of rice and meat. Because a giant plate of rice isn’t filling enough.

This dish is sometimes served at weddings, we were told, as it is huge and contains lamb, which seems to be the national meat. For a wedding, they might buy 1-2kg of lamb per person. Yeah, could you eat that much meat? Could your grandma? Imagine everyone eating that much lamb. Crazy.

This is definitely a dish that we will be sharing with friends and making for ourselves. You can find recipes for it on the net simply by googling it. I recommend cooking for as long as possible – a pressure cooker would be a big help in this regard. However you do it up, enjoy!

hot milk custard

This was the first thing we had in Amman. We had just checked in to our hostel after a three-hour bus ride across greenish desert (Jordan seems to have a lot of that), and we walked across the street in the cool morning chill and ordered a hot milk custard at the little stand across the street. Two cups were removed from the stack, a big vat of hot ivory stirred up and spooned into the cups, then topped with a few shakes of cinnamon and a pinch of coconut. We both stirred it all up and took careful sips to warm ourselves up slowly, huddled over the gumball machine outside.

breaking bread (and making it) with the bedouin

While we were out in the desert, the food that we had was not so different from anything else we had had elsewhere in Egypt – foul and shakshoka for breakfast, various vegetable salads for lunch (veggies and tuna, veggies with tahina and feta), baba ghanoug (though made using a campfire, a great practice and something I’d love to do while camping in the future). The cool thing to watch was the making of bread. First off, a pit fire was the only method of cooking, so an oil barrel lid was our cooking surface. The bread dough was made up, a splash of salt water was thrown on, then the bread was spun out thin – kind of like Italian pizza throwing in the cartoons – and put on the hot lid to cook, flipped over after a quick exposure.

It blackened quickly otherwise. While the bread was cooked like this on the top, the eggplants smoldered in the fiery ashes below: multitasking. After all the bread was cooked that way and the fire had burned itself down, the other bread was prepared.

See, bread made the first method was a little crispy and quite thin – good for grabbing pieces of tuna or meat or vegetable, but not so good for scooping up that last bite. So the ashes were scraped aside and a patted-out piece of dough was placed on the sand and covered by sand and ashes to slowly bake. Of course it took longer, so only one was made, but eight or ten minutes later the whole mess was swept aside and voila: delicious cooked bread. A couple of beatings against the flour sack and a little scraping to get any excess blackening off and it was ready to eat.

Surprisingly, there was no ash or sand that we found when we bit down – I’m sure you learn quickly how to work it enough to get both out!

It was a very delicious meal prepared in a very interesting way in a very gorgeous valley with very cool people. It was certainly a learning experience in many ways – I eagerly anticipate my attempts at campfire baba ghanoug now!

shish cooking

This one’s easy. Shish kebab is one food from this region that everyone knows. Spiced meat on a stick cooked up, straight up. Delicious. Pictured here they had removed the stick and arranged them all nicely. Great meat, kind of like meatballs in this place.

Shish tawook is the same idea, but with chicken. It’s the specific name for this dish – chicken by itself is farooj. Same idea, same great taste.

the building blocks of egyptian dining

Alright, it’s at the end, but I need to put in an entry on the basics available, photos or not. These basics are the ‘salads’ as they are often referred to on menus in English, though they can also be found under appetizers.

First up is our favourite, baba ghanoug, or as it’s known back home (from the Lebanese) baba ghanoush. Made from blended, baked eggplants and spices, it ideally has a nice smoky taste to it. We tried this all over and found two places where it really shone – the fancy hotel buffet we gorged at (pictured here with pomegranate) and Sofra in Luxor – but it was nice to have every time.

Hummus follows quite closely, mostly because Christine liked baba ghanoug more – they’d be a tie for me. Made of mashed chickpeas, tahnini (sesame paste), oil, and often a bit of lemon juice, it’s proteintastic and is wonderful with the pita bread you get everywhere. It’s best when it’s nice and creamy – good olive oil will give it the best consistency.

Tabbouleh isn’t terribly common here, being a Lebanese dish, but it can be found on a few menus. Parsley, tomatoes, cucumbers, and lemon juice make up this vegetable salad. It’s not my favourite, though when it’s done really well, it’s really good.

Foul is possibly the most basic food in Egypt. Made from smushed fava beans and spices (though sometimes it’s just the beans, really basic), it always comes with bread – either inside a sandwich (sometimes also with falafel) or on the side for dipping. If it’s on a plate, it often gets a dollop of olive oil for flavour. Sometimes it comes with a bit of spicy green pepper sauce/relish that gives it a great kick. We’ve only had this in Sinai in the east and in Jordan, but I like it a lot.

Ta’miyya (or as it’s known outside of Egypt, falafel) is fava bean paste with spices (or sometimes too much salt), rolled into a ball and deep fried. This is the other most basic food and has a long history. I think. I’d guess so, considering it’s made from the same thing as foul – beans! A cup of these costs almost nothing and, depending on where you go, fills you up in a delicious way. It’s the dish of a thousand variations, even though you don’t know what can be varied.

Lastly, we’ve got stuffed grape vine leaves. If you go to local markets, you can find grape leaves out for these little buggers. Spiced rice inside the leaves fills you up pretty quickly. They’re usually accompanied by labna, a delicious yogurt dip.

There are often other choices that can be found here and there, but they’re not always dependable. Coleslaw, potato salad, garlic tomato salad (really nice and garlicky!), and often different things with eggplant.

If you want to eat for cheap in Egypt, this is where you have to head. Healthy, tasty, and filling: there’s a reason they’re available everywhere.

sweet egyptian desserts, part iii

Unfortunately, I don’t remember the names of anything and didn’t make any note, so I’m just going to post pictures of these delicious creations and make comments from what I remember. More careful documentation will be done in Jordan, as they appear.

That’s coconut on filo dough pie in the corner, and it’s as awesome as it sounds. The others are a type of shredded-wheat-like dough used in a lot of pastries here.

The roll on the right is like apricot Fruit Roll-up with coconut in the middle. Again, as awesome as it sounds. The rest is filo dough and shredded-wheat dough stuff like above.

I remember that the cookie was rather dry, though it had pistachios in it, and the light coloured stick had fig in the middle.

Delicious filo dough sweets in the window.

Some kind of cakey confection. It may be the cornmeal-like cake I mentioned in the dessert post from Luxor, but that’s unconfirmed. Your choice – pistachios or chocolate on top!

tagin

Tagin, as far as I understand it, is a clay pot stew. It can have meat, fish, vegetables – pretty much everything. We saw it on menus all over, and due to its complexity and long cooking time, required preparation and expense. We found a decent place serving it in Luxor, however, and decided to give it a try. First off, it’s hot – temperature hot, as it’s usually kept heated on a griddle or something similar once it’s prepared. Once you get past that, however, it’s a delightful combination of flavours – spices, vegetables, meat, sometimes rice – that’s a bit like a slow-cooked stew. I’m glad we visited this place more than once.

manna

Well, it’s unleavened bread, anyway, and it’s basically manna. It’s eaten at every meal, anyway, whether as a holder for a sort of sandwich-like quick bite or as something to be torn at and dipped into a sauce. It can also be used kind of like an edible napkin to pick something up. Either way, it is a very strong staple, at least as important as rice and noodles are in Asia and the potato in North America. I love it and I hope to find a way to keep it in our house as much as possible.