Kushari

When we first arrived in Cairo, our guide Moustafa admitted that he had been terrified to take a group of four foreign women around Egypt; in fact, the morning before he picked us up, he had been to mosque to pray that he would do a good job. Being the great guide that he is, Moustafa took us to lots of great meals, however they were all in tourist restaurants. Finally, we asked him to take us to eat where the locals eat. Moustafa was shocked; he must have asked us 50 times if we were sure about our decision to jump headfirst into an "authentic" cultural experience--I think he was worried that we wouldn't like what we found. Despite Moustafa's warnings that we probably wouldn't like the food and that there wasn't any "atmosphere", we found ourselves at the door of a kushari restaurant.

These restaurants only serve kushari. You can order as much of it as you want, but it is the only thing on the menu. Kushari is super simple to make and consists of a few basic things--spaghetti noddles, round pasta, chickpeas, lentils, fried onions, with a tomato sauce on top, a little vinegar and some really spicy chili concentrate if you are brave. They prepare all the ingredients separately and then mix them together in big silver pots. This particular restaurant had two floors; the men cooked the ingredients downstairs and then carried huge, steaming, silver bowls of pasta or lentils up the stairs and dumped them into even bigger silver pots. The result of all this work is a starchy mess of goodness--kushari is a meal not to be missed.

After the meal we used the squatter toilets before heading out--Moustafa shaking his head the whole time at the crazy foreign women that he had on his tour.