Eat Your Way Around the World - Egypt

This is such a fun way to study a culture … explore their traditional foods! We are continuing with our Summer intensive study of Paths of Exploration. We are in the Columbus unit and just studied the various countries Columbus visited on the Mediterranean Sea and we are starting to study about his sailing experience outside the Med. One of the required reading books that is part of the Paths of Exploration curriculum is Eat Your Way Around the World, by Jamie Aramini.

There are three Egyptian recipes in the cookbook. Gebna Makleyah, Biram Ruz, and Shish Kebabs. We made all three recipes for our Egyptian Study meal. Since Blake is the self-proclaimed, cooker, he was in the kitchen with me. I call him my “precious cooker” (instead of pressure cooker)! When he was little, I would ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up… he would always tell me “a cooker”!! Needless to say, he gets as much experience in the kitchen as he wants!

The Shish Kebabs were spicy! We love cumin, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, onion, garlic, etc… and we eat these spices regularly! But even for us, this was a bit of a stout flavor. We will cook this recipe again, but we will absolutely tone it down! It could have used more garlic and less cumin (in my opinion). The flavor was great just too much of it. Gage noticed how filling this meal was. I wonder if the level of spiciness has any relationship at all to how quickly you feel full? Something to explore!

We LOVED the Biram Ruz! It is a long grain rice dish with whole milk and heavy cream… no wonder we like it, huh!?! Seriously didn’t expect to like this one. But we all loved it. It was pretty bland considering the spiciness of the shish kebabs… maybe this is intentional to counter that extreme spiciness? Either way, it was quite tasty!

Finally, we made the Gebna Maleyah. These surprised me. Number one, they were surprisingly hard to make, and number two they tasted great. I’m not a huge Feta Cheese fan, but these may have changed my mind. These were supposed to be cheese “balls”, as you see in the plate picture at the top of the article, they look more like pancakes. The boys didn’t like this flavor at all (no surprise there)!

So to wrap up our thoughts, the Egyptian meal was good, but not great. We will try modified versions of these again… except maybe the Gebna Makleyah (the Feta Cheese dish). They boys really did not like it, I guess that is a mature taste. Thinking about this stout flavored meal, I bet it would be FABULOUS with a nice Cabernet! I’m pretty sure this will be a Shabbat meal soon!

Until next time…

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Trish Corlew

Founder and Author at Live and Learn Farm

Trish has been married to her best friend, David, for 16 years and they have three sons (aged 13, 12 and 9). Trish is from the coast of North Carolina, but they now live in rural West Tennessee on a 40+ acre farm. She has been homeschooling since 2009 and her homeschool style leans towards a Montessori approach with a heavy emphasis on hands-on learning. They also own a small business that Trish runs from home. Trish’s family is Messianic and they love studying the Scriptures, learning Hebrew and growing in their faith and walk daily. In her spare time, Trish loves to write, work in their garden and can regularly be found trying to learn something new, modeling that learning is indeed a life-long endeavor!