Cairo Photo Tour: Experiments With Food

I mentioned a few days ago (unless I only emailed people about it and never blogged?) that I tried cooking, and ended up having to throw away two plates after unsuccessfully trying to heat up pizza and cinnaparts (you should check the link out -- Pizza Hut KSA...gotta love the image of the camels crossing the desert to get some Spaghetti Bolognaise!). Well I've FINALLY loaded the software for my unbelievably gorgeous and "ever-so stylish" mobile, and so I was able to download some of the photos that I've been taking on my mobile (because I'm too lazy to PLUG IN my ridiculously nice camera so that its battery can charge), and one of them is on the couch in my living room with the cinnaparts heated up. I think it's also worth mentioning that the plate, which came with the apartment, is the same flatware (flatware is plates and not silverware, right?) that we had at my guesthouse in Afghanistan, which I found odd and a bit disturbing (thinking I'd escaped Cairo only to find out that it had followed me to Central Asia).

I am also attaching a photo of the "chocolate souffle" (if you tasted it then you'd know that it needs to be in quotes) that I ordered from Tabasco, last night -- a restaurant that is kind of the AUC student/Zamalek spoiled youth hangout, but we also have two here in Doqqi, one which *gap* serves alcohol. I won't get into the horrible (HORRIBLE) fight I got into with the restaurant, because that will distract you from the actual point of the photo, which is the odd cream sauce that they gave me {prepare for slightly philosophical discussion of "the normal"}

They were thoughtful enough (I am shocked) to actually give me a ton of powdered sugar and sauce to put on the souffle, as well as extra red sauce for my ravioli, etc. Here's the problem: I'm not sure (even after eating it) what the sauce was, and I'm not even sure if it was meant for the souffle.

As you can see in the photo, the sauce was a kind of yellow/white/GREENISH liquid that was mostly watery but with some moments of thickness (almost like a watery custard). When I *saw* it I thought: vanilla sauce. When I tasted it, though, it was basically just egg. Then I thought maybe they gave me extra souffle batter in case I wanted to cook my own (combining my cluelessness about cooking with the total unpredictability of ALL service industry logic in Cairo means ANYTHING could have been happening, in my mind), but then I realized that I'm not even sure if you use eggs in souffle, and even so, you'd need chocolate -- I felt stupid for thinking that it might be souffle batter when I realized that, duh, cooking what they gave me would have just made, like, scrambled eggs. Then I thought maybe it was white sauce for my pasta (I chose red over white, but maybe they wanted me to have options), or just a lot of creamy melted butter.

Here is the problem: I totally liked the sauce. I mean, the souffle needed some kind of peristalsis-promoting lubricant, and the sauce had this proteinaceous (admittedly: suspiciously so, although I won't make any comments more provocative than that -- you can see the photo for yourself) , SLIGHTLY sweet taste, and I liked it. I even *Chunk blushes* DRANK it out of the cup while I was eating. What made me so uneasy, though, was that, despite enjoying the taste, I was really hung-up on what was proper, and what I SHOULD be eating it with. Was I downing cream sauce made for my ravioli and pouring it on my souffle? I hate butter, but was I chugging creamy butter? That I was so gastronomically disoriented (and that I realized how much I *cared*, in the privacy of my own home, whether or not it was PROPER for me to be eating it or not) was really off-putting! :(

Things to look out for in the photos other than the food:

* In the cinnaparts photo, notice the freakish mini pillows that decorate my house (not my choice). EVERYONE makes fun of the midget pillows. I sort of like them.

* In the souffle photo, notice what is the EPITOME of "Louis Farouk" Egyptian interior decorating: the marble table atop the spray-painted gold wood. It's the quintessence of the Egyptian bourgeoisie!

Anyway, enjoy the photos. I will post more in a bit about pollution, here :)

VC