I survived my 14-hour round-trip with the boys and had a really nice reunion with my Peace Corps friends this weekend. We drank a lot of wine and told a lot of our stories about each other and absent friends, but we spent an inordinate time reminiscing about the food. For the first time, I realized that we actually ate pretty well during our forced stint as locavores. Sure, we occasionally missed peanut butter, but we had constant access to fresh, abundant meat and produce.
Some things I hadn’t thought about in awhile:
Fresh baguettes, purchased every morning at your local bakery at the government-subsidized price of 100 millimes (about 10 cents). I used to eat it every morning with canned quince jam. It was considered sinful to discard bread, so people would leave their stale ends outside on their curb for animals to pick up.
Kaftegis - disgusting sandwiches with hot greasy french fries IN the sandwich.
Pizza with tuna and olives.
Lablebi, a hot chickpea stew, served as breakfast at construction sites.
Vile pudding decorated with little silver balls served for the Prophet’s birthday. It tasted like the iron pills the nurse used to give us.
Pastries dripping with sweet honey served during Aid Kbir. (The Tunisians were not that great with desserts.)
Raw, unpasteurized, spoiled milk (liban), the national health drink.
Peppers (filfil) that were either haloo (sweet) or haar (hot), depending on how you asked the question. (If the vegetable seller thought you wanted haloo, then he would tell you they were haloo.)
Brik, egg fried in phyllo dough with parsley and mashed potato, served with a squirt of lemon. Yum!
Harissa, or red pepper paste, served with a dash of olive oil and garnished with olives. Yumyumyum.
Cous-cous (kusksi in Arabic), the Tunisian national dish, with djej (chicken) or aloosh (lamb). YUMyumyumyumyum.
We talked ourselves into a serious craving and decided to make cous-cous on Saturday night. While we were shopping, we looked for harissa, which you can often find in the ethnic section of supermarkets, but a search of two stores turned up nothing. My friend K. found a recipe on the Internet and whipped up the most awesome batch of homemade harissa in ten minutes. Go ahead, click on that link and try it out. You won’t be sorry.
When I got home I was motivated to replace my Cuisinart (the bowl on the old one had warped, rending it useless), and I made it myself, as well as another Tunisian dish I’d been craving, slata mechouia (grilled salad). I’m not sure how to describe it — a sauce? a dip? a condiment? You eat it with bread, but you can also spread it on a sandwich.
Here, adapted from the Peace Corps cookbook, is the recipe:
1/4 kilo peppers (I use green and red sweet peppers)
1/8 kilo tomatoes
1 head of garlic
Small onion
1/2 t coriander
1/2 t cumin
Oil
Salt
Grill vegetables on a kanoun (a grill; you can also use your broiler).
When the skins are blackened, put all the vegetables in a plastic bag and tie the top shut. Leave them for 15 minutes. (This allegedly loosens the skins so they are easier to peel.)
Peel the blackened skins from the vegetables.
Puree the vegetables together with salt and seasonings.
Add oil to desired consistency.
Eat with bread.
Shahya taiba!
While Husband is planning his big Renaissance weekend, I have also been planning a reunion of sorts. A Peace Corps friend of mine who lives in Cairo, P., is on the east coast for the summer, and we are planning to take the boys on a road trip to the Finger Lakes region to see two other Peace Corps friends, K. and V., who recently bought a winery. (My friends: winery. Husbands’ friends: Renaissance Faire. Need I say more?)
I’m pretty sure that K. and V. first learned to make wine in the Peace Corps. P.’s roommate, T., used to make batches in their kitchen. He didn’t have access to any special wine-making equipment, so he’d use big water bedouns to ferment the fruit and condoms that came with our medical kits as airlocks. When the condom got flaccid, that was the signal that some crucial biochemical process was completed.
One weekend T. held a winemaking seminar/party at his and P.’s apartment in Jendouba, on the western border of Tunisia. Here we are:
Don’t we look hippie? And sweaty? And drunk? The pink stuff in the water bottle was the finished “wine”; the big bedoun on the floor contained the elixir-in-progress. It was high summer in Jendouba, a town generously described as “the armpit of Tunisia.” Does your armpit harbor mosquitoes the size of single-engine planes? No? Well, then, I’d rather vacation in it than Jendouba.
I’m the one with my eyes closed, which is usually how I’m photographed. I’m holding the wine-making manual (pre-internet, we had to learn things out of books — how quaint). I distinctly remember how happy I was to be wearing shorts outside of my apartment without having anyone call me a kahba (whore).
It was so hot that night that, after consuming a considerable quantity of our moonshine, we decided to sleep on the roof of the apartment building. Even on the edge of town there weren’t many artificial lights, and I spent an hour watching shooting stars before I fell asleep. At least, I think they were shooting stars. They may have been auras from the ocular migraine caused by the drink. I awoke some time later with mosquito bites on the palms of my hands and soles of my feet. Those were some tough mosquitoes.
Periodically, Husband gets together with three of his old high school buddies for a boys’ weekend. Husband and two of the three friends enjoy similar modes of relaxation, chiefly urban and Scotch-fueled.
They have a fourth friend who is a musician. For unknown reasons they decided to let him plan their boys’ weekend this year. Where is the Rat Pack headed? You guessed it: the Renaissance Faire!
I have been trying to imagine what a lame version of The Hangover that particular Lost Weekend would inspire.
A: Zounds, but my head doth ache! O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.
B: O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause transform ourselves into beasts!
C: What ho, lads! An infant, mewling and puking? The recollection of its arrival is in my memory locked, but I have not the key.
A: Men! I’ th’ jakes! A ravening Tyger!
B: But where is D? He is rendered lost.
C: Wait. Is D the one who made us come to the Renaissance Faire?
A: Yep.
B: Let’s get the hell out of here before he comes back.
Exeunt, pursued by a Tyger.