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!