Oh dear, I guess I spoke to soon. Alie likes her space. Marti wants nothing more than Alie’s love. It’s a recipe for trouble.
Here Marti is watching Alie nap in peace.
It has taken her a while to get settled into life in Cairo… but she’s finally back to her old self. For the record, that’s a yawn, not a wild cat roar.
I almost forgot. It turned out pretty good seeing as it came from a box after sitting on a shelf at the store for who knows how long!
We splurged and got a box of devil’s food cake mix at the store. Brandon added a splash of grand marnier to the buttercream frosting. It’s gonna be good. No frills, but it smells like orangey grand marnier goodness.
I just discovered this photo effect in our photo editing program, Gimp. I promise not to make everything sparkly, but it just looked so good on this I couldn’t resist.
Category : Food, My Life in Cairo, Oh, Egypt
I’m going to save my rant on how much I love really, really good high-quality gelato for another day, but here’s a picture of some I had today. It exceeded my expectations! Here it is sitting at the register.
What? Yeah, those are cigarettes at the register. Sorry if the fetal baby distracts from the picture. They try to warn people about birth defects, but everyone seems to smoke here. Not sure how well it goes with gelato. Bleh. And people were smoking IN THE MALL. Coming from a place where smokers can’t smoke indoors anywhere, it was a tad surprising. I hate smoke. Hate it.
But gelato… gelato I like!
I spent the entire day with Brandon at City Stars — a GIANT 7-floor mall in Cairo (this is a cell-phone picture we took while walking down a dizzying flight of stairs). It has everything… lots of great stores, grocery stores, a couple of giant movie theaters, rides, a million stores I have never heard of, and just about every popular American chain restaurant you can think of. We were on a quest for a mixer, a cake pan, a pizza pan, and something I can wear to an Egyptian wedding this week (more on that later!). We got everything but the pizza pan. I feel really accomplished! And neither of us got totally fed up with being in a mall for such a long period of time. Oh, and we picked up Season 2 of LOST on DVD. That’s right. We are RE-watching it. I’m excited.
It was a really fun birthday! I never would have guessed I would spend my 25th birthday in a mall in Egypt, but I did, and it was great. Thanks, Brandon!
Using Brandon’s AMAZING ciabatta, we made commuter sandwiches for breakfast today. I knew it was going to be a day of eating without abandon. See that spicy mayo? Secret ingredient… onion bowder. Not to be confused with onion powder. There is no “p” sound in Arabic, folks.
Delicious!
And what’s a commuter sandwich? Only the best thing EVER made with eggs and mayonnaise EVER. If you are ever in Phoenix (or apparently now in Santa Monica too) you have to go to La Grande Orange and eat an avocado commuter for me. Oh man. They are so good. They are really made with english muffins, but since we had this fresh, yummy, chewy ciabatta on hand, it just made sense to go with it. All ours were missing was the avocado. We can’t get really good avocados here. At least not right now. It’s ok. Don’t feel too bad for me. This sandwich was still amazing!
Meredith, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!
We are officially the big two five! I feel older, don’t you?
Little known fact, September 26th is the unofficial TWIN APPRECIATION DAY!! Being your twin is one of the greatest things in the world. Thanks for being a beaming ray of sunshine in my life! I hope it’s a beautiful day in Nantucket! Please enjoy a delicious, well-made latte and some good quality chocolate for me. And start looking for the best cake recipe you can find, because we are gonna bake ourselves a cake when you get here!
P.S. You may have to bring the cake pan .!.
This is a letterpress print Meredith did. I like to think my home is a little MERrier with all of the prints I have been lucky enough to receive over the last couple of years. She’s a great artist and I love her aesthetic.
This one is hanging above the desk in the living room and always offers a welcome reminder to look on the sunny side of things.
New York Lottery Sweet Million \”Sleepy Time\” on YouTube
This New York Lottery commercial has been stealing my attention periodically over the last two days. I wish I could forget it existed, but I can’t, and I keep watching it over and over.
I can’t handle it. It is ridiculously cute.
Here is my question. Is it real? And is there a career path out there that leads one to dressing pigs in pajamas and teaching them how to hoist their potbellies up onto a bunkbed? Incredible.
It’s probably best for all of us that there are no more pigs in Egypt.
P.S. While I was doing a little internet research on “can pigs wear pajamas” which eventually got diluted to googling “tiny pigs,” I found this little gem. Brace yourself. It is CRAZY, and I laughed till I hurt.
Another success from Bakewise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking! I was busy rifling through old pictures on the computer, and then all of a sudden, wafting from the kitchen, came the delicious smell of bread baking in the oven. It was like a dream, I tell you.
Sorry the ciabatta is hiding in the background and everything is out of focus. I was in a hurry to eat. But let me tell you, the ciabatta was perfectly chewy and delicious! Now I just have to avoid eating the second loaf that just came out of the oven.
Oh yeah, and that would be rosemary garlic butter there in the middle. Oh boy.
This will be the beginning of our beautiful new friendship via this sunny little place on the internet. I plan to talk a lot. It’s just my nature.
Since I accidentally commandeered Brandon’s blog, I decided it was time to get my own. I have posted a few things that I never managed to post on Brandon’s blog because I was convinced I would get around to making my own, so I’ve tacked them on here. And from now on, I’ll be here, not there.
Category : Food
That’s right. Homemade focaccia. I know I am a lucky girl, but to have a husband who loves to cook and bake and who is awesome at it, I just don’t know what more I could ask for. After we got our shipment a couple of weeks ago, we have been reading from Bakewise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking by Shirley O. Corriher, that my mom gave me a while ago and I hadn’t had the chance to read much of. It’s pretty amazing and sciency, and a little difficult to follow in my anti-science mind, but having a chemist around to put some of the magic into action makes it a lot of fun. Just a few little changes to Brandon’s usual dough recipe, and we are turning out some INCREDIBLE pizza with crust like you couldn’t believe.
Anyhow, the focaccia was exactly what I needed to lift my spirits and simultaneously motivate me to get to the gym regularly. It turned out perfectly. We picked up some really good gorgonzola at the nearby Italian deli which was a delight in and of itself. Being a cheese-lover in a non-artisinal-cheese kind of place, this deli is a light in my life. They have really good buffalo mozzarella, and it’s just a cheery place in general.
Anyhow, back to the focaccia. It started a couple of days ago with Brandon making a dough-starter called Biga. It’s basically just flour and yeast and water that rises and is then added to the other ingredients to make the focaccia dough. The focaccia is made by stretching out a bottom layer of dough which is topped with gorgonzola and cream, fresh mozzarella, basil, rosemary and garlic, and a shameful amount of olive oil. It is then topped with another layer of dough that we poked for what seemed to be no good reason, and brushed with even more olive oil in case we weren’t feeling guilty enough already.
Then we baked it. We couldn’t just throw it in the hot oven, instead we had to… get ready… gather rocks from the filthy streets of Cairo, scrub them in bathtub with bleach until I felt like it might be ok to introduce them to the kitchen, and then put them on a tray in the bottom of the oven where they got really hot. Brandon then added boiling water to said tray right as we put the focaccia in the oven.
And that was that. I don’t want to calculate exactly how much olive oil I consumed that night, but honestly, it was worth it. The filling was ooey gooey and cheesey and amazing. And the crust was crispy and chewy and amazing. Come to Cairo, and we can make it again!
Category : My Life in Cairo
This photo was taken during the tomato-traffic-jam when the bus was at a stop. I’ll have to take more pictures of the apartment buildings here. Some of the balconies are painted with beautiful bold patterns, and I’ve even seen a few with murals of things like painted palm trees and the beach. Our balconies, on the other hand, need some major tlc. They are covered in a thick layer of dust that I’m just not ready to deal with yet.
Category : My Life in Cairo, Oh, Egypt, Travel & Sightseeing
Traffic got slow… really slow. What was the hold-up? THIS. Tomatoes were everywhere.
Category : My Life in Cairo, Sightseeing in Cairo
These photos were taken on what the experts call a “clear day” in Cairo. If you look really hard, you can see the pyramids off in the distance.
We went on a bus trip around the city — the whole city, all 16 million people’s worth of city. It is a big city, folks. I think we just about saw it all: the downtown midans inspired by the layout of Paris, beautiful architecture that almost transports you to Europe, crumbling apartment buildings, agricultural regions along the Nile, camels, donkeys, and lots of new growth and development. The city has expanded into the desert. It’s hard to believe the Sahara can be transformed into livable, park-like neighborhoods.
We also got a crash-course in the history of the location of Cairo. Over the last few thousand years, the Nile has wiggled its way east, so all of the ancient sites which used to be along the Nile are now out in the desert. Fascinating!
I almost went blind cutting the noodles by hand. Was it worth it? YES.