Millions of peaches

Peaches for free!

Well, almost. Two days ago, after another hair-raising adventure with EgyptAir (what does it mean that their internal system can lose reservations that their website still displays???) I decided to blow off some steam and shop for a dinner party at a nearby souq.

I wrote about this souq before - it's a bit out of the way for me, so I don't go that often. And by "out of the way," I mean, "across the street." Those of you who have seen Qasr El Ainy know what I'm talking about - somewhere between 4 and 8 lanes (these concepts are fluid here) of moto-mania. It's not impossible to cross at this point, but there are vegetable guys who don't require me to take my life in my hands on this side of Qasr El Ainy.

It's been horrifically hot the past few days, with the beginning of the week absolutely excruciating. On top of the heat, the power went out in my flat for about 20 hours, throwing me back to the Stone Age. I actually used the salt lamp I got in Siwa as my light source for the night. The weather's cooled down a bit, but it's still well into the 80s and 90s most days.

So after my tussle with EgyptAir, I took the Metro back to Saad Zaghloul to get my dinner-party shopping done. I was so hot, so tired, so sweaty, so dirty that I couldn't stand the thought of turning on my stove. Fortunately, in Egypt the produce is so brilliant that cooking isn't really required for a good meal.

The first thing I saw were peaches. Tons of them. Peach avalanches. I'd eyed a few peaches the other day while having dim sum in the Four Seasons (not worth the money, in my opinion), but I'd ended up stuffing plums in my purse instead. If it were possible to eat sex, I think, then that's what eating a good ripe plum is to me. Positively carnal.

I decided to pick up a few peaches for dessert. I settled on 6 peaches that weren't rock hard or already rotting, but when I handed them to the vendor he looked puzzled. I finally figured out that choosing the number of fruits you need is strange - they expect you to buy in kilo increments. I kept trying to explain that I just wanted 6 peaches - these 6 peaches - and I'd pay whatever they cost (which ended up being LE 1.50, or 27 cents US). I'm not quite sure why this was so strange, but I ended up repeating this conversation through the whole souq.

My big splurge came next. I found a vegetable guy who was selling kilos of the most perfect little cherry tomatoes you've ever seen. With a twinkle in his eyes, the guy announced his price, which precipitated a startled "Eh da?" from a nearby patron. I fixed my eyes on his, tacked a smile on my face, took a deep breath to prepare to hurtle myself into my haggling routine ("my husband will beat me if I pay such a price") when the other patron cut in with a flood of Arabic. The vendor, seemingly defeated (but still grinning) cut his price in half, and I accepted it. I paid an outlandish LE 5 (90 cents) for a kilo of perfect fresh cherry tomatoes. Mesh. I would've given him the LE 10.

Yellow and red peppers - check. Cucumbers - check. Cilantro and dill - check. Three pounds, two pounds, and 50 piasters, respectively. I passed on the seafood, although I was sorely tempted by the fresh crabs. I knew that I'd spend the whole meal thinking about the legions of flies that crawled all over the seafood in their tubs of ice on the street.

In the end, dinner was a super-simple affair. I made a raita with yogurt, tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, and cayenne pepper. I whipped up another yogurt concoction with various Indian spices. I split the cherry tomatoes in half (I always forget that smaller foods require more, and more careful, knife work), sprinkled them with sea salt and basalmic vinegar and folded in a few handfuls of chopped dill. The red and yellow bell peppers here are so perfect, I just sliced them up and made a side of sun-dried-tomato olive oil, which I served with the cucumber slices. I rounded the meal off with a brie, some beef grisson (I wasn't crazy about the texture, but I tried to compensate by plating the meat in the shape of a fish in a shell bowl, complete with a tiny cherry tomato eye), crackers, and a few fiteer (round flaky bread).

We ended up eating out on the balcony with a bottle of French wine followed by lemongrass tea and a shisha made hazardous by the rising wind. The lemongrass tea was surprisingly good and required zero effort. All I did was put a handful of lemongrass leaves (from the desert development center) into my french press, poured boiling water over them, then put the whole thing in the freezer for a few hours.

But since we were sitting outside, the star of the meal was the Nile. I'm really going to miss this place - there's a strange glamor to my life here that I don't think I'll ever find again.