Deliciousness

This post is dedicated to my lovely and beautiful friend Shalise, who sent me an email asking about the food here. I smiled when I got it, because this is one of the many reasons that she is my friend forever. I took the pictures in this post weeks ago (even though my coworkers thought I was very weird for doing so), because food is my hobby. My perfect day in NYC? Starting at 96th St. and Broadway, and walking down to Chinatown, eating bagels and gelato and creme puffs and other tasty treats along the way. And who gained 5 pounds during a weekend trip to Paris, and ate more crepes than the boy she was challenging? Yours truly. And who has only learned Arabic words for food items? That's right. I like to call it cultural appreciation.

Who knew that I would love Middle Eastern food? I have always liked to try new cuisine, but I don't think the culinary world gets much better than Manhattan, so my expectations were low. But I have been pleasantly surprised at the deliciousness that is to be found here. My coworker Deema (a local Bahraini) is spending lots of time teaching me about the culture. My first week on the job, she announced that I needed to eat the local dishes, and that she would have her cook make lunch for us, and have her driver deliver it to the office (more commentary on the household help later). She wanted me to try fatoosh and mach boos. Here they are in all their glory:

Fatoosh starts out as a typical green salad (tomatoe, cucumber, cabbage, lettuce), with croutons made from fried pita bread. But the dressing is delicious--pomegrante sauce, lemon, and a spice called sumak. You can't see it very well in the picture, but sumak looks like of like a bright purple course salt, and has a bit of a sour taste. This is the perfect dish for a hot day.
Mach boos means "up to the neck" in Arabic. This is mach boos rubyan. Rubyan means shrimp. It is made kind of like a Spanish paella--everything thrown together in one large, full pot and cooked (hence the name--the pot is full "up to the neck"). The ingredients that I could taste were: saffron, onion, carrot, tomatoe, cloves, some cinnamon, and those are fried onions on top for garnish. Trust me, this dish is a winner.

**While typing this post, I remembered a date I went on to a restaurant in Salt Lake called Babba Afghan (Afghani food, in case you didn't pick that up from the name). The food is good and really unique, so if you live in Utah and want to try Middle Eastern food, you should go.