My teacher, some other students and I went to lunch today. We ate at a local’s place, which meant it was pretty dirty. The guy was “cleaning” the table when we sat down. Cleaning involved running a sponge over the metal table. I’m sure that that restaurant was soaking the sponge in a 3% bleach solution to keep the bacteria down… Anyway, the bread was put directly on the table, I wouldn’t recommend eating that unless your immune system was up to snuff. At least we weren’t on the floor. I find eating with my hands unappealing, but when I eat with my hands and I’m on the floor, I can’t help but feel like a dog…
Anyway, this was one of the Salta places. Salta is a Yemeni dish, and it’s pretty good. It’s essentially a lamb stew, but with a Yemeni (as opposed to an Irish) flavor. The one thing I really don’t like is the fenugreek (hulba in Arabic) that they put on top. I find it repulsive. It’s added at the last minute and it’s usually only a dollop on the top. The salta that was closest to me was totally covered in it and my teacher immediately stirred it all together. I couldn’t eat it, it really tasted that bad to me. So Adel ordered Fasah, another lamb stewish type of thing, but they don’t (at that restaurant) use fenugreek on it. Much earlier in my stay I had gone to a cooking lesson and they showed me how to make both Salta and Fasah. They started from the same lamb stock, but they differed significantly after that. Most places seem to only differentiate between the two by whether or not there is fenugreek on it… Anyway, it was good enough once we got the new dish, we all ate quite a bit.
My problem was that Adel had told me to come at noon instead of my usual 4pm so that we could have lunch. We had lunch, but he didn’t show up for the lesson at 4. I’m not about to be charged a 2 hour lesson for a 1 hour lunch, one that I had to pay for incidentally. I’ll have to talk to him tomorrow…