An Egyptian Feast

A few years ago, my cousin and his wife lived in Egypt for a while. When they returned, they had several treasures that they had brought back with them. Preston and I were very fortunate to be getting married right around the same time that they were returning, so we received these two very special gifts. 

Both of these items have had many "homes" around our house over time, but I was thrilled to be able to incorporate them into our Egyptian feast table decor. 


While preparing for the evening, we set up our buffet in our dining room to show the books that we have read, the flag that we made, and we pulled two camels from Aiden's playmobil collection to sit atop mirrored candle sticks and watch over it all. 

The sweet little kiss photo never leaves the buffet, so it might not be Egyptian, but it's there anyway :) 

Of course, I had Egyptian music playing while I prepared the meal. We borrowed a couple of CDs from the library and both were so wonderful! (I shared one of my favorites on my facebook wall a couple of days ago, but if you missed it you can check it out here.)


Our dinner guests arrived just before the food was ready, we poured some mango juice into the glasses and served dinner. Each plate was marked with a cartouche so that everyone knew where to sit. (See the making of the cartouches here.)

The Dinner: Sole with Dukkah, Kosheri, and Cucumber Chickpea Salad. We also had a fair amount of baba ganoush left over when we made it, so I stuck the rest in the freezer and pulled it out to have with our dinner along side cut up pitas. 

This is my plate of food. I don't eat fish, so I took extra of everything else.

Since I didn't have any fish, I photographed Preston's and he (as well as our guests) said it was delicious.

While we ate our dinner, I asked the trivia questions. I like to do this because it is a good way to recap what we have learned, and introduce our guests to a little bit of it as well. Occasionally, I even throw in something that we haven't learned about just to get the kids talking and make a last ditch effort to teach them one last thing before moving on to another country. 

For dessert I made Date Candy, which was pretty disappointing to me as I discovered that I am not a fan of cardamom, so did the rest of my family. Fortunately, our guests really liked it (or at least they said they did) so they got to bring home a bunch of left over date candies. 

After dinner, our guests did a bunch of dishes for us, which was a super nice treat! Then, we finished the night off with some good conversation and even a little belly dancing. After our guests left, we looked around and most of the remnants of Egypt were already fading, the left over food had been tucked away into containers and piled into the fridge, the cartouches all went with their rightful owner, and the music was over. 


We had a wonderful time learning about Egypt. Sometimes it seems as if a month is not enough time to spend on a country. As always, I am both sad to be saying, "goodbye" to Egypt, but eager to see what we will learn next month about a new country. 




**Don't forget, if the text is blue it is a link to recipes, other posts, trivia and more.**