Lately I've been having a love affair with Egypt (especially Ancient Egypt). I believe this all began back in the fifth grade or so when my mom got me some books on mummies (Mummies Made In Egypt, sweet mother of meat, it's totally in a Reading Rainbow episode!!!) and the discovery of King Tut's Tomb. The book is Into The Mummy's Tomb.
I actually made a movie about it, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon discovering King Tutankhamun's tomb, not kidding, in the seventh grade(?), starring local kids (who actually wanted to be in a movie I made). I wrote a script and everything. And my teacher picked it to go on to some competition at Weber State, anyway, long story. (I still have the 8mm tape of the movie I made. I need to get it onto YouTube, haha! Or at least on a DVD. Wow, did you guys know about this? I just learned this! Wal-mart will transfer your old 8mm or VHS home movies to DVD, or slides, etc.)
Who knows, maybe I picked the books out myself at the bookstore. She (my mom) is cool and let us buy books. She let my oldest sister buy an expensive textbook on Emergency Medicine! when she was just a wee little thing. The book cost a lot of money and it wasn't exactly what my mom had in mind, and money was tight. But she let my sister buy it, and long story short, my sister is a doctor now, doing family practice medicine. (She almost did emergency medicine.)
It made me want to be an Egyptologist for awhile, until I wanted to be a marine biologist (7th-9th?) (SeaQuest?), and then moved on to an astrophysicist (10th-12th and beyond...). (Stephen Hawking was getting big and I bought and read A Brief History of Time in high school.) Kids are young and impressionable.
I got to feed my Egyptologist addiction again when I got to BYU and in my penultimate year, was trying to fulfill my Ancient Near Eastern Studies minor (basically Biblical Archaeology), realized that a class in hieroglyphs was offered. (A 500 level class, not in my chosen field of study.) I bit the bullet and took it. It was taught by Prof. John Gee. He was kind of intrigued that a physics major was taking his class. It was super hard. I didn't realize this, but there are a lot of (pornographic?) Egyptian hieroglyphics, and, while using my dictionary, I translated the weirdest piece of crap ever, didn't know what to do, wrote an apology at the bottom, and turned it in for credit. I hope he laughed his head off. (Aside from being weirded out.) Things improved as I was too stubborn and determined to drop the class.
I got to learn about Sinuhe and The Shipwrecked Sailor! I wrote a giant report on the Middle Kingdom! I got to read, transliterate, and translate hieroglyphics! And the class was only a semester long, although he taught us what they take a full year to learn at Harvard. Or Cambridge? Or University of Chicago? Or whatever university it was he used in his example?
He actually took pity on me and told us basically what would be on the final. It was us translating an excerpt from The Shipwrecked Sailor. You bet I locked myself in the Lee library and did nothing but translate that thing for eight hours straight and tried to pound it into my head. I think I had a D in the class on homework assignments and translating, but mysteriously pulled myself up to a B after the final. I think he took pity on me with that test score, too. I bet I deserved worse. Oh well, I would have been happy with a C or D because I was TAKING EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS and it was SO AWESOME! Even if I stunk at it. (Then again, when you are comparing yourself to the grad students taking the course, who have had about 4 years experience already, some had previously taken the class, and were also familiar with Assyrian cuniform, you might come up wanting.
So derailed...
FOOD!....
Let's talk about food!
I listen to YouTube videos to help me sleep. It used to be episode of Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, but then my favorite source (Content Dump, love you) but no new videos went up for awhile and I had listened to the old ones too many times. I started listening to videos about Ancient Egypt and old archaeology sites, and then moved on to Egyptian music (the meditative stuff that goes for an hour is pretty good), and then thought, what the heck, I should start cooking Egyptian food. I am also planning on being Cleopatra (or just some Egyptian lady) for Halloween this year. I've got it BAD.
Here is a great video with flavor profiles and traditional dishes from Egypt. I am so going to start cooking food like this for Adam. (But really, it's more for me.) My Moroccan Chicken Tagine has a similar profile, with the cinnamon and what not, and they even use tagine ovens in Egypt, although they call them something else, tagin or something.
Egyptian Cuisine YouTube Video 1 of 3.
Egyptian Cuisine YouTube Video 2 of 3. (Dang, there is a problem with this video now. Bogus.
Egyptian Cuisine YouTube Video 3 of 3.
It all came from a book. I got hooked on the Amelia Peabody series by *Elizabeth Peters (*not her actual name), who is a lover and actually a scholar of Ancient Egypt. What a fascinating lady, both the author and the main character. I'm having a lot of fun. And the books are so well researched, by an actual Egyptologist. Freaking amazing.
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