I Cooked Freekeh Mansaf at 8 at Night
Intermediate (B2) · Food & Drinks · 34 min · Free
It is eight at night, I have not eaten all day, and I decided to cook the most involved thing in my kitchen.
Freekeh. Wheat picked while it is still green and then roasted, which is why it tastes like nothing else on the shelf. It comes from Bilad al-Sham, Syria and Lebanon and Palestine and Jordan, and it is in Egypt too. Tonight it becomes mansaf with grilled meat.
Two jobs at once. A ribeye on the bone, cut into two steaks, seasoned and carried out to the grill in the garden, while the freekeh toasts in samneh in the kitchen. Salt, black pepper, seven spices. Almonds in a small pan on the side. It was eleven degrees outside and I refused to put a jacket on.
Neither job went perfectly.
While the freekeh cooked I sat down with the laptop, because it takes half an hour and there was work waiting. And there was an email. A very long one, from a premium member, describing his whole history with Arabic before Arabic All The Time and after it. I read it on camera and I did not really know what to say when I finished. I still do not.
Yasmine comes home partway through, after six hours of studying, with groceries from Adonis.
A real kitchen, nothing staged, in clear Levantine Arabic, around B2. Vocabulary: السمنة, محمّصة, البهارات السبعة, المقلاية, حمّص الفريكة, تغلي, المكسّرات.
