There are plenty of fast foods that you can make better at home: this burger will beat anything that ever crawled out from under any golden arches, or, if Taco Bell is your thing, you can easily beat the experience at home by cooking up a bowl of oatmeal and throwing it in a tortilla. But there are some foods that are better never attempted at home; foods that benefit from economies of scale such that cooking them at home makes no sense.

Kushari is one of those foods. In Cairo, you don’t have to walk far to find a kushari stand, but the complexity of the operation — and these places only serve the one dish — is a clue to its unsuitability for adaptation at home. After indicating just how much kushari you’re interested in eating you can watch your bowl head down the line where it is filled from several pots, one man to a pot: rice, noodles, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions and tomato sauce.

Yes, this is really a dish with both rice and pasta, lentils and chickpeas. It’s a starch-lover’s dream, packed with affordable calories — which partially explains its popularity in Egypt. Preparing these ingredients to all be ready simultaneously is something the many employees of the kushari joint have down to a science. Doing it at home, unless you have a ready brigade of helpers and extra stove space, is a challenge. And for the humble result , you are better off just hitting up the local kushari place.

Unfortunately, outside of Egypt such restaurants are rare. (I did once locate kushari in Minneapolis, a special at the Lyndale Grill and Grocery.) So for those of you with a craving that can’t be satisfied and some patience, here’s what I did: my stove has four burners; I used three of them (the fourth being taken up by a pot of old frying oil that I am too lazy to clean). On one, I started a pot of rice. At 30 minutes, this is one of the longest cooking items. In a pan on another burner, I started caramelizing some onions. In a large pot on the third burner, I brought water and lentils to a boil.

After 20 minutes, the lentils were toothsome and ready to come out. But don’t drain them! You need that hot lentil water! I used a mesh strainer to fish out as many lentils as possible from the water and placed them in a covered bowl to stay warm. After bringing the water back to a boil, I added in broken vermicelli.

In the meantime, the onions had become suitably browned. Transferring them to a small bowl, I quickly wiped out the skillet and began heating olive oil, garlic and red pepper flakes until they were fragrant. To this, I added a can of tomato puree (actually a can of pureed diced tomatoes, but buying them pre-pureed would have been easier) and let the tomato sauce simmer. Soon, the vermicelli was within a minute of being done so I added a can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed, to the cooking pasta in order to warm them. If you wanted to make this dish more complicated, you could start with dried chickpeas.

The assembly of kushari proceeds in layers: a base of rice, topped with pasta and chickpeas, topped with lentils, garnished with fried onions and finally covered in tomato sauce. Whenever I ate this in Egypt it was served with a thin, vinegary hot sauce which I simulated at home by blending a little sriracha into a lot of rice vinegar.

Loving garlic as much as I do — and I love garlic — I was briefly in heaven when I discovered at a Lebanese restaurant in Cairo a dip called thoumiya. The name presumably derives from the Arabic thoum (ثوم), which means garlic, and this dip was all about garlic — almost pure garlic, touched with lemon juice and beaten into a fluffy cloud of ecstasy.

As you can tell, I departed the Middle East with no small amount of enthusiasm for this dish. Imagine my dismay when I found no mention of it in any Middle Eastern cookbooks, and could find no information on the Internet (perhaps owing to transliteration difficulties). It was as if I had imagined the whole thing, or perhaps been tricked by a djinn.

Or so I thought, until today, when on routine provisioning trip to Kowalski’s I saw glowing out from the shelf like a red and white beacon the words “Garlic Supreme”. One look at the texture and color and I knew I had finally found that magical sauce from of my memories, courtesy of the St. Paul Flatbread Co. The first thing I did upon returning home — before even putting the groceries away — was crack this open and I was immediately transported; it was perfect, lemony, light, and above all garlicky.

It would be more in the spirit of this blog for me to post a recipe for a homemade version — and I suppose I will probably do that one day — but for the moment I am happy that I can have a small piece of heaven for just $3.99.

Living as a student in Cairo, I quickly learned what my cheapest meal options were: kushari, fuul, and best of all, ta’amiya — known elsewhere as falafel. For the equivalent of 5¢, one of these delicious little sandwiches was mine: pita bread (‘aysh baladi) stuffed with fried balls of spiced fava beans, lettuce, cucumber, tomato and carrot all topped off with yogurt sauce. Three or four of these was all I needed for lunch most days, with all my nutritional bases covered: bread, vegetables, beans, dairy.  Of course, eating uncooked vegetables for lunch daily, a practice which we were repeatedly advised against, might have been behind my chronic intestinal problems throughout my stay in Egypt, as might have been my switch to an almost all-bean diet. But for a 15¢ lunch, I was willing to put up with a little hardship.

After leaving Egypt (and allowing a suitable period of separation), I began to crave ta’amiya again, but since I have never lived anywhere with a significant Egyptian expat community it was impossible to find. Sure, I could find falafel, but it never tasted quite right — no doubt the result of blending fava beans with chickpeas, or omitting the favas altogether. With no restaurants around to satisfy my needs, the only option left to me was to make my own.

Luckily, I had the foresight to buy a cookbook in Egypt, which featured a good ta’amiya recipe. The basis of ta’amiya is fava beans, but a different variety of favas than those used for fuul. In fuul, it is crucial to get the round, brown favas that are about the size of pinto beans. For ta’amiya, you want the bigger variety that is a bit more commonly available. Ideally, you’ll be able to find the variety known as ‘fuul madshush’, which are already shelled and therefore white in color. Unfortunately, I’ve never actually been able to find such beans, so after an overnight soak I dig my hand into the pot and start shelling beans. You can make it a game: see how many beans you can shell in an hour, then try to double that amount.

With soaked, shelled beans ready to serve as the body of the ta’amiya, it is time to add in the flavorings. The dominant flavor in ta’amiya is dill. This was a bit surprising to me since I think of Middle Eastern food as being more about parsley and cilantro. I use a lot of fresh dill, and for good measure throw in a little parsley and cilantro. Next, a good dose of various allia: 10 cloves of garlic, an onion, and green onions or leeks. Finally spices: cumin, cayenne, salt and black pepper.

All of the ingredients are roughly chopped and tossed together. Great. But that won’t fry — you need a paste! If you were an Egyptian housewife of modest means you’d be reaching for your biggest mortar and pestle, but if you were a twenty-something lazy neo-orientalist you’d bust out the food processor. Because the beans need to be ground pretty fine for the patties to stay together in the hot oil, I grind them in several batches. After all is ground, I knead the mixture with my hands to make sure everything is distributed evenly. The mixture should hold together and have a pleasing green hue from all the herbs.

When you’re satisfied that the beans are as ground as they are going to be, it’s time to shape patties. The size of the patties in Egypt was rather small, maybe a couple of tablespoons, but to save time I make mine bigger, a rough handful. For frying, I use peanut oil heated to 375°. Reaching the right temperature is crucial — if the oil is too cold the ta’amiyas will break apart and you’ll be left with a big mess of oily crumbs. I learned this the hard way at least a couple of times.

The patties don’t need to fry long, just a few minutes until they are golden brown. I usually rotate mine a few times during the frying because it makes me feel like I know what I’m doing.

So you’ve got some ta’amiya. But as with fuul, at least half the fun of this dish lies in the toppings. Fresh pita goes without saying. Yogurt is also needed, preferably some kind of yogurt sauce with garlic and tahini. For vegetables, the classic combination is lettuce, cucumber and tomato. With the summer Farmers’ Market being my main source of produce, though, I have been going more seasonal: lettuce, radishes and spring onions tossed with sumac. I also had some rutabagas pickled with beets sitting in the fridge just for such an occasion.

I hardly need to explain what happens next. Put the ta’amiya in a pita (for authentic Egyptian style crush the patty a little), add topping of your choice, and enjoy. It probably cost more than 5¢ to make, but if you factor in the cost of a plane ticket to Cairo, you’re really coming out ahead.

As far as dips go, if it has raw garlic you can count me in. This started with guacamole and continued right on through to hummus and beyond. My most recent discovery is the Turkish dip tarator.

Tarator consists of almonds ground with olive oil, water or broth, lemon juice, salt, pepper and garlic. As with any dish featuring Allium sativum au naturel, the garlic is the strongest flavor, but the almonds also contribute a pretty strong flavor of their own: that mixture of cream and nuts that is almond. The key to bringing this flavor out is to use enough salt; add salt until you taste almonds. The almonds also give the sauce a surprising amount of body with a thick, whipped texture.  This sauce is strikingly white, so consider using white pepper to preserve that.

Apparently tarator is eaten with seafood in Turkey, particularly fried seafood. The recipe I used was intended to go with fried mussels. Instead, I served it with Moorish lamb meatballs, substituting it for a different almond-based sauce. Putting the tarator with food helps to mellow the strong garlic flavor which, tasted by itself, can be a little intimidating, even to diehard garlic fans.

Here’s the recipe, from Ana Sortun’s Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean:

• 1/4 c Olive Oil
• 1/2 c water or mussel poaching liquid or what have you
• 2 t minced garlic
• 1/2 c blanched whole almonds
• 1 t lemon juice
• Salt and Pepper

Put olive oil, water, garlic, almonds and lemon juice in blender or food processor (NB: Sortun says to add them in that order which I guess would make a difference if you use a blender, which she recommends, but not so much in a food processor, which I used). Puree for at least 3 minutes so the mixture is completely smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Even being in Egypt for a short time as I was, one can’t avoid encountering fuul. Fava beans show up all over Egyptian cooking (more deliciously, in my opinion, in ta’amiya) but simple fuul is one of the basic staples of the Egyptian diet.  It is Eaten at all times of day, especially at breakfast. In the hotel I stayed at in Alexandria, it was the breakfast served to Egyptians, while foreigners got the Syrian treatment of bread, cheese and fresh vegetables (at this point in the trip the last thing I needed to eat was more beans so I embraced my foreignness).

Fuul is, at heart, a big pot of beans, cooked slow until soft and mashable. There is a actually quite a variety of fava beans available in this world, and in fact fuul is the general Egyptian term for them, but it most commonly refers to this dish of small, round fava beans cooked until they are mushy (fuul medames to be exact). People make this at home in special pots, but I also often saw housewives and children go to local restaurants to have whatever container they happened to have filled up with the stuff.

I’ll concede that that doesn’t look or sound too appetizing. For me, the best part of fuul is not the beans themselves, but all of the toppings: fuul is served with a variety of additions, which each diner can add in at their preference. I assembled a fine passel of ingredients, including lemon (very important), ground cumin, aleppo pepper, pickled beets and rutabagas, minced parsley, salt and pepper and yogurt (the yogurt is more of a Levantine thing as well. I just gravitate that way). Chopped hard-boiled eggs are traditional, but yuck, none of those for me.

Once you’ve added all your fixins’ you mash it all together on your plate and then eat it with plenty of pita bread.

OK, so it’s a little disconcerting to dig into a big pile of beans for breakfast, nor does it bode well for anyone who needs to spend time with you that day in an enclosed space. But if you can get over that, this gives you a really hearty start to your day.