Much as we like meat and fish, our go-to comfort foods are always vegetarian—pasta, Israeli couscous, mujadra with tahini and salad, or kusheri with tomato salsa.
Our kusheri has not always been popular with everyone. In Cairo you can buy this dish—rice, lentils, pasta and chickpeas, scented with cumin, caramelized onion and cinnamon—from street vendors, served in a cone of old newspaper and topped with tomato sauce. When we opened the restaurant we had a vision of a bowl on the counter by the window filled with kusheri, which we would sell in cones made of old menus. But because we had just opened, we didn’t have any old menus yet, so we had to use new paper. And we hadn’t thought about how our customers would transport a paper cone filled with rice and tomato sauce back to the office along with their handbags, laptop bags, bicycle bags and any other bags they had. Another hitch was that the office workers of central London, unlike the laborers of Cairo, are quite conscious of their waistlines and tend to avoid carb-explosion dishes of this kind.
We thought we saw a glimmer of hope when a group of Egyptian students from nearby University College London came in, asking whether this was the place that sold kusheri… but they came back only to tell us that they thought our version had too much coriander seed in it. After a week of cooking it every morning and feeding it to our staff every night, we decided to drop this dish, much to the delight of the girls, who were tired of cleaning rice from the counter and of eating the same thing for supper every day.
The best thing to come out of this experiment was our friendship with Huda, a lady from Kuwait who was going past our restaurant one day and walked in when she saw kusheri. She now comes almost every week and has become not only a friend but also a quality controller for our cooking. She warns us when something is not up to scratch and we look for her seal of approval on new dishes, so much do we trust her fine palate. Incidentally, she did not think our kusheri recipe was right either, and to show us what it should taste like, she brought us a pot of kusheri straight from the kitchens of the Egyptian Embassy, no less, where she has friends.
Our mujadra recipe, on the other hand, is a knockout. Everyone agrees.
This is a perfect dinner and needs nothing else, but you could easily add some roasted meat or fish if you wanted to (this works particularly well with lamb chops or kofta).
Dinner for 4 (or for 2, with leftovers for lunch the next day)
2½ tbsp olive oil
2 large onions, peeled, halved and sliced
1½ tsp salt, divided
4 cups/1 liter cold water
¾ cup/150g lentils (we favor Puy, but other green ones work well too)
1⅓ cups/250g Basmati rice (we like Tilda) or long-grain Persian rice
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
a knob of butter (a generous 1 tbsp/about 25g)
3 medium tomatoes
3 Lebanese cucumbers or 1–1½ large cucumbers
5 sprigs of fresh mint, picked and chopped
5 sprigs of fresh parsley, picked and chopped
½ tsp salt
juice of 1–2 lemons
3 tbsp olive oil
1 cup/240g tahini (here)
vegetable oil, for frying
2–3 long French shallots, peeled and cut into little rings
1 tbsp pastry flour
a pinch of salt, plus more for sprinkling
a pinch of pepper
Put the oil, onions and 1 teaspoon of salt in a small frying pan and fry for about 15–20 minutes on a gentle heat until the onions start to go golden. In the meantime set a saucepan containing the water and lentils on a high heat and bring to the boil. Then set a timer for 10 minutes and leave the lentils to cook—do not turn down the heat.
Once the onions are caramelized, add the rice, pepper, butter and the additional half-teaspoon of salt to the frying pan and stir to coat the rice all over. Continue frying for 2–3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove the rice from the heat when it starts to catch on the base of the pan and crisp up.
By now the lentils should have had 10 minutes. Tip the rice mixture into the lentil pan and bring to the boil. Stir once, then cover, reduce the heat to low and leave to cook for 10 minutes. Check that all the water has been absorbed by pushing the rice aside with a spoon so you can see the bottom of the pot; if there is still liquid there, re-cover and cook for an extra 5 minutes. Once the lentils and rice have absorbed all the water, turn the heat off and leave to rest covered for 10–15 minutes.
Dice the tomato and cucumber as small as you can, then combine in a bowl with the other salad ingredients.
Make the tahini, following the recipe here.
If you are making crispy shallots, pour a thick layer of oil into a frying pan and set over a high heat. Mix the shallot rings, flour, salt and pepper together in a bowl. Once the oil is very hot (if you drop in a pinch of flour, it should fizz up), drop small batches of shallots into it—they should start to bubble up straight away. As soon as each batch has browned, lift it out with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towel to absorb the excess oil. Once all the shallots are fried, sprinkle with some sea salt. They will crisp as they cool.
We like to bring all the various elements of this dish to the table so that each person can decide how much rice, salad, tahini and shallot they want, but you can of course plate it up individually if you prefer.