Food – no counterspace

(vegan) Saniyet Batates

(this post doesn’t start vegan, but keep reading to the second attempt!)

I’ve been taking a class on food and culture in the Islamic Middle East, and my assigned country to research is Egypt. As part of this, I’ve been looking at Egyptian cookbooks.

I started with Egyptian Cooking: A Practical Guide by Samia Abdennour, published in 1984 by the American University in Cairo Press. It looked very sensible and traditional with bare bones recipes and no pictures. The cookbook inspired confidence that this is recording traditional cooking. There were 2 versions presented: one with veal and the other with beef, but all of the same ingredients and quantities for both. I figured I would give it a try.

Here are the recipes as published in the cookbook:
MC 180 SANIYET BATATES, NAY FI NAY – Casserole of potatoes (1)
1 kg potatoes, peeled and sliced 2cms thick
1/2 kg beef
4-6 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped coarsely
12-15 garlic cloves, halved diagonally
2 onions, sliced thinly
2 cups tomato juice
salt and pepper

Cut beef into bite-sized cubes. Put all the ingredients together in an oven pot, cover with seasoned tomato juice and cook in preheated moderate oven for 1-2 hours.

MC 181 SANIYET BATATES – Casserole of potatoes (2)
1 kg potatoes, peeled and sliced 2cms thick
1/2 kg veal
3-6 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped coarsely
12-15 garlic cloves, halved diagonally
2 onions, sliced thinly
2 cups tomato juice
cooking oil
salt and pepper

Peel and slice potatoes 2cms thick. Cut veal into small cubes. Peel and chop tomatoes coarsely. Peel garlic and halve diagonally. Slice onions very thin, keeping all items separate.

Saute onions, add tomato juice and cook for 10 minutes. Add [meat,] garlic and seasoning and cook for another 10 minutes.

Arrange sliced potatoes in lightly-greased oven dish, bury the meat mixture among the slices and cover with the cooked tomato sauce. Bake in slow oven for about 1 hour.

Now I didn’t have a full kilogram of potatoes handy and was only cooking for 1 person, so I scaled the recipe down a bit.

mise en place with an empty donabe, 2 sad potatoes, 5 peeled garlic cloves, 1 small peeled white onion, 1 can of peeled plum tomatoes, and a bowl with small cubes of beef

I had 2 russet potatoes that were not in great shape. (I had purchased them on delivery instead of looking them over in the store, and this batch was damaged. The delivery place gave me a full refund for the potatoes after I sent them a picture. Then I split up the bag with a few people so we could use them up before they went off. So I washed them and peeled them and sliced them into thick rounds and put them in the casserole dish. And this is where I had my first misgivings – when I’m building a dish like this, I usually like to put the onions between the bottom of the dish and the main meat (or in this case potatoes) so that there’s less worry about sticking and burning. But we’re trying to follow the recipe here!

Donabe filled with potatoes with small beef cubes tucked all around and thinly sliced onions on top. There are also garlic slices in there, but none are showing in the picture.

Once I had a solid layer of potatoes in there, I started tucking the garlic pieces and the small beef cubes around the potatoes. And then I (foolishly!) decided to not get another pan dirty by precooking the onions in the tomato juice, like in the second recipe, and just add them directly the way the first recipe says/implies. I added the tomato juice from the pan and sliced some of the tomatoes on top. Then it went in the oven!

donabe with a cooked dish with potatoes in thin liquid and you can see the other ingredients – tomatoes, beef, and onions – looking a little dry and cooked with some small amounts of burning, especially right around the edge of the bowl where liquid bubbled up the sides.

After about an hour and a half, it was smelling pretty good and like food, so I gave the potatoes a poke with a fork – they were still fairly firm, so back they went for another half hour. Then I waited for the potatoes to cool enough to eat and I was very optimistic about this dish.

It was terrible! The potatoes might have been cooked, but they were not soft and none of the sauce had penetrated to flavor the potatoes. And the onions! I don’t know how, but the onions tasted even more strongly of raw onion flavor after cooking than they did before! Nothing went together and it put me off of using that whole cookbook!

But this should be a viable dish! It sounds so simple, stable, and reliable. So I went looking to see if it appeared in other cookbooks. Of the ones I checked, nothing particularly close appeared.

And then I found a food blogger with a VEGAN version! https://cheznermine.com/2026/03/27/authentic-egyptian-potato-bake-saneyet-batates/

screencapture of the start of Chez Nermine’s page about Saneyet Batates – site linked to picture if you want to click through

And this was more like it! With detailed instructions, discussions about ingredient varieties, and even a video recap. So this time I made it for lunch with a friend. She has been having chemo on Friday afternoons and then I’ll pick her up and make a meal before the nausea kicks in. It has all of the fun of dining out with none of the risks of dining in public while immunocompromised. So I asked her opinions about the ingredients, and she asked for minimal garlic and onions and that it not be particularly spicy, so those are the big changes here.

Using an 8″x8″ casserole dish, I started with some oil in the base. And then I added about 1-2 Tablespoons (not measured, just was left in the container I had) of dried shallots (to replace the fresh onions) and the spices – this version called for spices, so that’s exciting – ground coriander (the last one the ones I dried from my 2025 garden), ground cumin (from the Egyptian cumin a former couchsurfer had brought me!), dry oregano (also dried from my garden), and a generous sprinkle of paprika (a little more generous than the recipe because I’m trying to use up that container). And then that got kind of mixed together.

This time, I was using a fresh bag of yukon gold potatoes. Even though the directions say to slice one inch thick, looking at her video I decided to slice them closer to half an inch thick. And then I sliced up some fresh bell peppers without any spiciness to them. That gets tossed with the spices to distribute as evenly as possible.

I still used the same kind of canned whole tomatoes, so I first poured out some of the liquid and mixed it with tomato paste and vegetable soup base. Then I sliced the tomatoes on top again and poured the enriched liquid over everything. The whole large-sized can was perfect for this size casserole dish.

And then I cooked it – first on the stovetop and then in the oven. But for much longer than called for because my friend’s appointment ran later then I’d been expecting. By about an hour and a half. I had been planning the switch to the oven for right when I left the house, but it ended up almost completely finished before she even called me for a pickup. So I made sure there was enough liquid and that the heat was just high enough to keep a low bubbly simmer but low enough to not dry out or misbehave while I was out of the house.

Finished dish of tomatoes that have turned orange from braising in the tomato sauce and small chunks of tomato and pepper in a saucy base.

We came back in the house, and the smell was amazing! The potatoes were very hot, but that gave us some time to chat while waiting for it to cool.

I still had a little ruqaq (an Arabic thin crepe-like bread) left from an experiment, so we used that as a base layer to soak up the sauce. And we had ~~feta~~ brined white cheese on the side.

A plate made up with the potatoes on top of a layer of soaked flatbread and some white cheese on the side

This version ended up amazing! A+ Would make again. The spiced tomato broth flavored the potatoes all the way through, and it was just the right amount of warm and comforting without being too heavy for lunch.

Let’s also do a quick roundup of Egyptian food blogs I found:

Chez Nermine: authored by Nermine Mansour, who was born in Egypt, a former Egyptian diplomat (her husband still seems to be a diplomat), and lives in Virginia (united states). Oldest recipe posted 17 August 2017; most recent recipe 3 April 2026. Primarily Coptic, she has recipes tagged for Christian, Islamic, and Jewish holidays and includes both vegan and meat. Has a recipe for macarona forn, saneyet batates, koshari, and molokhia. Tagline is Raising the Flag of Egyptian Cuisine. Likelihood of using: 10/10 (see above)

TheEgyptianCook: Signature cooking by Muhammed Elgammal, but posts and videos are made by a team and his site has a merchandise store “in development.” He is an Egyptian-American Muslim who resides in the United States. Oldest recipe posted 11 December 2023; most recent recipe 17 November 2025. Has a recipessddd for macarona bechemel, baked potatoes and lamb, koshari, and molokhia, Recipes are fairly meat heavy, but includes vegan kofta (as well as beverages and desserts). Likelihood of using: 1/10 (autoplay videos)

Scarf Gal Food: Simona Afifi does not have a separate “about” section, but does sprinkle anecdotes throughout the posts. Diaspora Egyptian with actual experience making and buying food in Egypt, posting from the united states. Oldest recipe posted 21 April 2015; most recent recipe 13 December 2021. Has a recipe for macarona bechamel, saneyet batates, koshari, and molukhia. Likelihood of using: 6/10 (most likely this recipe for easy ful starting with canned beans)

The Egyptian Kitchen: abissada was 1st generation born outside Egypt and lists her location as France, but she has visited Egypt. Earliest recipe posted 18 January 2010; most recent recipe . Has recipes for macarona bil bechemel, koshari, and molokhia (first posted recipe). Likelihood of using: 3/10

Food of Egypt: References christian and Islamic holidays. Oldest recipe posted 28 July 2010; most recent recipe 1 August 2013 (posted to facebook through August 2015). Has a recipe for molokheya. Likelihood of using: 2/10 (too many intrusive ads)

Cleobuttera: Tasbih is a food blogger in Egypt who specializes in pastry and baking. Oldest recipe posted 11 November 2014; most recent recipe 25 August 2019. Best web design, includes a section of which major publications have referenced her blog. Likelihood of using: 7/10 (would be higher if I were more of a baker/confectioner)

JulienJulia: Julia is a cooking nom de plume for Kariman Al Essawy, a home cook in Egypt. Oldest recipe posted 22 April 2010; most recent recipe 26 June 2017. Includes restaurant reviews. Has recipes for bechamel lasagna, koshari and molokhia. Also includes this write up of cookbook author Nazeera Nicola. Likelihood of using: 5/10

One bowl potato soup

I wasn’t sure if it would be possible to make just one bowl of potato soup, but I figured I would try.

The bowl of soup with some bacon crumbles and cheese on top

I used my 1 quart pot so that I’d not have room to add too much.

Starting by dicing half a large onion, I put it in the pot with some bacon fat and turned the burner to medium to start sweating the onion. I washed and diced two smallish medium potatoes and added them to the pot as well (and turned the heat a little higher).

I mixed two cloves of garlic and threw those in as well, but I didn’t want either celery or carrots. I have carrots, but I didn’t feel like it

Once the vegetables were pretty evenly translucent and a bit softer, I added two teaspoons of flour. Then I thoroughly stirred that into everything and let it cling evenly to the vegetables and get cooked until it was no longer raw flour.

Then I added just enough soy milk to cover. (Last time I was ordering groceries, I wanted a little dairy but the smallest quantity was a half gallon and the soy milk was cheaper than the cow milk. The main thing I look for in a plant milk is that it has no sweetener and no vanilla flavoring. If I want sweet milk, I can always add sugar, but there’s no taking it out when I want savory (which is most of the time).

I added a bunch of seasonings – salt, black pepper, gochugaru, paprika, powdered thyme, and some mushroom powder. Because that was what was on hand. Because my paprika is losing its color so I want to use it up.

The soy milk thickened faster than I was expecting, so I added a little more. I’m not sure if that’s because of how much flour I added or if it is party of the qualities of soy milk and how it behaves. But I made sure I kept cooking long enough for the potatoes to be cooked through.

Then I topped it with cheddar cheese and bacon crumbles.

It’s was very rich, but definitely tasty. As long as I still have an abundance of ‘milk’, I might make this again. It was a very satisfactory dinner

Breakfast Kale with an Egg on Top

Close up of the finished dish with a nest of cooked shredded kale and a soft poached/steamed egg in the middle of that nest

I’ve already written up this recipe a couple of times, but I wanted to update it. Here’s the post where I cite the original Roman recipes that inspired this meal.

Start with finely chopping up a few slices of purple onion and sauteing them in a little olive oil.

A pile of shredded kale with a bottle of sweet red wine and a bottle of Red Boat fish sauce in the background

Let’s talk about ingredients

Kale – I like growing Red Russian Kale because it has a flatter leaf that is easier than most varieties to check for bugs as it is growing, but also a softer texture that cooks up nicely when harvested. This recipe will work with any variety of kale.

Wine – This should be a red wine, and I prefer a sweeter variety. Honestly, I love the kosher Manischewitz concord grape or blackberry flavors both for drinking and cooking with. But I also keep a bottle in my refrigerator of boiled down and concentrated red wine from any time I have a leftover partial bottle, and that would also work well here. Whatever you’ve got.

Fish sauce – I am pretty sure the ancient Romans used at least two different kinds of fish sauce. There’s the garum, which is very light colored and quite polite. That’s the table fish sauce for adjusting flavor after cooking. And then there’s the liquamen, which is almost ubiquitous in these recipes and seems to function for adding salt. So I look for the funkiest and saltiest fish sauces available. I’ve had good luck with the Squid Brand and Red Boat. Use the salty one with kale!

[if you want to avoid fish sauce, then you can switch to a powdered bouillon (maybe half a cube or less), soup base, or Maggi cube]

Okay, so your onions are getting caramelized around the edges and a little brown. Your patience will be rewarded. Now you can fill your pan with shredded kale (this is about 5 or 6 large leaves) and you can throw in other green herbs (parsley, cilantro, dandelion greens, scallion greens, dill, mint, random foraged edible things) if you want, but I usually just go with kale because if I’m growing it in my garden, then I already have too much of it to get through.

Cook the kale until it just brightens. If you want, you can add a teaspoon or two of water to help it move around, but it should be pretty dry right now. Because as soon as it’s a little cooked, v you’re going to add a teaspoon of fish sauce and a teaspoon of red wine and that with sizzle and steam everything up.

Mix everything together well and then tuck everything toward the middle of the pan with a little divot in the middle to make a nice nest.

Then crack an egg into the middle of the nest, grind some black pepper on top, and cover the pan and let the egg poach in that steam to cook.

A skillet with a silly hat of an aluminum takeout container as a lid.

I’m just a few minutes (it’s okay to peek) the egg will set. The yolk will turn from yellow to a pinkish color and the white might jiggle but it will all be white. If you want the white harder, you can go a little longer, but you risk your yolk solidifying and not being as runny. It’s your egg, so make it the way you like.

I like to eat this with a bagel and cream cheese. And with a spoon. Enjoy!

Ova Elixa – Eggs dressed with fish sauce

This is another Roman recipe. I made it for Noisemakers IX.

So a lot of SCA events just have a bowl of hard boiled eggs in the shell – pretty much for people to fill up on when they aren’t adventurous for weirder dishes. So I found a recipe that would make hard boiled eggs one of the adventurous dishes.

These were served cut into quarters and already drizzled with the sauce, and a side pitcher so you could add more sauce, if desired.

Ova Elixa: liquamine, oleo, mero vel ex liquamine, pipere, lasere – Apicius VII, xix.2

Boiled eggs with a sauce containing fish sauce, olive oil, red wine, black pepper, asafoetida

So for the fish sauce, I ended up being convinced by my favorite cheese mongers to try BLiS barrel aged fish sauce. And I chose this dish to use it on because I thought the woodiness and the eggs would go well together.

We strewed the plate with baby arugula so the eggs wouldn’t shift in transport from the kitchen to the buffet.
The pitchers with the sauce were made by Brunissende.

And this was at the very start of the buffet so that it would be like the sources in a Roman dinner party – from eggs to nuts – but I forgot to put out the nuts in the end.

Laterculi: Poppy Seed Pop Tarts

Okay, so this is not an accurate redaction. Or, well, it’s about (slightly less) as likely to be accurate as anything else.

There’s a play by Plautus (Poenulus 325-6) there’s a reference to laterculi with the only description being that they are composed of sesame seeds, poppy seeds, (wheat) flour, and nuts.

Okay, so the name is also descriptive. It’s the word for bricks or tiles.

Some people take this description and match it with gastris, a food from Crete described by Athenaeus as walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds and poppy seeds, with fruit, honey, pepper and white sesame seeds. That will lead you to redactions both simple and amazing.

Now that last gastris redaction – which looks to me like a seedy fruitcake – would be perfect to make in an 8″ x 8″ x 2″ shape that was not unlike a common Roman brick shape.

On the other hand, Athanaeus’ gastris recipe has fruit and no flour. But Plautus was very clear that flour was involved in this project. Flour would be easy to add to the gastris because the nuts are working in a similar way. But it’s also leeway to go in a completely different direction.

One could make candies out of the honey and seeds with just a bit of flour.

Or! And here’s what came to my mind as being kinda fun – you could make pop tarts and call them tiles.

Okay, so pop tarts. First place to go is Smitten Kitchen‘s homemade pop tart recipe.

Next the filling. I liked how La Spelonca separated the poppy seeds and the sesame seeds. It both made them look more dramatic and kept the flavors clear and less like bagel toppings. So tentative working plan is to have two different flavors of pop tarts: Poppy Seeds and either almonds or walnuts or both; and Sesame Seeds and either hazelnuts or pistachios or both.

Okay, so poppy seed filling is a thing. But my first google search yielded only recipes that called for milk… but the Romans mostly ate their dairy in the form of cheese. It just didn’t feel right.

So I kept looking and loved this one that described the method and thought process beautifully and clearly – cook poppy seeds with a minimal amount of water, grind, cook again with honey and sugar.

Okay, so first I have to find the poppy seeds. So off I go to Amazon. And the first review right off the start informs me that real bakers look for unwashed poppy seeds for a richer, nuttier flavor and a better texture. Well, okay. So off I go looking at the unwashed poppy seeds and their reviews. And then things started to get weird. There was some division, but also some overlap, between the bakers and the people making poppy seed tea. And some of the people making the poppy seed tea seemed more interested in the color of their tea than the flavor, but others loved the flavor. Erm… And then I got to the ones talking about how ‘effective’ their tea and/or baked goods were. And there was the one who assured people that the reviewer really could tell that these poppy seeds were unwashed because there was plant material included as well. Ummm… I object! Because if I’m baking and there’s plant material, don’t I then need to wash the poppy seeds? But it wasn’t all double entendre and drug references, because there were still people staunchly championing the unwashed seeds while listing their preferred baked good and their baking credentials. But then I got to the one that was all, “I just made the best batch of muffins ever. Now I’m off to take a nap.” And I just. Now I have no idea whether kolaches is actually a baked good or just a wink and nod drug reference in the land of amazon reviews. So I still haven’t what to buy for making a large quantity, but I picked up half a pound of what are definitely washed seeds at a spice shop in the Italian Market.

So poppy seeds and water in a small saucepan. Check. Going well. The poppy seeds take on moisture, darken, and swell.

Grind the poppy seeds… doesn’t go so well. I put some in my mortal and grind it with the pestle… and it goes okay, but every time any utensil touches the poppy seeds there’s mess left behind. And so after a few desultry grinding attempts I figure I might as well see if I might like the consistency of it not ground all that much. So I put it all back in the saucepan and add the honey. And then add more honey because honey was more common that sugar back in the day. And then panic! Because the honey just liquifies and everything becomes sloshy. And cooking it more doesn’t make it any drier. And what if I really needed sugar to get a good paste because of how honey is like an invert sugar? Eh, whatever – let’s refrigerate what I have and see how it moves tomorrow. Plus I’m going to add nuts to it.

And the paste is fascinating! I used a fork to move it and it’s sort of a non-Newtonian liquid. Woo!

Okay, so crust. Filling. Assembly!

I got a friend with skills and a marble rolling pin to help with the first set of rolling out (I’m hoping I can use my pasta roller when I’m on my own). I rough guessed a size that’s smaller than pop tarts. My goal is to find a size that stretches my supplies while still being large enough to not get grabbed by the handful. One or two should be an intuitively obvious portion size. These ended up about 4″ x 3″ (and I think I could go a smidge smaller and have them about the size of poker cards).

I did one batch with just an egg white wash for sealing and one with a beaten egg. I think I’ll go with the beaten egg for future versions (because simpler to brush and more efficient use of stuff).

About 2 teaspoons of filling lumped in the center. And then I spread it out with my fingers because everything else seemed to just get coated in seeds more than helping to move them where I wanted. I left 1 cm margin. I can try getting a narrower margin, but too narrow might lead to disaster. And then I crimped the edges sealed with a fork and poked holes in the top.

I started the oven at 350F. And then after 10 minutes with no obvious cooking I popped it up to 425F. Total cooking time was 25 minutes, and that was a little too much (very brown, some corners just starting to burn, still entirely edible and hella tasty). Then I looked at the recipe, which was 350F for 30 minutes. So I just panicked too early.

When they were cooking, there was enough butter in the dough to lead to puddles of bubbling fat that were almost frying the pop tarts. So not okay for a toaster! But it was kind of sexy on a lined sheet pan.

When you bite in, the first taste is browned butter. And the second bite is also butter with a bit of pastry. When you get to the filling, it’s amazing. The nuts and poppy seeds are a lovely texture among the crispy pastry flakes and I’m not going to worry about grinding the poppy seeds at all for the future. And the honey is a great balance to the butter. It’s sweet, but not too sweet. They’re going to make the best breakfast.

So plans for the future:

* reduce butter per 2 cups of flour from 1 cup to 3/4 cup (12 tablespoons)

* try rolling out with pasta roller

* Cut to 3.5″ x 2.5″

* Poppy seed & almond is great. Also try sesame seed & hazelnut.

* Make 75 of each flavor; 150 total. Freeze before baking.