In which we talk about breakfast! Yum! Because while I read a lot of involved, uplifting, active, and self-referential blogs, personally I’m just not that interesting. Plus: there’s a bunch of food porn!

Yesterday I was craving a big old bowl of the Egyptian breakfast food known as ful medames. The stuff is just so delicious I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Since my shift today didn’t start until one o’clock, I got up and took myself to the grocery store this morning. I didn’t go to Loney’s because they don’t carry fava beans and I never can find any pita bread there. Instead, I took my brother’s truck and went over to Super 1. It was gigantic:

There, I spent about two million years fifteen minutes looking for fava beans and pita bread. They were there, but not where I thought they would be, and I must have covered two thirds of the store’s square footage before I located them.

Then I went home and watched this video again on my iPod Touch, because it’s my favorite recipe for ful and I couldn’t remember how much lemon juice to use:

After that, I cooked up a big old batch of beans with garlic and lemon and garnished it with olive oil, parsley, tomato, radish, hard boiled egg, green onion, picked vegetables, and olives. It looked really pretty plated up:

And then?

And I eated it! With whole wheat pita bread! OMG teh yum!

(G’ma said the concoction “looked pretty, but didn’t taste all that good.” This is because I did not salt it per about ten recipes I’ve read which don’t call for salt. At all. Apparently you’re supposed to salt at the table. Which I did!)

The last time I had ful was in Brooklyn, in an Egyptian place around the corner from Deboka’s brownstone. It was freakin’ delicious there, too, and came with a giant squeeze bottle of tahini (!!!) and even had green peppers in it.

The time before that, I made a batch myself and packed it in a bento box with some falafel:

And here’s an entire gallery of fuul porn, just in case you doubted the status of my fandom for this dish! (Go look. Srsly. I’ll wait.)

Ful is the bestest, cheapest, fillingest breakfast ever. Bonus: it has the added benefit of giving you garlic breath first thing in the morning!

And yes, apparently I did just write an entire post about beans. Guess who needs to get laid?