The great G2 recipe swap

Continuing our week-long recipe series by passionate foodies, Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif cooks her favourite fall-back recipe, koshari. Her nanny may have disapproved of street food, but it's easy to cook, inexpensive, healthy and filling

Recipe: How to make koshariIn pictures: See Ahdaf Soueif cook the dish




My aunt Toufi is always with me when I cook or clean or launder or sew. Eight years after her death, she still makes me dice onions by hand, not in a blender; never - if I can help it - use frozen vegetables; hang out socks to dry in pairs facing in the same direction; and make sure that bed linen is folded without a single crease.
I don't think of myself as having home-making habits. Or rather, whenever I do something domestic I transform into my aunt, my mother or my nanny. My habits, whether in cooking or housekeeping, directly reference these three women.
My nanny who brought me up is now in her mid-80s. She can hardly see and can hardly stand but she's still the world's best cook and she won't retire because she says if she sits down she will die and she wants to die standing. So she stands at the cooker and the rice she magics in 20 minutes is so good that we fork it into our mouths straight from the saucepan. All I see her put in the saucepan is rice and water and butter and salt. Every time I ask how she does it, she says cooking is all "nafas" - which is both "breath" and "spirit".
My mother, on the other hand, was content to tell nanny what to cook and stay at her desk, working furiously, always behind deadline. Sometimes she would come into the kitchen to make one of her few specialities: bechamel sauce was one, and so was mayonnaise. She died in October 2008. The month before was the last Eid we had together and we were cooking for 30. From her desk, where she was finishing her Arabic adaptation of the Cambridge History of English Literature, she gave me a newspaper clipping with the recipe for chicken circassian - chicken in a very rich nut sauce on a bed of rice. I shall always thank God that I cooked it without protest; it was the last thing she asked me to do.
When my kids were growing up in London I fed them the standard international fare that I used to find waiting for me on the kitchen table when I came back from school in Cairo: grills, pastas, salads, sauteed vegetables, chips, cheeses, fruit. At Christmas time I'd go all out with what my (late) husband once called my "parody" of an English Christmas menu. I'd pull out all the stops: Turkey and goose, three types of stuffing, sprouts and chestnuts, flambe Christmas pudding and brandy butter - like in a Dickens novel. And when we were in Egypt I left it to my mother, nanny, aunts and the country itself to feed us Egyptian food.
I still live in both Cairo and London. In Cairo, about every fifth shop is a food shop. People will stop and eat standing, or will take away. And the shops are specialised: beans and falafel, milk puddings, ice-creams, Arab and European pastries, fish and prawns, sandwiches, liver and brains - and koshari. Needless to say, my mother, my aunt and my nanny did not approve of street food. So when one day my son asked for koshari, nanny surprised us all by cooking it. And now I've adopted it as my favourite fall-back recipe.
You will always find the ingredients in a well-stocked larder, it's not expensive, it can be expanded to feed as many sudden guests as needed and it's healthy and filling. It's also versatile because each person can combine the ingredients in the quantities that suit them and either spoon on the hot, garlicky sauce or ignore it; and it's vegetarian without making a point of it - so you're not offending or excluding anybody.