Tunisian Food

Behold, two delicious staples of my Tunisian diet, fricase (pronounced freek-a-say, emphasis on the first syllable) and brik (pronounced breek).

Fricase has the typical Tunisian melange of fixings:  hard-boiled egg, tuna, olives, and cabbage.  But the beauty is the bun, which is deep fried, like a donut.  So your ingredients are enclosed in a delicious, melt-in-your-mouth package.  One of these is a very nice snack.  And it costs about 25 cents.

Brik is a thin friend pastry.  The edges are just crispy pastry, but the inside is sort of like a hot pocket.  They can have most anything in them, but mine often had potato, maybe some cheese or tuna, and a runny egg.  When you bite into the hot pocket, the egg goes everywhere, but it's very tasty.  Brik is a catchall term it seems -- some brik looks like an egg roll and is filled with potatoes and vegetables.

In the photo below, fricase buns on the left, and brik on the right.

And here's the gentleman who prepared my fricase.  He put two kinds of hot sauce on it (including the omnipresent north African red sauce called harissa), and a bunch of other stuff from all those bins.

If you look around a bit, you can find incredibly inexpensive food in Tunisia.  I had several delicious sit-down lunches for about $2.50 apiece, and many cafes serve a cup of coffee for 20 cents.  A sandwich with standard Tunisian ingredients plus some lamb goes for maybe $1.00 or $1.50 in most shops.  Even on the main boulevard, where some cups of coffee will set you back $3 or more, you can find good deals; just keep searching.