Recipe (Fettah)

Fettah is the name of any dish that consists of flat bread in small pieces. Here are three varieties:
  Fettah bil-halib: Ingredients: flat bread and milk. How to make it: Tear the flat bread in small pieces and put them in a stone maqleh if you have one. Otherwise, any pot or pan will do. Pour the milk over the bread and heat it up well. In the process, the milk should be soaked up by the bread so that it's not too liquid. Eat either with a spoon or your fingers. Personally, I like to add some sugar and apple, but this is not the Yemeni way!
  Fettah bil-moz: I haven't tried this one myself but I have been told the following: Ingredients: flat bread, bananas, and ghee. How to make it: Tear the flat bread in small pieces and put them in a stone maqleh or other pot. Mash the bananas into the bread, add some ghee and heat up.
  Fettah bil-maraq: Ingredients: flat bread and chickenstock or beefstock, preferably not Maggi but the stock you get when cooking meat in water (see recipe 'meat Yemeni style' elsewhere on this blog). How to make it: Tear up the flat bread in small pieces, add some ghee (half a spoonful or so), and pour the stock over it.  That's all!

Motorcycles

Sana'a has many motorcycles. They are a quick means of travelling since traffic jams can be avoided on a motorcycle. But most importantly, they are used as taxis. You can see a passenger on a motorcycle sitting behind the owner of the vehicle with a sack of flour, a gas cylinder, or a goat. Or without anything, simply in a hurry to get somewhere. Lots of people earn their living with a motorcycle, which is obviously much cheaper to buy than a car. But now the government has come up with an idea to restrict the income of some of these people: '...it has directed banning motorcycles with unregistered plates in all Yemeni governorates, and seize vehicles violating Yemen’s traffic law. In an online statement, the ministry confirmed the need to organize daily security and traffic campaigns to arrest the violators.' we can read in an article published by al-Arabiya. Since registering your motorcycle is most probably time-consuming and expensive (all paperwork in this country is), not everybody will be able to do this. An economic analyst in the same article said: “From a security perspective, this plan might be important, but under the pretext of security measures, it will leave tens of thousands of citizens without their only revenue source. Indeed, the political crisis and its disastrous economic repercussions have already forced citizens to buy motorcycles and use them as taxis in order to provide for their daily bread.”

Recipe (Susi)

T

his dish is very easy to make. You need flat bread, three eggs, milk, and salt and pepper. Put some pieces of bread on top of each other. Mix the eggs with milk so that the mixture is neither too 'eggy' nor too 'milky', and add salt and pepper to taste. Pour the mixture over the bread (the bread has to be completely covered) and put it in the oven until the mixture is hardened. This works best in a stone cooking pot called a 'maqleh', which keeps the food hot for a while after taking it out of the oven.