We Made Feteer Meshaltet in the Middle of the Nile With Shoka W Megdaf

On Qursaya Island, a relatively small green structure in the middle of the Nile, a kind, seasoned chef called Om Nada teaches clueless (maybe a little white washed) Gen Z kids about the ways of the traditional Egyptian kitchen. Om Nada perfected the art of everything from stuffed pigeons, mahshi and pickled anything, among many more dishes that she serves in community kitchen Shoka W Megdaf. Because teaching a man to fish is always better than feeding him for a day, Om Nada also teaches. We joined her for a feteer meshaltet workshop.

Om Nada is not merely a workshop instructor hired by Shoka W Megdaf, she is Shoka W Megdaf. Qursaya Island had been home to environmental conservation initiative VeryNile for a couple of years, providing the island’s women with safe employment options, when Om Nada approached them with her idea of a community kitchen, right there on the roof of VeryNile HQ.

“I’ve always been drawn to cooking,” the increasingly popular chef told Scene Eats, “and I worked in a bunch of kitchens off the island before ending up here. I went to the VeryNile founders and told them I could cook. I couldn’t embroider, I could stitch just fine, and I wasn’t really interested in sewing – but I wanted to cook, and I knew I’d be good at it. I told them they could come visit my home any time and see how well I cooked and how clean I was. They liked what I did, and Shoka W Megdaf was born.”

For the entrepreneur that she is, Om Nada is far from a show-off. People of all skill levels join her workshops, and she nurtures their abilities – limited or not – all the same. In this workshop, we started out with some flour, water and a dream that we weren’t sure even we believed in, and ended up with full, edible and – get this – even enjoyable feteer meshaltet. In the process, we found a small family, who like us struggled with the steps Om Nada deemed frugal, and felt like, if only for a few hours, we had escaped the endless Cairo bustle.