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Egypt's national dish: rice, lentils and pasta layered together under a sharp spiced tomato sauce and a heap of crisp fried onions. Carbohydrate on carbohydrate, and completely justified.

Chickpea flour whisked into a spiced onion base until it becomes a thick, smoky, deeply savory stew. One of the fastest genuinely great things you can cook from a cupboard.

A fragrant tomato, lentil and chickpea soup thick with herbs and finished with lemon. Traditionally eaten to break the fast during Ramadan, and restorative at any time.

The Ethiopian red lentil stew. Almost nothing in it, and yet the berbere and a genuinely long onion cook do all the heavy lifting.

The Egyptian breakfast: fava beans warmed through and crushed roughly in their own liquid, sharpened with lemon and garlic, then flooded with olive oil and scattered with tomato and parsley. Eaten with bread, out of the same bowl.