The Egyptian Diet the Convenient Store way:)

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So my son michael who is in the 6th grade is not the most "interested" student. He mentioned to me about 2 months back he volunteered to make some egyptian food for his class because they are studying egypt. He mentioned a fig cake, and asked if I would help. I said, "sure, just get me the details" Fastforward to last weekend(two days ago) Michaels "details" were "mom, we have to make all that Egyptian food for my class on Tuesday". "All that food" and "Tuesday??" I ask. "yep" he says. Now mind you, this is Sunday and he is calling me from his dads house, and he isnt coming home until Monday. This class is Michaels only C, and my gut is to get on the internet and start to research food trends in Egypt and recipe ideas, clearly fig cake is not all he needs to bring in. However Michael would like nothing more for me to do this all for him, and he just show up for the class food in hand, but he isnt getting off so easy. School only gets harder and eventually parents arent going to be there to help, so I waited for him to come home from school Monday night, and to his astonishment he found no Egyptian food prepared, and I told him to get looking for some EASY recipes. Grudgingly he found a website with tons of recipes and they were super basic. It seems the Egyptian diet is very basic, lots of dried fruits, some vegetables, rice, beans and not a lot of meat because of economics. We chose 3 basic recipes that were easy to make and a one stop shop to our neighborhood convenience store - Walgreens.
The first recipe was the fig cake, although it was called a fig bread, it tasted like a cake. The other recipe was called specifically - Khashaf, and it was a combination of many dried fruits combined then mixed with sugar and boiling water to create a syrup. I must say both were really good, and easy to make. Michael especially liked the cake, and couldnt believe their were figs in it.
From what we read, Egypt doesnt have lots of forest or farming land, so crops are limited, also it is an extremely dry counry, which because of limited rainfall makes for limited plant growth. Tons and tons of vegetables are not on hand, so Egyptians make due with that they have. Rice and beans are a staple as well. We made another dish that neither of us cared for which consisted of rice, elbow pasta, garbanzo beans and lentils in a tomato sauce(I skipped the lentils because I didnt have any) it was heavy with all that carb and the sauce was bland because we didnt use any spices...

Dried Fruit Mixture

1/2 cup dried prunes

1/2 cup dried dates

1/2 cup apricots

1/2 cup figs

1 cup raisins

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 1/2 cup boiling water

Boil water

dice prunes, apricots, and figs into smaller peices and add to raisins and dates. Mix in sugar

mix in boiled water and stir until water disolved

let cool and refrigerate for an hour

serve

Date and Fig Bread

1/2 cup dates

1/2 cup figs(cut in quarters)

1/2 cup walnuts

1 1/2 cup flour

1 cup sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

2 eggs