So you think you know Ethiopian food?

I know two and a half months sounds like a long time, but our experience once we got settled in Mekele is that time flies when you’re having fun.  And despite the sad and very abrupt demise this very day of the Devotion/Fight Club after many pseudo-successful runs of the Old Testament’s greatest hits, we are having fun.  Other sad news served to make the day a heavy one.  So it seems the thing to do is to consider the good things in life and celebrate them while we can.

Platters awaiting raw meat at a restaurant that
specializes in meat.  We have not braved raw meat here, but
it's a national delicacy.

I’ll fill you in on why our intrepid theatrical company tanked, as well as the other heavy news later.  Right now - and before our time in Mekele is up and I forget to do it - I really want to write about something I always find uplifting; the surprising and unique foods of Ethiopia.  If you live in the DC area - or if you are at all a foodie - you will have at least tasted Ethiopian food.  But in all likelihood, you will have been exposed to a fraction of what might be considered typical of Ethiopian food.  I certainly was, and I grew up eating it.  This blog is dedicated to the few months we have left to enjoy these tasty items, because most of them are difficult, if not impossible to find outside this country.

I have quite a few friends who aren’t fans of Ethiopian food.  Haters, I hope you read this and find enlightenment.

For orientation purposes, I’ll start with what a plate of typical Ethiopian food looks like. On the left, we have the star of the show; Injera, which is a flat, soft and bitter bread made from a grain called Tef. You use the injera both as a nutritious gluten-free food item, but also as a utensil to scoop up various sauces, such as the sauces shown here; siga wat (spicy meat stew), shiro (chickpea paste), and ye atikilt alicha (veggie stew).  Eating is done strictly with the right hand.  Traditionally, you would eat from the same large plate.  At home we always eat individual portions, like this. These are just a few of the many, many sauces typical of Ethiopian food. 

Moving on to slightly more exotic items, above we have shekla tibs; tender pieces of meat cooked at high heat on a clay stove, typically with onions, green chili peppers, and maybe tomatoes.  In the States, tibs is a favorite dish - tasty, unthreatening, universally pleasing.  Unfortunately, in the States, tibs rarely comes cooked on the miniature clay stove pictured above (shekla).  It’s sort of like a fajita situation, sizzling meat that’s crispy on the outside, tender on the inside.  It is typically eaten with the spicy red chili-based sauce in the picture (awaze) or with mitmita, a dangerously hot powder that you have to eat strategically so that you don’t accidentally inhale it.  (The trick is to dip the injera in the mitmita first, and then get a piece of meat so that when you put it in your mouth, the meat - not the mitmita is facing the back of your throat.  Sorry for the detail, I simply want you to benefit from my own disastrous experiences.) 

Behind the shekla tibs in a little covered pot is a dish called tegamino shiro.  Tegamino, in Italian, means fried.  But really, this is a shiro (chick pea sauce), that’s hard to get anywhere else because it’s cooked in a clay pot, rather than in a metal pan.  The clay pot imparts this delicious, deep, buttery flavor that’s impossible to beat.  Add to that the fact that Tigrayans are known for their shiro powder - the base of the sauce - and I can tell you we’ve never eaten shiro like this anywhere else.  Shiro - you can get in any Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant in the States.  Tegamino shiro?  I’m not so sure.

Our friend Messi serves Tilho in her home

Moving on to even more exotic items, tilho is a dish that originated in a town called Adigrat, right here in Tigray.  Perhaps you recognize, that flat, pancakey thing covering the bottom of the plate. It’s injera, spread flat this time instead of rolled up.  In the center of the plate is a clay pot filled with a very spicy, very oily wat made with lots of onions, tomatoes, and dried beef.  Topping that wat is a unique, quite bitter yoghurt sauce garnished with herbs.  The little dumplings surrounding the clay pot are made of barley flour and water.  You take a tiny fork, pick up a dumpling, dip it into the wat, then the yoghurt, and enjoy a mouthful of the richest food you’ll ever taste. I have never been able to put away more than three bites. I'm willing to bet you can't really find this in the States.  You can’t really even find it outside of select parts of Tigray province, Ethiopia.

I’m moving on to breakfast dishes.  The dish above is not particularly exotic, in fact it’s really just cracked wheat.  But when you season the cracked wheat with salt and clarified butter, then what you’ve made is kinche, a favorite breakfast dish of mine since childhood.  Some of the people in my household who don’t have Ethiopian blood like to destroy the dish by drizzling honey or maple syrup on it, claiming that too many spicy/salty breakfast dishes go against the very nature of breakfast.  To each his own.  This is a very homey dish and I haven’t seen it on any menus Stateside.

In Ethiopia/Eritrea, when you scramble eggs, you finely dice and fry onions, green chili peppers, and sometimes tomatoes.  Then you add the eggs.  A very typical bread from this region is a bread that is only good the day it’s bought - actually, the morning it’s baked.  It is neither crunchy nor chewy, easily torn apart, and hasn’t got much flavor, but is very sturdy and easy to eat with a variety of breakfast foods.  It costs basically nothing and is sold in at least three little kiosks very close to us.  Just before we left the States, we finally found a delicious rendition of this common breakfast minus the bread at Meleket Restaurant in Silver Spring (owner Abe Bayu is a friend).

American Ethiopians/Eritreans will quickly recognize this dish - called fitfit, or injera firfir - because it’s a great way to get rid of old injera and whatever wat you have handy, and they probably ate it a lot growing up.  Usually, you would use left over wat (spicy stew), heat it up in a saucepan and break injera up into it.  Here, often the sauce is not left-over, but made fresh with berbere (red chili powder and other spices), oil, and very finely diced tomatoes and onions - a sauce known as silsi).  Although this is a super-homey dish, you can usually get it at most Ethiopian restaurants.  In our home, we always eat/ate it for breakfast.

Kitcha firfir (or chechebsa) is hands down the favorite household breakfast, and also not that common in US restaurants.  It is basically a thick tortilla broken up, then fried with clarified butter and berbere.  There is even a version I’d never met before - which is made with honey (right side of picture).  The spicy version is best eaten with yoghurt.  If you want to eat a really good version and you live in the DC metro area, go down to NoVA and eat the version with meat at Cafe Aurora (Dahab, the owner is also a friend).  You can also get it at Meleket Restaurant in Silver Spring.  I really haven’t seen it anywhere else.

Ful (commonly spelled fool) is not traditionally an Ethiopian/Eritrean dish, but an Egyptian one.  However, it is so commonly eaten here that it may as well have originated here.  It’s made from fava beans which are cooked and smashed with various spices (cumin being prominent among them).  In Ethiopia, it’s served with very finely diced tomatoes, onions, and green chili peppers.  Often a bit of clarified butter or olive oil will be drizzled over the top. Yoghurt is an optional side.  And this version being enjoyed by our friend Sandra includes eggs.  You use the bread I described earlier to scoop it up.  Ful is easy to make and so satisfying.  Also available at Cafe Aurora or Meleket in the DC area.

I ordered Special Fata.  When you say "special" in Ethiopia, it
means you want your dish accompanied by scrambled eggs. 

Fata probably originates in Egypt, but again, is eaten so often in Ethiopia/Eritrea that it may as well be local.  First, you’re given a couple of pieces of the bread described earlier.  You tear it into pieces then you send it back to the kitchen.  The bread is then fried with spices, and perhaps that silsi I mentioned earlier (tomatoes, onions, oil/butter).  Then it's brought back to you with a garnish of onions, tomatoes, and green chili peppers.  Yoghurt with this dish is a must because it binds the whole thing together.  This dish is one I’d never seen before, and is so commonly eaten for lunch or breakfast that entire restaurants specialize in it.  As common as it is here, I have never seen this dish served in any Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant in the US.  

When Mark first ordered fatira at a restaurant, it I thought it would be disgusting. But he took one bite and insisted I try it.  Completely delicious.  It is basically a very thin omelette sandwiched between two chapatis, or tortillas, and then drizzled with honey.  Basically an egg quesadilla with honey, I guess.  Again, I’ve never seen this on offer in any Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant elsewhere. 

I had never even heard of this giant, circular steamed bread, called hibishti, until we came to live in Mekele.  I have no idea if it is a regional or national food, but I suspect it is the former.  It is absolutely amazing to eat; soft, fluffy, a dream-come-true with a cup of sugary tea.  It really is a very special occasion kind of treat because it is such a pain to make.  It seems to be made more frequently at certain times of year.  I took the picture of the stove used to make it on one of our walks, during a time when every other street seemed to have this rudimentary steamer outside on the sidewalk.  It isn’t served often, and you can order it in certain bakeries, but you must commit to eating it with every meal, or else invite your neighbors because it’s that humongous.  No.  I don’t believe you can get this outside of this part of the world.

I’ll end with a beverage which we were interested to find was made entirely of blended peanuts in milk. The drink is called loze, which means peanuts, and it tastes exactly as you would expect it to taste - liquid peanuts.  It’s served hot, thick, and creamy, and that description alone distressed many members of this family.  But with enough sugar, I tell you, it’s a very entertaining drink.  But we’ll probably stick to coffee, which is obviously the national beverage of choice, and is - in my humble opinion - better here than anywhere else in the world.  And I grew up in Kenya, so that’s saying something.

Well, it’s cheered me up considerably to present these dishes to you.  Today was not the best day.  I promised I would let you know what happened with the Devotions/Fight Club.

I’ll be uncharacteristically brief and say simply that I’d had it.  And while I’m still stewing at my failure to herd cats, I’d better not attempt to write about the lessons learned here.  Because just at the moment, the lesson is that some performances are impossible to pull off when the number of middle-school girls in the cast has suddenly risen to ten, and the story involves stubborn Israelites, 950 self-flagellating false prophets, the prophet Elijah, King Ahab and, of course, a certain lady called Jezebel.  It was a grand adventure, a crazy ride.  God bless drama teachers.  God bless middle school teachers.

At the writing of this blog, it is not the best day for other reasons, too.  Mike Kenney, who many of you read about in an earlier blog post, passed away from complications of esophageal cancer yesterday.  I said I wouldn’t eulogize him while he was alive, but I’m finding it difficult to eulogize him now that he’s gone.  It might be enough to say that while I wish I knew him even better, he changed many things about me for the better.  How many people can you say that about?

When I look back on what I’ve written about in this blog post, I’m incredibly thankful for life and health and all the things I take for granted.  My friend Mike is gone, but I can still hear his big laugh, and think about what grace he maintained even in his final days.  In his final blog post, he mentioned that there was a huge phlegm build up in his lungs, and asked for prayer so that it could be resolved and he could breathe again.  I could post any number of inspirational words of faith he posted and shared via e-mail, but in the spirit of this blog post, let me just share this brief facebook exchange from four days before he died:

Kim S. Payne So, basically, we're praying for you to be able to hock the mother of loogies?

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Michael Kenney Kim you got it buddy!  😜

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Thanks for reading, all.  If you would like to donate to help families of Operation Rescue Ethiopia out, please forgive me for the jarring discrepancy between our eating adventures and the hardships faced by the many families at ORE, and remember that you can make a tax deductible donation at: http://www.fieldsofpromise.org/?page_id=72  Please add an instruction noting that the donation is for “Woodward family project.”

Please let us know if you do make a donation so that we can thank you!

PS:  Hazal has turned a corner and is behaving herself.  I think she had an epiphany while we were in Italy, and I returned to find her a changed woman.  She hasn’t tried to kill anyone in months.