If you read about my Friday night alphabetical country tour you will know that this Friday we were up to E. If you haven’t read about it, you can catch up quickly here. (Basically my sister and I are taking turns to cook meals that are themed with a different country each Friday night – from A to Z.)
This week was my turn and I was very tempted to go for English and serve bangers and mash but I thought I better put in a little more effort. I waivered between Egypt and Ethiopia for a while but settled on Ethiopia when I saw that they served lots of curries and stews that could be made in advance.
An Ethiopian “feast platter” usually includes a couple of meat stews, a lentil dish (which I opted not to cook because I know my family and the lentil dish would NOT have been a success), a cooked vegetable and a raw vegetable dish served on a large platter covered with Injera, which are Ethiopian sourdough pancakes type things and the biggest challenge of my meal. Some of the ingredients (tef flour) are very hard to source in Sydney and usually the injera are made days in advance to allow the culture to develop and the yeast to rise. I was never going to be that organised so I cheated with a quicker recipe you can find here. Injera are also served as a side and are used instead of utensils to pick up the rest of the food.
Ethiopians don’t typically do starters but I had some roasted chickpeas to nibble on. You can find the recipe here.
Ethiopian spiced chickpeas
Main meal was the injera (recipe here) with a chicken stew known as Doro Wat (recipe here), an Ethiopian beef, spinach and peanut stew (recipe here), a vegetable stew known as Amhari-Atklit (recipe here) and an Ethiopian tomato and cucumber salad (recipe here).
My injera which may have been too think but turned out better than I had imagined
Doro Wat (or chicken stew). Bad lighting – in reality it was quite a reddish colour
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Ethiopian Beef, Spinach and Peanut stew (with a lot of capsicum)
Amhari-Atklit (although we called it vegetable stew)
An Ethiopian salad which resembles a salad from most countries but with chilli
And this is how the plated meal looked
Ethiopians are not big on dessert but I am so I made an icecream with honeyed almonds and a salted butterscotch sauce. Yum
No one complained that it wasn’t on theme
Next week we are having a break because we are going to my mother-in-law for dinner. She has opted to do E again – she is doing E for easy.
We do something similar. I call it “world on a plate” and each week we eat something from another culture/country. Instead of the alphabet, I try and coincide our feasts with that particular country’s national day. We find the country on our globe, we do a bit of research on the people and the culture, and then we EAT!! A great family bonding experience !!
Brilliant, Lana – well done! When I lived in Kampala we used to eat regularly at an Ethiopian restaurant. My sister and I love spicy food.
…the ending made me giggle.
Very impressive cooking skills sharpest pencil. Mr. Pencil is quite spoiled.