Since there has been a request for more food commentary, I’m trying to appease my audience with this post. While I was in Ethiopia, I was lucky enough to get a couple of lessons in Ethiopian cooking.

Home Cooking

The first lesson came unexpectedly near the end of my first couple weeks in the country. I was staying with Tselate at her uncle’s house when we realized that I needed food for my 13-hour train journey to Djibouti. After some ridiculous discussions, it was decided that Ejigayehu (her uncle’s exquisite chef and maid) and I would make some lentil sambusas. Basically, this means making misir wot and sticking them inside some dough and frying them. The filling is quite a bit different than Indian samosas, but the process is almost exactly the same.

Ejigayehu and I making lentil sambusas

Cooking School

After my friends departed early from Lalibela, I had a day to myself in the beautiful city. I signed up for Lalibela Cooking School at Sisko’s Unique Restaurant on the other side of town. Sisko is an absolute gem of a human being and she has her daughter and nieces helping her run her cooking classes.

Before we started, they had to do a special repair of the injera stove. The solid metal plate doesn’t really need any fixing up, but the structure holding it does. They use a mixture of cow poop and ashes to smooth out any part that is crumbling. This apparently doesn’t have to be done all that often, but I happened to show up on stove repair day.

Anyways, for the class, I was supposed to learn how to make a yetsom beyaynetu, basically the veggie combination plate you get at any Ethiopian restaurant in the states. Wednesdays and Fridays are fasting days in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which means eating only vegan food. As you can imagine, fasting beyaynetu is particularly popular on these two days of the week. We made seven different dishes and I got to try my hand at making one injera on the stove.

Sisko and our yetsom beyanetu, my first injera, the stove with her niece

Injera is made out of teff flour. It’s basically teff combined with water and then has a fermented starter added to it. Injera has a sour taste and is full of holes from the fermentation process. Some say it’s an acquired taste, but I think it’s delicious. It’s allowed to rise for 3 days and then that batter is pour into a small container. From there, it is poured in circles (from the outside in) until the entire pan is covered in batter and then the lid is placed on top. After 4-5 minutes of cooking it’s ready. You can see from my photo that there are lots of bumps on mine. That means I didn’t pour too evenly and those bulges are places where I poured too much batter on the stove.

We were cooking over two fires that were constantly being fed by small logs. The room was smoky, so please forgive my not so brilliant photos.

top: qey kik wot, key sir alicha, kik alicha
bottom: tikel gomen, shiro, gomen

Most of these dishes aren’t very involved and you can make them easily if you can get your hands on the ingredients. Here’s a brief overview of what we made:

• qey kik wot – split peas and berbere
• key sir alicha – beets and carrots
• kik alicha – split peas, onions, and garlic
• tikel gomen – cabbage and carrots
• shiro – chickpea powder and berbere
• gomen – spinach (can also refer to a dish made of collard greens)
• misir wot – lentils and berbere (the brownish green dish pictured only in the photo with Sisko above)

Tigrayan Food

One area of the country where the food is substantially different is in the north. The Tigrays share a lot in common with their Eritrean neighbors to the north, including language and some food traditions. I have a good Eritrean friend who has made some delicious food for me, so I was looking forward to food in this region.

all from Aksum: tegamino shiro, special ful, fata

Tigrayan shiro is just better than shiro everywhere else in the country. That’s because they add tomatoes and it just makes the whole thing delicious. Sometimes shiro is watery or has a terrible aftertaste, but the photo above shows the best shiro I ate during my entire time in Ethiopia. Tegamino shiro is a special kind of shiro that has been cooked for longer, so it’s thicker. Yum!

Other fun Tigrayan food specialties involves putting yogurt in breakfast foods. In the middle is ful (beans), mixed with eggs and yogurt. Other parts of the country have ful and it’s relatively common, but nobody else adds yogurt. The last photo is of a dish called fata which is bread fir-fir (bread soaked in berbere sauce) mixed with egg and yogurt. It may not look that appetizing, but it was delicious!