The most important thing of any Ethiopian celebration, like most cultures, is food. Lots of food. Delicious food. The party was on a Monday and I started the cooking process Friday afternoon.
The base of many Ethiopian dishes is a type of spicy butter. It is really a necessity in ensuring that the dishes have an authentic taste. In order to make this butter, you must must melt butter and then simmer it in spices. The smell of this simmering butter set the tone for the rest of the weekend. Once it has simmered you remove the solid spices and pour the butter into a container. It is best to make a large batch so you can use it on more than one occasion.
On Saturday morning I began the cooking by baking several loaves of Yemarina Yewotet Dabo, a spiced honey bread. I am a novice bread baker at best, so I had some trouble getting a good rise out of the yeast, but the bread still turned out delicious. I suppose it is hard to go wrong when you add a cup of honey to something!
The most challenging dish I decided to prepare was Doro Wat, the Ethiopian national dish. This is a very spicy dish seasoned with berbere, a spice unique to Ethiopia. Ethiopian cooks and restaurants tend to develop their own versions of berbere because it is a mixture of many different spices. The berbere I used was purchased at a market in Addis Ababa. I won't go into great detail about the six hour process, but it did make for some beautiful cooking photos.
Most commonly known Ethiopian dishes are stews. The stews are eaten with injera bread which is a spongy sour dough flat bread used to pick up the food. I purchased my injera from a local Ethiopian woman because it is a long process and can require specialty equipment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injera
I also prepared two lentil dishes of varying degrees of spiciness. The doro wat was incredibly spicy even though I cut the berbere in half! I had to tone it down a little bit to be palatable to western preschoolers.
I spent about 15 hours cooking and preparing for our little party so it was very exciting for me to see everyone enjoying the food. We had three children attend who were adopted from Ethiopia along with many of their friends.
The children learned how to eat Ethiopian food and were also invited to construct the Ethiopian flag out of paper to celebrate the tradition of boys preparing pictures to sell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enkutatash Below are some of the artistic recreations of the Ethiopian flag by 3 to 5 year olds.
Here is the website I used for my Ethiopian recipes. http://www.ethiopianrestaurant.com/recipes.html
4 comments:
This sounds great! My mouth is watering thinking of the smells! What a fun celebration :)
Yum! The best part is the leftover spiced butter - sauteed veggies and scrambled eggs are particular good cooked in it!
Elizabeth
Seattle, WA
Mom to an Ethiopian adoptee too!
That is a great idea! I'm going to try that. We are big fans of scrambled eggs for breakfast!
This is why we go to India Fest. I would lose my mind if I had to cook that much. Although I do enjoy educating our home school groups about Gandhi.
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