Ethiopian Cooking and Popery

Today was another food-centric day.  To start with, I got a text from my mother late this morning: she was  at the Mills mall, and asked me to meet her for lunch in Aspinwall at Patron.  So basically the day started out with delicious chicken fajitas.

Then I came home and got dinner started.  I had a meeting to attend at my church tonight (I got talked into being on the Parish Life committee -- I don't know about you, but when a priest asks me to do something, I usually end up doing it), so I decided to pre-prepare dinner, so it could just be heated up when I finally got home.

Ted and I enjoy dinner at Abay, one of the Ethiopian restaurants in East Liberty, and so, just as I decided it was time to learn how to make homemade Thai, I've decided it's time to learn how to make Ethiopian at home.  Plus, I had some beets and potatoes from last week's farmers' market languishing in my veggie drawer.

Local beets and potatoes. And look at my adorable wee Japanese ginger grater!

The first hurdle I encountered is that there seem to be fewer resources on the internet for Ethiopian recipes than for Thai.  The second hurdle is that there seem to be 1,000,000 variations on berbere, which is a spice mixture that makes up a key component of a lot of Ethiopian cooking, specifically wats.  Finally, I couldn't crush my fenugreek seeds, because they were as hard as tiny bits of gravel.  So there were roadblocks.

I decided to make tikil gomen, a cabbage, potato, and (oftentimes) carrot dish; kay sir dinich, which is beets and potatoes, and which as far as I know is exclusive to Abay's menu; and doro wat, chicken stewed in berbere.  The tikil gomen and kay sir dinich were pretty simple: it seems much Ethiopian cooking starts with a base of onions, garlic, and ginger, cooked in a spiced clarified butter called niter kibbeh.  I confess I didn't undertake this, and just sauteed the aromatics in plain old butter, but maybe in the future I'll undertake this African version of ghee.

I used epicurious.com's berbere recipe, though I cut back on the paprika and chile, and substituted ancho for New Mexico chiles -- and, as I said, I didn't have ground fenugreek.  I sauteed onion, garlic, and ginger in butter, and added four chicken thighs and about two tablespoons of the berbere mix, and a few cups of filtered water, and let it simmer forever.  It turned out perfectly tasty, but it didn't taste Ethiopian.  I plan to try a different berbere recipe in the future.  The vegetables were simpler; I sauteed onion, garlic, and ginger in butter again, threw in potatoes, carrots, and cabbages, several cups of filtered water, about a half teaspoon of turmeric and a teaspoon of cumin, plus a pinch of salt and black pepper.  This tasted most successfully like the tikil gomen I'd had at Abay.  The kay sir dinich was onions, garlic, ginger, butter, chopped beets, potatoes, and a pinch of salt, boiled down until everything was tender, and it tasted pretty much like the restaurant version as well.  I'd say the main sticking point is the berbere.

And the injera.  Ethiopian food is served with a spongey flatbread -- more like a pancake, really -- made out of fermented teff.  Trying to make it seemed like more of an undertaking than I was ready for, so on my way home from my meeting I stopped at Abay and bought two injeras for $3.21.  It helped make things seem more authentic.

I can't take credit for the pancake.

So, in summary, I don't have any recipes down, but it wasn't a disaster, and I have something to build on.

Oh, and if you're curious about the church meeting, we're putting together a youth group program for the parish's teens.  Being Catholic is odd, I know.  I was raised Presbyterian and converted to Catholicism when I was 22.  I preferred it as a practice, and I chiefly see religion as a matter of practice.  I can't tell you whether or not God exists -- I've never talked to Him, anyway.  But I do know that it's good for me to have a spiritual practice and moral reference, and so when I found Catholicism to be more satisfying in this regard -- I enjoy the ritual, the solemnity, the historical reliance, and the universality of the Church -- I converted.  (I didn't feel I wanted to stray too far from the religion I was culturally accustomed to.)

The trouble, of course, is that I'm very liberal.  And, frankly, I think the Church -- the papacy in Rome, the American Council of Catholic Bishops, etc. -- is frequently despicable and loathsome, in its treatment of women, the LGBTQ community, its refusal to embrace contraception in AIDS-ravaged communities, and so forth.  But I regard my relationship with the Catholic Church the way I regard my relationship with the United States of America, which is also frequently despicable and loathsome; I might be a Catholic and I might be an American, but I'm not necessarily responsible when either of these bodies do despicable and loathsome things.  And I have as much right to this Church and this country as do the people who move them to be despicable and loathsome -- moreso, in fact.  So it's my job to be a good Catholic and a good American, and try to push these bodies in better directions, or at the very least, it's my right to say that I, a good person, represent these bodies, and so they should be judged according to my beliefs and behaviors as much as according to those of the despicable, loathsome types.

But this seldom comes up for me in church on a day-to-day basis, because I belong to a very liberal parish -- I sometimes think, being in the ghetto, the diocese just kind of ignores us -- and my priest is The Awesomest.  He is good and kind and holy and there is a rainbow flag in the parish office.  So.