I love to host occasions, anything from birthdays to baby showers. I love to plan a menu whether simple or elaborate and try new things. Since deciding to adopt an Ethiopian child, I have been trying to learn about the things that culture likes to eat.
I have decided that Chad will be a much better Ethiopian eater and cook than I will be! Their food is known to be spicy with lots of onions (my least favorite food!), peppers, and other veggies. (I try but I am not too much of a veggie eater, especially the spicy ones like onions and peppers.)
Berbere (bar-bare-ree) is the most common cooking spice. According to my most recent reading, it is actually a combination of spices that begins with very hot red chili peppers. Up to 20 other spices are added to the mix. Spices like garlic, nutmeg, cardamom, cumin, etc are added as per the cooks special taste. Traditionally Ethiopian women go to market and choose exactly which spices they will use for there berbere. They dry the red chilis themselves and then grinds them along with all the other spices they have chosen with a mortar and pestle. It is very time consuming (seriously, can you imagine grinding spices by hand!) so they often make big quantities, like 15 pounds at a time.
Does making a special spice blend to match your taste not sound like my husband! He creates everything he cooks to taste, no recipes for my man. And spicy is his middle name. One year he made deer sausage so spicy the kids still argue when he mentions hunting for a doe. (The year after the too spicy sausage he had a buck tag. In order to get the kids to try deer sausage again, we convinced them that just does were spicy. It worked, but they prefer horned game now! Chad says it worked out quite well in the end, he would much rather hunt horned game anyway!)
Ethiopia was not introduced to sugar until 1934. They still much prefer spicy, salty snacks to sweet. The coffee ceremony is a very important part of entertaining. ( I will bore you with the details I have learned about that another time.) With coffee they serve spiced popcorn or little spicy crackers called kolo (koh-loh). I LOVE popcorn, so I tried a recipe I found for Ethiopian spiced popcorn tonight.
Want to try it?
To a big bowl of popped corn (I popped mine in oil, more authentic and I hate microwave popcorn) add:
2 T Melted Butter
1/2 tsp each of cayenne pepper and paprika
1/4 tsp each of cumin and garlic powder
Mix the spices into the melted butter and pour over the popped corn, salt to taste.
I thought it was pretty yummy!
Better watch out coming to eat at our house for a while. I have some bebere on order and I plan to keep experimenting. If you have Ethiopian recipes send them my way. I figure when kids are toddlers trying new foods can be pretty daunting. If we can make a few things that will not seem so foreign for Joshua, hopefully trying our family favorites will seem a little less weird. I may need some Tums though, even the recipe I found for eggs has jalapeno, garlic, ginger, cardamom, and onions in it! Yuck, I say - Chad just grins! He's going to enjoy this!
