Our Week In Food

Continuing to try Ethiopian recipes.
Above: shiro, recipe by Samin Nosrat (recipe link)
In casserole dish: Chicken in Tej Sauce with Oranges.
From Ethiopia by Yohanis Gebreysus.

Lunch without a recipe:
Fried mushrooms and toasted cheese on English Muffins.

Curried cauliflower with green peas (recipe inspiration)

Outdoor lunch: chips, salsa, salad.

First time grilling in 2022.
Len grilled a sliced eggplant, served with fresh tomatoes and cheese.
Side dish: couscous with parmesan and herbs.

And we are growing herbs for summer meals.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.

Ethiopian Recipes

 

"From berbere, the spice blend that takes more than three days to achieve complexity

 within heat, to injera, our gluten-free daily teff flatbread, which also requires

three moons to acquire the perfect elasticity and taste, and of course let us not forget

coffee, the country’s first culinary gift to the world, this book will open your eyes to 

culinary wonders from Ethiopia, the Land of Origins."  Yohanis Gebreyesus, Ethiopia (p. 5).

From Ethiopia: Making injera.

The introduction to Ethiopia, my newest cookbook, names the three most characteristic foods of this African nation, whose cuisine is generally very unfamiliar: teff flatbread, berbere spice blend, and coffee, which is Ethiopia's contribution to world cuisine. It's a really well-organized and well-written cookbook, and I've now tried two recipes from it, as well as one Ethiopian recipe from the New York Times cooking section (link ). I thought that I would try making injera flatbread, but the all the recipes I've seen are insanely complicated, involving days and days in order to ferment the teff, a special grain from Ethiopia, which is baked on a specialized griddle. 

While I've eaten at Ethiopian restaurants a few times, I'm really not familiar with Ethiopian food at all. The characteristic berbere spice blend contains very hot pepper as well as other spices like nigella seeds, cloves, ajowan (an herb that grows in Ethiopia), onion, garlic, ginger, cardamom, basil, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and fenugreek. I've now tried a couple of recipes with the little jar of it that I bought from Penzey's, and though it's really hot, it has a  pleasant flavor. I have one or two more recipes from Ethiopia that I hope to try. Although the directions in the cookbook are very clear, the process of slicing and chopping vegetables and cooking the various elements of each dish are rather time-consuming, but in the end, it’s worth doing.

Shiro Wat from Samin Nosrat

A vegan stew of chickpea flour, tomatoes, and berbere spice.
Hot but very delicious.

Potatoes and Cabbage in Ginger Turmeric Sauce

The Ethiopian name for this dish is  “አትክልት | ATAKILT” — while the ingredients are all familiar and available in any American supermarket, the result is surprisingly flavorful and unexpected. The cookbook gives the Ethiopian recipe names in both the Amharic script and also a transliteration, which is very interesting.

I served the potato and cabbage dish with a salad and the
green beans from the cookbook.

Green Beans and Carrots

I also made the dish ፎሶልያ | FOSELIA, Sautéed String Beans and Carrots, from the recipe in Ethiopia. It was also delicious and unusual — and made entirely from commonly available ingredients.

Green beans and carrots in a sauce of tomato and onion.

Quite a delicious meal!

Update: Two More Recipes from Ethiopia

Squash/pumpkin stew with berbere and other spices,
plus lamb chops (meat exceptional!) with recommended spices,
eaten with a very good bottle of wine.

Blog post and photos © 2022 mae sander.

New Cookbooks and Good Eats

Food happenings in our house this week include two new cookbooks, and some new ingredients that I haven't used before, including chickpea flour, berbere seasoning, and Ethiopian teff. I'm just getting started with these cookbooks, which are both fairly recent and have been widely praised by reviewers. Both of them offer a look at cuisines that are unfamiliar, and that I'm interested in learning about.

Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean, &
Southern Flavors Remixed by Bryant Terry.
Published in 2014.

From Afro-Vegan: twice-cooked potatoes for
"smashed" potatoes with corn and peas.

The finished dish, with salad. The flavors were unusual, and nice.

Ethiopia: Recipes and Traditions from the Horn of Africa
by Yohanis Gebreyesus, Published in 2019. Kindle edition.
I haven't tried any of the recipes from this prize-winning book yet.

I've been experimenting with spices and ingredients from Africa, but not always with perfect results. For example, I tried making some chickpea-teff patties from a website. The flavor profile was great, but the "patties" didn't stick together and were more like crushed-chickpea hash. So no photos! And hopefully the books will have more reliable recipes.

Baking Bread This Week

Len made two loaves of pain de mie with pepper.
The recipe is from Poilâne: The Secrets
of the World-Famous Bread Bakery by Apollonia Poilâne

Len also baked a French rye bread from the Auvergne region,
using a recipe from The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg.
We sampled this bread with butter and jam. Delicious!

Ordinary Food

Salmon croquettes made from frozen salmon:
no recipe.

A pot of vegetarian chili: no recipe.

Lime and cilantro to garnish the chili.

Cornbread to eat with the chili.

Classic simplicity: French oil-based potato salad with
herring and tomatoes. We remember eating this often
in a VERY cheap restaurant when we were students:
the menu read "hareng pommes à l'huile."

Blog post and photos © 2022 mae sander.

Ethiopian Coffee

 

Locally roasted Ethiopian Coffee.

Saturday, Carol and Nat offered us a cup of Ethiopian coffee made with steamed milk, using beans that they buy from the Hyperion local coffee roasters in Ypsilanti, Michigan.  It was quite delicious. Carol has been experimenting with various types of Ethiopian-grown coffee, which are processed somewhat differently than other single-origin coffee beans. In response to her enthusiasm, I've been looking into the story of Ethiopian coffee and local sources of Ethiopian beans. The fact that the coffee plant is native to Ethiopia and that coffee cultivation began there makes it all the more interesting.

I find single-origin coffees to be very appealing, for example, the coffees from Costa Rica, which we sometimes buy as a result of our visit to a coffee processing collective in Costa Rica, or coffee from Peru, which is rather hard to find but which we found delicious when traveling there. After visiting a coffee plantation in Hawaii, I often ordered coffee shipped directly from there, but it became too expensive.

Several of the local small-scale coffee roasters are very aware of a number of issues about coffee. They care about the welfare of coffee plantation workers in the far corners of the world, and make an effort to have ethically-grown products.

The various methods of processing coffee beans are also interesting, for example, washing the raw beans or allowing them to dry without washing them or removing the "coffee cherry" attached to the beans. Ethiopian coffee uses this "natural" method of processing, which affects the flavor of the coffee. There are also various ways that coffee beans undergo a fermentation process before they are roasted.

Ethiopian Coffee from Roos Roast.

A picture of this Ethiopian single-origin coffee is on the Roos Roast website, but their only single-origin selection at the moment seems to be from Indonesia. Our current favorite coffees are Roos Roast blends of beans from multiple origins.

Roos Roast makes an effort to find ethical sources for their coffee, and most of their product is Fair Trade Organic, meaning that they focus on ethical treatment of workers as well as on organic agricultural methods. They are very aware of environmental issues in their processing as well -- they use a high-efficiency roaster that produces much less smoke than most equipment. Recently, their entire roof has been covered with solar panels to conserve energy. 

The Roos Roast building is in walking distance of my house, so we often walk there when we need to buy coffee. When we were isolating from contact with people, Roos Roast also made it very easy to buy coffee safely, so we have used their coffee consistently. I'm looking forward to being able to drink coffee in the café part of the shop when it fully reopens.

Another local roaster's selection of
Ethiopian coffee beans.

A bit further from our home, but a place we sometimes shop is the well-known food business Zingerman's. Here is what Zingerman's has to say about their Ethiopian coffee beans:

"Here at Zingerman’s, we are committed to traditionally-made, full-flavored food. For that reason, we find Ethiopia a really interesting coffee growing region. It is, of course, the birthplace of coffee — and we’ve all heard the story of Kaldi and his goats. But we are also fascinated by the stunning amount of flavor variety found in coffees from Ethiopia. Various combinations of plant genetics, micro-climate, and processing method produce cup profiles that range from citrusy, floral, bright, and elegant, to rustic, spicy, and deeply fruity.

"This coffee falls squarely in the rustic camp. It is a 'natural' or 'dry' processed coffee, meaning that the fruit flesh from the coffee cherry was left attached to the bean as it dried. Natural processed coffees, and this one in particular, have intense fruit characteristics. Famed the world over for its distinctive blueberry mocha flavor, Harrar coffee fetches some of the highest prices for unwashed coffee in the world market."

I don't know if I'll experiment with Ethiopian coffee or not, but I am curious about all the many flavors and origins of coffee that are available around us. I notice that amazon.com has a very wide selection of Ethiopian coffee available, but I'm really happy that I now feel safe shopping in person! We have so many local roasters here that it's really fun to check out all the possibilities.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander, images as credited.