More Skiing and More Ethiopian Cooking

Even though it's been sunny and pleasant the past couple of days, the weekend gave us a nice covering of snow. On Saturday, we were able to make our way around the fairgrounds before heading back to the Lemon House on Sunday.

Then it was back to our Ethiopian cookbook for "shiro salad."

This one begins with chickpea flour, which you make into a paste and let it cool. 

Then, we rolled them into small balls and fried them. So something like croutons, but better.

And then there was the injera, which is getting progressively better each week.

Bubbling Injera

I put last week's remaining injera batter in the refrigerator with the intention of using it again for this week's menu. I wasn't expecting more fermentation to happen, but when I took the batter out and let it warm to room temperature, I saw bubbles.

Indeed, this week's injera looked slightly more like what you might see from people who actually know what they are doing. 

For this week, we topped our injera with a chicken and onion sauce recipe.

Making the onion sauce had similarities to French onion soup. You start with a huge batch of onions and cook them for a very long time. The difference is that with this, you add the Ethiopian spice blends, which give it a distinctive flavor as well as a spicy kick.

For the rest of the meal, we had a tomato salad and a desert of stewed pears. I have already picked next week's menu, which will include--interestingly enough--sprouted fenugreek seeds!

Kicking off Ethiopian Sundays

Another winter means another country and another cookbook. This year, it's Ethiopia!

This has also meant finding new ingredients, such as teff flour--a common grain in Ethiopia used to make a flatbread known as injera. 

But this is no ordinary flatbread. Making the batter is a weeklong process, aimed at fermenting the mixture to create a sour flavor. 

Cooking it is relatively simple, although it's quite unlike any other flat breads that I have made. To look at the batter, you'd think that you would cook them like crepes. But the batter goes solid rather quickly, so you have to work around the outside of the pan and circle in.

The injera is then used for grabbing and eating the food, so everyone received their own...

...with the main dish of ground beef in fenugreek sauce on top. The flavor profile in this dish was quite unlike anything that we have had in our international cooking adventures. SPICY! I suspect I'll have more to say about that in future posts.

We also enjoyed a vegetable salad with a unique, creamy sunflower seed and mustard sauce.

So it was a successful first try, with many more Sundays ahead of us!

Sundays in Jerusalem: Installment 1

OK, so I think I need to do a better job of documenting our Sundays this year. Last year, I kinda fell off. So let's get started!

Originally, we were going to cook Italian this winter. We had two--yes TWO--cookbooks. But then Kate located this exquisite cookbook.....

There are so many recipes that we are eager to try, but for our first adventure, we went with stuffed pears. Yes, pears. Actually, the recipe called for something called "quince," which is similar to a pear but, surprisingly, not at Wal-Mart in Ebensburg. This also uses lamb, which again, called for some improvisation so we went with beef.

As you can see, the pictures in this cookbook are remarkable.

Basically, these are seasoned meatballs stuffed into the pears and slowly simmered for an hour or so. I think our end product looked a lot like the picture above. #NailedIt

So this ended up being a suitable introduction to our new cookbook. We are all looking forward to what's next!