Ethiopian At Home

After a recent excursion to Aster's, I decided it had been far too long since I prepared a homemade Ethiopian feast. So I spent a leisurely Sunday afternoon in the kitchen.

First I made niter kibbeh, a spiced oil blend. Watching it simmer on the stove with all those vibrant colors, you just know it's going to add great flavor to your dishes.

Clockwise from top left: gomen wat (collard greens), atakilt wat (cabbage stew), mesir wat (spicy red lentils), and but'echa. The but'echa recipe came from Vegan Eats World. I was so excited to see a recipe for this dish, made from chickpea flour. I had only eaten it once before, at an Ethiopian restaurant in Montreal. It was like a thick hummus with a strong garlic flavor. This version of but'echa turned out quite different. It was more like scrambled eggs! We still enjoyed it even though it wasn't what I was expecting.

Random thing I learned when I set out to make my own injera bread: Austin is experiencing a teff flour shortage! In the past, it was easy to find at the health food stores. Now, according to a guy at Whole Foods, they're having trouble sourcing it. You can still get the teff grains, but they're so hard and tiny, there's no way my cheapo food processor would be able to grind them into flour. Fortunately, I was able to buy a big bag of readymade injera from an Ethiopian restaurant near my house.

I frequently post pics of Jackson or Olivia enjoying food, but rarely Tony. He eats, too.

Jackson is all about zombies these days. Today he created a zombie repellant for our backyard.

Did you know zombies are allergic to black pepper? He also rubbed his bare feet on the rock, explaining that the "stink" would drive the creatures away. (He may have a point there. Oh, how I miss the days when his feet had that sweet baby smell!) The device seems to work -- no zombie invasions to report.