Robert was in town, so I used his arrival as a perfect excuse to try my hand at Ethiopian food, which we both love, especially Doro Wat.
Having never attempted a single Ethiopian dish before, I was a little nervous. I looked at more than one hundred recipes, and here is what I came up with:
For those of you unfamiliar with Ethiopian food (shame on you) the brown tortilla sort of bread is called injera. It is a spongy, slightly sour, bread made mostly of Teff flour. There are lots of places to pick this up in Minneapolis including African grocery stores, the Seward Co-op, and Everret’s Foods on 38th and Cedar. It is tasty, even with good old American food.
The bright pink food is a beet and potato salad with a lemon dressing.
To the right, the yellow mush are lentils called Misr Allecha. These were amazing.
To the left of the picture is Chickpea Wat.
All three of these recipes I followed pretty much exactly. They were all good, but the lentils were particularly good.
On the bottom of the picture is Doro Wat. This is my favorite Ethiopian dish and this was my attempt to recreate it, though Robert did a lot of the work. We combined a few recipes to get to what we thought was a good recipe. It ended up being VERY spicy, almost too much. But it was VERY GOOD.
This dinner was great. I will definitely be making more Ethiopian food in the future. It was pretty easy, it just takes some time.
A nice vegan meal for us on this Meatless Monday.
The main is roasted butternut squash with toasted walnuts and lentils. It is topped with a squeeze of lime (and cilantro that I forgot for the picture) which really makes the flavors pop. The rice is spiced with saffron, cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon. The spinach is plain sauteed spinach.
Good, easy, and cheap, just how we like it.