Week #1: Ethiopian

... So as I was saying a couple of days ago, I'm spending the next year eating my way around the world without leaving home, or at least without pulling out my passport. I don't have to, because immigrants have brought with them one of their greatest treasures--the foods they miss. Being an immigrant from Tennessee, I certainly understand this need for a taste of home: I've had my share of dry-rubbed pork ribs FedEx'd from Memphis; I've lovingly collected a coffee can full of bacon drippings for the flavor they bring to all kinds of foods, including the cornbread I make in the well-seasoned iron skillet that's older than Himself and me combined; and every trip home I crowd my luggage with hog jowls, bacon, ham and cracklins, as you've no doubt read about in this blog.

It's intriguing to discover the cuisines that are available in your own town, whether the population is 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million or more. Food comes with stories, history, human drama, religion, geography...you name it.

I'm starting in Ethiopia, where the food traditions are strong in spite of the scarcity there of food itself. Himself and I headed to Nyala in Los Angeles' Little Ethiopia to satisfy our craving for some wonderfully savory fare.
We ordered a combination of vegetarian and meat platters, so we could try a bit of everything. Ethiopia has large populations of Coptic Christians and Muslims, along with some Jews, so there is no pork in their culinary repertoire. And with the many fasting days dictated by the Coptic Church, the cuisine features a lot of vegetarian dishes. I appreciate that they serve both--I don't mind vegetarian entrées if I know meat is still available. And when the veggies are so creatively and aggressively seasoned, I don't miss the meat at all. But we weren't going to turn our noses up at the beef, chicken and lamb. The vegetarian platter included collards (yes, my Southern brethren and sistren, those gnarly greens came from Africa), a mixture of vegetables and three types of lentils, along with a bit of salad (was that a holdover from Italian colonialism, I wonder?).

The lentils and meats were each made into a rich stew known as wot. They were spicy and flavorful, with varying degrees of heat. All the lentil stews were cooked with garlic and ginger, with the yellow lentils being mildest. The red lentils were seasoned with a sauce called berbere, a combination of spices and several varieties of reallllly hot chilis. The meats were cooked in butter and seasoned with onion, garlic, ginger, the chicken with lemon juice and the lamb and beef with red wine. And goosed with enough berbere to keep them interesting.
All of this food was served on top of a large crepe-like bread called injera, a staple of Ethiopian cuisine. It's made of teff, a minuscule grain that produces a thin, spongy bread with a sourdough flavor. Injera is the great multitasker of the Ethiopian meal, serving as the plate, the utensil and the bread. In some cases, the entire table is covered with injera in place of a tablecloth (just not in L.A., where the health department would no doubt have something to say about it!). I love eating with injera: it's so satisfying to experience food this way, much more tactile and intimate than when it moves between plate and mouth on a fork or between a pair of chopsticks.

The best injera was the piece lining the tray. By the time we polished off our basket of injera and most of the food on the tray, what was left was the layer of injera into which the juices of our meal had soaked, messy but oh-so satisfying.

Our end-of-the meal Ethiopian coffee tray arrived with a piece of red-hot charcoal bearing a lump of frankincense, which created a warm and heady aroma (it's probably a good thing we opted for water over Ethiopian wine or beer, or we might have fallen asleep right where we sat). The coffee, brewed in this small pot called a jabana, was rich and commanding.

The restaurant was resplendent with its colorful artwork and artifacts. The music and incense helped complete the illusion that we were on the Horn of Africa, not a stone's throw away from the Beverly Center.

Adventures in Staycating

The trend this summer, with the economy and the dollar growing weaker than Superman in a kryptonite speedo, is toward "staycation." It’s a good idea, in theory, but you need to get away from your “stuff,” both the literal stuff and the figurative stuff, if you’re going to relax and experience something new. And that can take some work—or at least some creative planning.

One way is to sample food that’s outside your usual repertoire. One New Year’s, Andy and I resolved that each month in the coming year we’d try a new cuisine, see at least one play and take a hike somewhere outside the confines of the city. Of course, resolutions are made to be broken, and while we were unable to carry through with all three components of our resolution for the entire 12 months, we did manage to enjoy some cuisines with which we were unfamiliar.

Some of our discoveries:

*We found out how cultures can meld when we visited a Chinese Islamic restaurant. While you don’t typically find bread on the table in Chinese restaurants, this one featured a gargantuan round of sesame bread that carried us through the meal and over the next few days. I’ve since heard stories of Chinese Islamic restaurants that serve even larger rounds than the one we got. Apparently, it’s a staple of the cuisine.

*At an Ethiopian restaurant, we discovered the pleasures of eating communally and with our fingers. Our two huge steaming trays, one of vegetarian stews and the other of assorted meats, were served with injera, the famous crepe-like, sourdough-tasting flatbread that functions as both utensil and food.

*We tried a Persian restaurant to see how the food differed from other Middle Eastern cuisines with which we were familiar. The fesenjan, a pomegranate and walnut sauce that’s typically served with duck and chicken, was so good I ate it without the meat on a huge plate of basmati rice and purred like a kitten for the rest of the day. And the tah-deeg, the golden layer of crusty rice remaining at the bottom of the cooking pot, was both yummy and fun, sort of a grown-up rice krispie treat.

So try a cuisine you’ve never had or one you’re not too familiar with. If you go when it's not the height of the lunch or dinner rush, you may have time to engage your server and possibly even a cook or chef. When you’re ordering, ask, “What do you like?” or “What's your favorite thing on the menu?” Don't say, "You pick for me," because you may end up with the blandest thing they have.

My friend, Chuck, of Gumbo Pages fame, has a business card-sized guide he keeps in his wallet that’s helpful for ordering in ethnic restaurants. On it is the following sentence written in several languages: "I have a white face and a Chinese/Thai/Russian stomach"—you get the idea. This lets the server know he’s an adventurous eater. Chuck said that once when he handed this card to a server, the server took away the first "safe" menu and returned with a "real" one.

Consider this as a staycation option to the same ol’ same ol’. Who knows? Maybe this fall your kids will write an essay titled “What I Ate on Staycation.”

Finger-lickin’ extraordinary

It may sound funny, but sometimes it’s easy when you use a fork not to actually notice what you’re eating. Especially when you’re in a hurry—and when the food’s not all that outstanding—it’s easy to employ the shoveling action that ensures you’ll finish your meal quickly and get back to your desk on time. And you may not taste a thing!

But try eating with your fingers, and you experience food quite differently. I don’t mean food like pizza and fried chicken, but cooked food that you’d typically eat with a fork.

Case in point: When you visit an Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant, you’ll find no utensils at your disposal. Rather, your food will be served atop a large, round piece of injera, a crepe-textured flatbread with a taste reminiscent of sourdough. Made of a grain called teff, injera is a sort of edible utensil. You tear off a piece, drop it onto your food, pick up a bite with the injera and eat the food wrapped in the bread, all in one bite.

A meal consumed in this way is a revelation. There’s something about the absence of familiar table tools that makes you slow down and get closer to your food. The experience is transformed, a much more textural and immediate sensation. You feel, smell and taste it more intimately, and I believe, come away from the meal with a heightened sense of what you've just had.

Looking at this from the reverse, would an Ethiopian who ate using a fork for the first time suddenly be awakened to attributes of the meal never before discerned? Possibly, since there would be only lentils or lamb stew on the fork, with no injera to flavor every bite.

However, for the person who eats injera daily, the fork would be a real setback, for injera is three things: plate, utensil and food. All the fork enables us to do is to be tidy eaters.