This Ethiopian vegetarian dish came with an impressive eleven preparations. From the bottom, going clockwise, we have red lentils, cabbage, timatim fitfit (tomatoes mixed with injera), salad, shiro (powdered chickpeas), chickpea dumplings, caramelized green beans with carrot, potato with carrot, yellow split peas, green lentils, and collard greens are in the middle. All were cooked and served warm except for the salad and the refreshing tomato dish. The dishes were all spiced with some being quite spicy and others being quite mild. Everything was designed, as usual in Ethiopian cuisine, to be picked up and eaten with injera, a sour spongy pancake made from nutritious teff seed. Like a lot of Ethiopian food, this veggie utopia was exotic, very tasty, and healthy.
Location: Lalibela, 1025 S Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, California. Date: June 6, 2023.
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This is an Ethiopian dish of steamed collard greens, lamb meat, and onion, seasoned with assorted spices. It was garnished with a few raw green bell pepper slices which provided some crunch. It was, of course, served on injera, the famous Ethiopian soft and spongy flat bread made from sourdough teff, a grass seed that grows in Ethiopia and Yemen. This dish had a strong slightly bitter collard green flavor that was definitely enhanced by the lamb meat. It was sour from the injera and little spicy. There was definitely some garlic in there. This was a special dish served only on weekends.
Location: Red Sea, 4717 University Avenue, San Diego, California. Date: April 10, 2022. Fosalia is obviously Amharic for green beans; what carrot is in Amharic I don't know as this Ethiopian vegetarian dish appeared on the menu as Fosalia with Carrot. It was carrots and string beans flavored with tomato, garlic, and green pepper. It was an alitcha wot, meaning it was mild and yellow from turmeric, which distinguishes the mild stews from the fiery red ones. The beans were cooked to the point that the little beans themselves separated from the pods, but the carrot pieces were still nicely intact and they gave some sweetness to the otherwise savory dish. Even though it was supposedly cooked with vegetable oil, there was a buttery taste to it. There was also some sourness from the injera bread and the salad. This was my first time having this particular wot, and I'm going to add it to the menu of wots that I cook at home.
Location: Addis Restaurant, 3643 El Cajon Blvd., San Diego, California. Date: July 19, 2021. I believe this is the fist time I'm blogging about an Ethiopian lamb dish. Yebeg Tibs is pieces of lamb meat cooked in a mildly spicy sauce with onion and garlic. It was served with a side of house sauce and salad. You could order the house sauce mild or spicy, so naturally I went for the spicy. The very red sauce was hot and sour with an exotic floral note. The salad was lettuce, tomato, and red onion simply dressed with lemon juice. The lamb stew, that had really good lamb flavor, was served on injera (a sourdough spongy pancake made from a type of grass seed). I enjoyed this spicy, sour, and savory dish with a Harar beer, my favorite Ethiopian brand. It's malty and just a little bitter and slightly sweet. On the label it says “Enjoy the taste of real beer”.
Location: Addis Restaurant, 3643 El Cajon Blvd, San Diego, California. Date: July 16, 2021. I don't blog about ingredients or products very often, but these coffee beans from Joshua Tree Coffee Company are, in my opinion, quite special, and not just because I lived in Ethiopia as a boy. Firstly, the beans are organic, and they're roasted in a roaster that minimizes their exposure to air. What makes the flavor so special, though, is the fact that they're a light roast. I first came across light roasted coffee at a tasting on a coffee plantation in Panama, and I was amazed at the fruity flavor. I'd always been partial to medium roast for the chocolate notes, and the fruity notes of the light roast was a revelation. Even though these Ethiopian beans are light roasted, the flavor of the coffee is mildly fruity and it still has a light chocolate note. It is very distinctive, though; I haven't experienced this flavor from coffee beans grown anywhere else. Ethiopia, by the way, is the birthplace of coffee. The lovely cactus you see is located in a pot outside the coffee company in Joshua Tree.
Location: Joshua Tree Coffee Company, 61738B Twentynine Palms Hwy, Joshua Tree, California. Date: June 13, 2020. This vegan tasting at an Ethiopian restaurant had the following on the menu: Misir (red lentils with berbere spice), Ater Kik (split peas with tumeric), Fasolina (green beans and carrot stewed in berebere), Tikil Gomen (a mild stew of cabbage and potato), Kay Sir (potato and red beet with jalapeño), Gomen (collard greens with a mild spice blend), and Eggplant Wot (eggplant sauteed in berbere sauce). They said it came with salad on the side, but actually the salad was on the plate and so were a couple of other tastings; in all, there were eleven different tastings on the plate, the most I've ever had at an Ethiopian restaurant. Most were served cold, but a few were warm. From the top, going counterclockwise, is the salad of microgreens, a cherry tomato, and fruity dressing; potato colored with beet; spicy soybean puree with jalapeño; cabbage and potato; eggplant, served warm, which was soft and succulent; split pea with turmeric, and I could actually taste the turmeric; collard greens, served warm, which were very tasty; red lentil, also very tasty; carrot and green beans, which was somewhat sweet, maybe due to the caramelized onion; tomateem fit fit, which is sour, salty, and spicy raw finely chopped tomato soaked with pieces of injera; and dark lentils. This restaurant uses organic ingredients whenever possible. What a lunch!
Location: Gihon Ethiopian Kitchen, 2432 El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego, California. Date: December 27, 2019. I'm a big fan of just about any Ethiopian wot (spicy red or mild yellow stew), but when you say beef, it's derek wot that comes to mind first (often spelled dereq). My derek tibb was little pieces of tender but still chewy beef cooked in oil with diced jalapeño pepper and diced onion. It was spicy even without the red pepper sauce on the side, but that sauce was so good (spicy, floral, fruity, and a touch sour) that I just let it burn! The sweetness of the onion and the peppery quality of the jalapeño complemented the meat. The tomato salad also had jalapeño and onion in it, but raw. As usual, the sourness of the injera toned down the spice.
Location: Merkato, 1036 ½ S Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, California. Date: December 17, 2019. This Eritrean restaurant in San Francisco's Little Italy offered fish wot (spicy stews) with their injera (the sourdough pancake one uses to pick up the wots with). I've come across whole fish dishes in many Ethiopian restaurants, but I think this is the first time I came across a fish wot. (Masawa, by the way, is located on the Red Sea, so it stands to reason that they do seafood). The berbere spiced stew had tomatoes and onion in it, the tilapia was firm, and the dish was served with lentils and salad. This place was quite a find because I wasn't expecting to find a place like this in Little Italy. I enjoyed my meal with a glass of tej (which is Ethiopian honey wine); this one tasted like it was aged a bit, like Sherry.
Location: Masawa Restaurant, 532 Green Street, San Francisco, California. Date: September 16, 2019. This Eritrean appetizer was obviously meant to be shared, since there was literally a tower of okra, so for this okra lover it was an entire meal. The whole okra were small, tender, and had some sweetness to them. They were lightly encrusted with a teff flour and egg mixture and either deep fried or baked; either way, they weren't greasy. (Teff is a nutritious grass seed that is imported from Ethiopia.) The teff coating was very crunchy and the okra inside still had some of that sliminess that I love. The plate was garnished with roasted tomato pieces, caramelized onion pieces, and fermented hot sauce; this is where the Abyssinian flavor came through. There was also a sprinkling of salty and spicy awaze powder, another distinct Abyssinian flavor. I've had cornmeal encrusted okra in Atlanta, Georgia, but they were chopped into smaller pieces and, though crunchy, had lost most of their slime. I really enjoyed them as a beer snack, but for an okra lover they're better whole.
Location: Muzita Bistro, 4651 Park Boulevard, San Diego, California. Date: August 9, 2019. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, with Kaffa province lending its name to the beverage. I was quite surprised to find an Ethiopian coffee house on University Avenue in San Diego; not only that, but they make ceremonial coffee twice a week. This coffee takes time to make. The beans are usually roasted and ground fresh, then coffee and water are added to a clay coffee pot which is put onto hot charcoal or, in this case, a gas burner and boiled up three times or so until the lady in charge decides that the coffee is ready. She then tilts the pot and lets it sit for a while, so the coffee grounds sink to the bottom, before she pours it into cups and serves it with some green aromatic leaves called tena'adam that she grows in pots out back. Even though I was offered sugar, the coffee was so good that I hesitated to add anything else to it. It was dark and rich but not overly bitter, and the fresh herb gave it a taste that reminded me of cardamom. I enjoyed my coffee with a lentil sambusa, a pastry stuffed with cooked lentils flavored with Ethiopian spices. With the ceremonial experience, I thought I was adding up quite a tab, so I was pleasantly surprised when the bill came to less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks would have cost.
Location: Yohed Coffee, 4160 University Avenue, San Diego, California. Date: August 3, 2019. |
AuthorChef Roland has been a legal resident of seven countries and has travelled in over thirty, documenting food along the way. He currently resides in the desert in Southern California. Categories
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