ethiopian dinnertime.

ethiopia.eating.


Dinner is like this. You get together with a group of fellow eaters. You gather around a plate of wat. Wat just means stew. You might think that limits your options. You’d be right, it does…it severely limits your options for eating. But don’t worry, Ethiopia makes wat out of everything. Well, everything that has to do with eggs. And chicken. And sometimes beef, and chickpeas.

You sit around the giant plate, with all the eaters. Your face and arms are caked with clay from a day hanging out the window of a land cruiser. A raccoon tan on your face from the African sun pounding away mercilessly on your sunglasses. A small woman walks from eater to eater, pouring water over your right hand. It doesn’t clean much. Also, unlike the locals, you tend to eat with two hands, so you slyly pass around the hand sanitizer. Thank you Purell corporation. I wish I bought stock in your organization, I wish I had a trashbag full of Purell that I could jump into, with only my eyes above glycerine-gel level. Just for a minute. Once a day.

After the cleaning, the woman brings out the injera on a huge round platter. It’s usually laid flat, a few layers of sourdough flapjacks. Good injera is the color of my cheeks when I get seasick. Greyish, like badly trampled, low grade carpet. The lighter the color, the better quality tef used. Good tef is the key to great injera. Supposedly highlanders laugh at the inferior quality of lowlanders injera. I’m afraid that the world’s best injera would still taste like a spoilt crepe to me. A spoiled crepe that you kind of get used to after a while. You kind of even like it a little bit after a while. Limited options.

The woman dumps some sort of wat all over the injera, it’s looking like your living room floor after a flash flood. I mean she douses it, pouring bright orange pungent doro wat coast to coast across the two foot wide frisbee of injera. Then she steps away, maybe brings you another bottle of harar beer or a cold ambo water.

Then you eat.

Right hand only. Try tearing a pancake into manageable pieces with only ole righty. It’s ridiculous. Not so pretty. You take the soggy injera and dab it into the wat. You wrap it around the pieces of meat. You smush the hard-boiled eggs into pieces and you cram it all into your mouth. You do not lick your fingers, culturally inappropriate. Your hand has a lot of food on it.
Now if you are someone’s honored guest, they will do something that will probably make you feel uncomfortable. They are probably going to take a piece of meat and finger-feed that straight into your mouth. They are gonna do it, you should get used to it. Try not to lick their fingers, that’s extremely awkward.

When you’re done, you chat.
Dinnertime.