Ethiopian Food is BOMB: Final thoughts on Ethiopia

My dad often says, that Ethiopian food is the only food that consistently makes him ill. He HATES it, and if you know my dad, you know that hating any kind of food is a rare occurrence.

I've never felt the same way, although I've met many who have. I think what it really boils down to is: injera is kind of weird. I'll cop to that. It's served cold, it's kind of got a spongy texture, it's slightly sour, when it gets wet it falls apart which is obnoxious because you have to use it as your fork, spoon and knife... I get it.

But, despite it's faults, I've enjoyed our traditional feasting here in Ethiopia.

We happened to time our trip to coincide with Ethiopian Lent. Ethiopians take their Christianity very seriously - compared to a lot of Ethiopian Christians, Americans are just phoning it in. For Lent pretty much no one eats meat (fish doesn't count as meat though... go figure... it's the Faith Gaskins method of vegetarianism.. ZING). There will be meat listed on menus, but if you order it, you'll be told it's not available.

So that pretty much left us with the Ethiopian Fasting Plate. Sounds pretty awful, but in reality it's not at all awful. It's basically a big round of injera topped with all these little vegetarian salads. The mainstays are a kind of spiced, curried lentil, a cooked cabbage salad, shiro (which is the only food I will admit is really trifling. disgusto. it's basically chick pea sauce, but there's nothing in the sauce, and the sauce itself kind of tastes like glue or paste or something), curried potatoes and carrots and then whatever else is available. Sometimes a sort of coleslaw like salad, sometimes a green salad, sometimes something unidentifiable but delicious.

Also this huge meal costs the equivilant of about $1.50 USD. It's like the ultimate dollar menu! Really cheap, really tasty, really filling.

They also serve injera for breakfast here, called firfir. It's literally yesterdays torn up injera stir fried with some awazi sauce (super spicy) or some other sauce... sometimes the dreaded shiro. It's pretty good, although I'll admit I go for eggs when available.

While the Italian colonizers were only here for like, five years, it was enough time for the Ethiopians to take the best of what they had to offer: pizza, pastries and aqua con gas. We've only been in Kenya for 1 day and I already miss Ambo! They have it everywhere, it's just seltzer water, but it's a nice constant in a country who's landscape and people change so dramatically from region to region.

The pizza in Ethiopia is GREAT, and every other storefront is a pastry shop. Granted, you can point at any slice of cake, no matter what it's shaped like or what color it is, it will turn out to be lemon cake - but that's beside the point.. it's GOOD! And it's everywhere. Donuts too! (Which reminds me of a very off color joke told to me years ago: What's the easiest way to exterminate the entire population of Ethiopia? Throw a donut off a cliff. I HOPE YOU'RE NOT LAUGHING).

Also, to make my mom proud, we found the only Thai restaurant in Addis, and ate there our last day. Guess what? It was really good. Everything tasted authentic and we were joined in the dining room by two tables of Thai people, so you know it must have been the real deal. It was even better than the Thai food we had in Cairo. And significantly more spicy than Thai food served stateside.

So all the jokes about food and lack of food in Ethiopia are totally off the mark, the food here is great, I didn't get sick once, and not EVERYTHING is hellishly spicy. I have a feeling I might even miss the Ethiopian fasting plate here in Kenya... We'll see! Tomorrow we're headed for the coast!