Make sure that you have truly tasted traditional plates before you wrap up your visits. “Diversity” can better explain the national cuisine that ends up making a restaurant’s menu to embrace a host of meals. The menu varies for the different mealtimes. Here, the writer limits herself in dishes that best complement your breakfast feast.
Some of the meals you may see listed in a menu are utterly a new experience to you. Others, however, appear to be the best taste resulted from a cross-cultural fusion of food. CHECHEBSA – A delicious and usually soft and moist meal prepared from pita (from whole wheat flour).
The flatbread or pita is then cut into small pieces, and mixed with clarified butter locally called Niter ‘Kibe’ (Butter, melted together with spices like cardamom, garlic, and fenugreek…) and chili powder. You cannot stop eating if it is served with a glass of yogurt. FUL- This food seems to have been adopted from Sudanese cuisine. But it has long been one of the favorite foods in the urban areas of Ethiopia. Dry fava beans soaked in water for several hours and then boiled with water for hours. The cooked beans, whose skins already removed, are crushed.
The crushed beans then mixed with minced onion, pepper, salt, diced tomatoes, cumin, black pepper, coriander, feta cheese, and oil. Genfo (Porridge)-If you get a chance to attend a birth ceremony, that is your lucky day to taste the local ‘Genfo’. Usually, this food is prepared from whole barley flour, sometimes from whole wheat flour and whole maize flour. Despite a stark improvement, expectant mothers deliver at their homes with traditional birth attendants.
The birth attendants are said to put stirring rod between the expectant mothers’ teeth, to enable the mother to press the rod and firmly push the baby. After delivery, the mother’s teeth cannot chew hard foods thus soft foods like ‘Genfo’ is much preferable. ‘Genfo’ looks like a model of Crater Lake when served it to you with a bowl or plate, a lake of Niter Kibe mixed with spicy chili placed in the middle.
The Ethiopian Herald May 24/2019
BY STAFF REPORTER
