Last night, I embarked upon my first foray into making Ethiopian food. I'd been craving it awhile (the anticipation of making and then eating inerja, which I will discuss shortly, kept me awake a couple of nights ago), but since we haven't been able to get over to The Blue Nile, I decided I'd give it a go myself.
I reconnoitered the fridge and cupboards for stuff to make Ethiopian food out of. The freezer contained a package of chicken thighs and legs (bought a couple of weeks ago expressly for making doro wat), and there were red lentils in the cupboard. Here, I'll level with you: the lentils weren't in the cupboard. The cupboard's crammed full of spices, lots of shit you can't make a meal out of without a lot of effort like baking chocolate, what-must-be thirteen varieties of vinegar, and cans of, hell, I don't know. Veg-All? We try not to eat the Veg-All or anything else from a can if we can help it.
Ethiopian food requires not only a staggering number and amount of spices, but also roasting and pulverizing those spices. The aroma permeates the house in a kinda poetic way, but all that roasting smokes up several city blocks and causes violent fits of coughing and painful, watery eyes. The recipes also call for lots of butter; specifically, the recipes call for nitter kibbeh, or spiced butter, which requires its own preparation, including the addition of more spices. Lots of onions, too, more onions than we had in the whole house, like six pounds of onions or some crazy amount that not even the most nutty onion-stinking guy would ever use in a lifetime. Two small onions would have to do, including their cute little tippy-tops.
Once all the prep work was finished, cooking the meal was a breeze. Fry your weight in onions, and then add to it garlic, water or broth, berbere, which we have plenty of now fr Chrissakes, the butter I can't pronounce, and the chicken. Let the whole schmeer simmer for thirty to forty minutes. Fry ginger, garlic, and an armload more onion in the nutty butter, add the bunga-bunga spice mixture plus some tumeric, add water or broth, and boil the lentils until you can maysh 'em like those maysed taters, takes about thirty minutes, maybe fewer.
I'm thrilled to say that the meal was delicious. Not quite Blue Nile delicious, but damned close enough and we didn't have to drive across town to get there. Indeed, my doro wat and the lentil dish I can't remember the name of and I'm too lazy to look it up and link it right now were a big hit.
The astute reader has noted that at this point, I've mentioned the inerja, really the attraction for me, but once. And what about the Bisquick, Shiftless Chef? Inerja is, effectively, Ethiopian silverware. All the dishes are served on it, and the inerja is used to scoop up everything into your mouth. I'm too lazy to look up a youtube video to demonstrate how this is done. At any rate, an Ethiopian meal seems incomplete without it.
Inerja calls for teff flour and three days of preparation time to allow the teff to ferment. I didn't have teff flour and I didn't have three days to prepare a meal. Happily, Ethiopian cuisine seems pretty casual in terms of ingredients. Many of the recipes read, "These proportions aren't set in stone, so if you don't have something, you'll get it right next time." Such is the case with the inerja. Ordinary white flour and some sort of fermentation or bubbling agent will do in an emergency. I had some sourdough starter that's been brewing in the fridge for a couple of months now, so no problem.
We'd run out of ordinary white flour because of my failed pasta attempt two nights prior. How do you prevent pasta from drying out before you're ready to use it? None of the pasta recipes, which vary pretty wildly, I consulted address this. They think-it we all know-a how-it to make-it the pasta? They're it the crazy types! No flour, but we did (do) have a box of Bisquick somebody gave us. I looked at the ingredients, which I'm wont to do. Bisquick contains leavening, which is good. It also contains dextrose, which I'm not sure about.
The inerja recipe seemed similarly casual to the other recipes. "Mix all ingredients until not-quite pancake batter like consistency is achieved." I mixed the sourdough starter, the Bisquick, and less than a cup of water with a couple of teaspoons of baking soda together until I achieved the runniness I was looking for.
As casual as Ethiopian cuisine is, I'm now sure that it makes absolutely no allowances for Bisquick under any circumstances. I don't care if that's all you have, eat pancakes or waffles or biscuits tonight instead, or drive across town and eat Ethiopian food the way it's supposed to be made. I'm pretty easy-going, but Bisquick, no-sir-ee.
I dipped my finger in to taste the batter, and ascertained a distinct laundry detergent-like taste, and not the good stuff, like Tide. I tried to thin out the dough using more sourdough starter, a bit more salt, some vinegar, and the scant amount of bread flour I discovered behind the stupid Bisquick. None of those additions helped much, but I soldiered on anyway because I was determined that we were going to have inerja, befitting a proper Ethiopian meal, soldiered on in bad faith, believing that I could fry out the Sam's Choice detergent flavor.
Bisquick is wretched, wretched stuff. I have deemed Bisquick unfit for human consumption. I'm convinced that it doesn't even make good roach feed.
Bisquick Buyer Beware!
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