Injera

We are so excited to begin cooking Ethiopian food. We purchased an Ethiopian cookbook online from someone with the screen name "church lady" and it's fantastic. Although we've eaten at quite a few Ethiopian restaurants we've never been a part of the preparation or involved in the ingredients-gathering stage. I was very happy to read that the majority of the recipes are simple roasts that include a protein (chicken, beef, or lamb) and an assortment of the following:
- onions (specifically noted in many recipes as fried without grease)
- red peppers
- butter
- cardamom
- black pepper
- garlic
- ginger
- salt
- red wine (or t'ej)
- water
- eggs/lime

And of course, injera. injera is the traditional bread eaten with Ethiopian cuisine and also serves as the utensil for the meal. Injera is broken into pieces and used to scoop up the various meat roasts, vegetable entrees, and bean dishes. Traditionally there are multiple spreads served on top of a plate of injera with several rolls of injera served in a separate basket on the side. You can then tear pieces of injera from the rolls and scoop up bites of the spreads. It's very family style and very fantastic.

We're in the beginning stages of preparing several recipes from our new cookbook, and mastering injera feels like the appropriate place to start. The only problem is that there is barley injera, corn injera, rice injera, and many other forms of injera. My gut tells me that we'll be fondest of rice injera (we usually cook with rice pasta) but really am not sure. I suppose we'll start with the rice-based recipe and see how it goes. We're visiting MN next weekend (taking dad to THE Vikings Packers game) and would love to prepare an Ethiopian meal and want to make sure that we're able to prepare injera before hand, so I suppose we'll be practicing that tonight and tomorrow just to make sure.