Samma We't (Spinach-Like Plant Sauce "Nettle")

"Samma is made on very rare occasions and only during Lent.  It is made from a hairy, leafy shrub which grows wild and stings the skin when touched.  Use of rubber or plastic gloves will prevent skin irritation.  It looks like spinach after it has been cooked."  ~ D. J. Mesfin, Exotic Ethiopian Cooking, p. 179

According to the random number generator, I was supposed to have made this dish back in February, but random.org  failed to take into account the fact that stinging nettles are a very seasonal crop and aren't ready until late March/early April (and then their growing season is really only about a month long).  


Despite knowing exactly where I could find a lush, healthy wild crop I decided to take the easy way out.  Back in February, I signed up to receive an e-mail when the nettles came back into season, and I received that e-mail a couple of weeks ago or so.  Last Monday, these were waiting for me on my doorstep! 

 the apparent discoloration is only an illusion 

My original intent was to hold off until the weekend to make this dish, but by Thursday, I noted that the nettles were starting to wilt, so I steamed them up so that they would then keep a few more days until I could finish the dish.  The book says to rub the leaves through a sieve, chop them, and put them into boiling water.  I kind of did things a bit backwards and just steamed them to start. 

two pounds is a lot of nettles

Because these were very young nettles, I didn't notice any sting (and I do know what nettle stings feel like).  I handled them with my bare hands without any problem.  They steamed up well, just like spinach, and turned a most gorgeous dark shade of green.  

steamed and packaged for later

When I was ready to finish the dish, I put the cooked nettles into the food processor and chopped them up.  I skipped the sieve part, largely because I wasn't sure what the purpose was.  

Back into the big pot the nettles went (though it had decreased a great deal in bulk, there was still a sizable amount vegetable matter to be dealt with) and they were mixed with some barley flour:

Then the instructions said to add a little warm water until the mixture became thin, so I started to do just that: 

A minute or two into this process, I wondered to myself if there might have been a specific amount of water mentioned in the ingredient list, as I wasn't sure how "thin" I was supposed to get it.  Sure enough, there was.  I wasn't sure how much I had added before I realized this, so I just added the whole amount anyway, figuring I could always boil it down if I needed to.  Some garlic was also added:

The we't was cooked for about 15 minutes, after which salt was added.  At this point, the instructions became a little unclear: "When done, add salt, remove from heat, pour into bowl and cook before serving".  Wasn't I just cooking it?  Perhaps it's a typo and was meant to be "cool"? 

I chose to eat it hot and liked it.  The flavor of the nettles is quite crisp; stronger than spinach, but not unpleasant, in my opinion, but I like wild greens (dandelion greens, burdock greens, miner's lettuce, really any greens, except for mustard and watercress).  I've been eating it for lunch this week.  

My husband refused to even taste it.  The Ethiopians had a few bites the day I made it and take a bite or two when I'm having it for lunch, but they're not passionate about this dish, perhaps because it lacks berbere and wasn't served with injera.  It's certainly not a vegetable aversion, as they were eating their weight in Brussels sprouts at lunch today.  

If you're not interested in working with the nettles, I saw it suggested somewhere on-line that you can try watercress instead, or, frankly, you can probably just make this with spinach.  I do think that a stronger-tasting green, like watercress, will work better than mild spinach, however.  

For the health benefits of nettles, and more nettle recipes, click here. 

Yeshimbra Fitfit (Whole Dried Chick Pea Sauce Blended in [sic] Spices and Injera)

"Yeshimbra Fitfit is a refreshing meal by itself.  It is mild and nourshing." ~ D. J. Mesfin, Exotic Ethiopian Cooking, p. 212



I adore fitfit (stew mixed with injera); my most favorite Ethiopian dish is doro fitfit, the country's national dish (doro/chicken stew) mixed with injera.  It's my "usual" when we go out for Ethiopian.  


Last time I was on, I mentioned that we weren't too thrilled with the injera we had mail-ordered.  The Ethiopians complained about a residue left on their fingers and tears started flowing when the injera, instead of being supple and elastic, more or less crumbled when they attempted to fold it around their food.  So, despite having 20 pieces still left in the freezer, I decided to go back to getting injera fresh from our local restaurant (unless I make it myself), relegating the mail-ordered stuff to use in fitfit.  How timely it was, then, that Random.org landed me right on a recipe for fitfit!


This is a very simple, very standard wet to make.  There are no exotic ingredients to try to find and the preparation is straight-forward.  


As with most wets (at least in this book), this one started off with a large quantity of red onion:

In Ethiopian cooking, you apparently never sauté the onions in oil or butter, though fat is used later on in the cooking process.  Instead, you throw them into a dry pan and cook them that way, keeping a good eye on them and stirring them nearly constantly, as they are not supposed to change color (by that, they mean brown; they do become translucent as they are cooked).  

After the onions, I added sunflower oil and water:

And dried chickpeas:

After letting it boil for 10 minutes, I was supposed to add some garlic and ginger and some more water, but I got a little ahead of myself and added the spices to the mixture before it boiled:

There's also some black pepper in there, as black pepper is mentioned in the ingredient list.  It is never, however, mentioned in the recipe, so I just assumed it went in with the rest of the spices.  And while only 1/4 teaspoon of garlic was called for, I used a teaspoon because I use these and one cube is roughly one teaspoon.  

Then it was just a matter of cooking until the chickpeas became soft.  No time was given, and I had purchased them in bulk from Whole Foods, so there were no cooking directions (I know they're on the bins, but I didn't pay attention to them), so a perusal of volume 3 of my Women's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery was called for.  

This is my favorite cookbook set, from 1965.  I sometimes just sit and leaf longingly through the pictures, feeling inexplicably nostalgic for the days of dinner parties, caftans, tureens and chafing dishes, Fiestaware, harvest gold, avocado green, and Americana decor, though I was born three years after these books were published!  

According to the Encyclopedia, the chickpeas needed to cook for two hours.  Unfortunately, it also said to soak them for an hour before cooking them for those two hours, but I didn't read that until the chickpeas had already been thrown into the pot.  After all was said and done, however, they ended up simmering for about 3-1/2 hours because I had to run out to pick the Ethiopians up from daycare due to an emergency at my husband's work.  As a disclaimer, I would like to add that we do eat a fair amount of beans, but I tend to use canned for convenience's sake, and haven't cooked from dried beans in ages; that's why I needed to look it up!  You could also put the stew into a crockpot at this point until you're ready to have it.  

After we got home, I added the finishing touches.  First, some sliced Anaheim pepper:

Then the injera, which crumbled perfectly:

The finished piece:

I had to fold over the edges of the injera because it's too big for the plate!

Despite this not being a berbere dish, it was very good.  Even though we don't like the mail-order injera as platter or utensil, it worked wonderfully in the fitfit and the end result is quite filling.  

Yegebs Siljo (Barley Paste)

"Yegebs Siljo is a popular dish during fasting.  May be eaten with injera or bread.  It is a vegetarian dish." ~ D. J. Mesfin, Exotic Ethiopian Cooking


There are 250 Ethiopian fasting days in the year, according to this site, although fasting only means not eating until after 3 p.m., not fasting all day.  Fasting also means "no meat, fat, eggs or milk".  Many recipes in Exotic Ethiopian Cooking are mentioned as being "fasting" recipes, and this is one of them.  


I have probably had yebaqela siljo, a broad bean paste, when dining at an Ethiopian restaurant, as it is often served as an accompaniment on the injera, along with Ethiopian cottage cheese, some green salad, tikil gomen (cabbage and potatoes), yekik alich'a (a mild yellow pea stew), and various other items, all arranged daintily and prettily along the outside edge of the injera platter (the main dish goes inside the ring of side dishes).  However, I'm not entirely sure, as I don't have any memory of that dish.  I wish I did, if only so I knew what texture actually constituted a "paste" in this context.  I have a sneaking suspicion I came closer to a thick barley soup or a slightly thin barley hummus.  


This dish needed to sit (in the refrigerator) for three days prior to eating it, so I started earlier in the week.  As mentioned here, the first step involved making barley flour, but I was unable to find a reasonably priced (read as "under $200") flour mill, though I now have an eBay search on for the KitchenAid grain mill attachment (and, believe it or not, though it's in stock now, it wasn't on Monday).  I do wonder if this would have come out much better if I had been able to make my own flour, instead of buying packaged barley flour.  


The second step was to make the suff, or sunflower juice.  This is some seriously good stuff, but we have a liberal concept of "milk" in this house (I believe that, right now, we have cow milk, rice milk, and soy milk in the refrigerator, and we sometimes also have almond milk or hemp milk or coconut milk, as well).  The suff may as well have been called sunflower milk!  Between myself and the 2-year-olds (who decided they liked it after they tasted it again), there was no leftover sunflower juice, even though I didn't need it all for the recipe.  I'm not sure I'd say it was a refreshing drink, as advertised in the cook book, but it's good.  


On Tuesday afternoon, I was ready to bring it all together.  I started by roasting some fenugreek in a frying pan:

I find my fenugreek at my local Indian grocery store.  I love the smell of it as it roasts, as it smells faintly of maple syrup (random bit of trivia: fenugreek is often used to improve a nursing mother's milk supply, and the recommended dosage is "until your perspiration starts smelling like maple syrup").  

After roasting it, it was time to grind it up in The Poor Coffee Grinder:

Next came time to boil the barley flour and the water, and I didn't realize there was a discrepancy as to how much water should be used until I was done.  In the ingredient list, it calls for two to three cups of water, yet in the instructions, it says to boil the flour and the fenugreek in four cups of water (and another cup of water is called for at another point in the process).  This also may explain my results!

I was to boil the mixture "until it thickens", a nebulous concept, indeed.  

        cooking

I boiled it until it started forming a thin layer of what I can only call a pancake on the bottom of the saucepan, then decided that would be enough:  

      the bottom of the pan after I had decided the mixture was finished

From there, I put it into a bowl and poured some cold water over it; the instructions direct one to "not mix" it; the water just sits on top of the mixture until it's cooled:

After draining the water off, it came time to add the spices.  When I make a shopping list, I'm pretty particular about making sure I have enough of whatever I need, to the point of measuring it sometimes...except when it comes to spices, because, usually, spices only need a tiny amount: a teaspoon, at most, maybe a tablespoon on the rarest of occasions.  When spices are involved, I simply look into the spice cabinet and look to see if I have whatever is called for; I don't worry about how much I might need.  So when I came to add the spices and looked at how much was called for, I was a little shaken.  Instead of being by spoons or parts of spoons, the measurements were by parts of cups.  To be specific, I needed 1/2 cup, each, of garlic powder, ginger powder, and dried mustard.  One-half of a cup.  Fortunately, I had a nearly new tin of mustard from the but'ech'a and I had just recently purchased a new jar of garlic powder because we go through garlic powder with astonishing rapidity.  I also had more or less enough ginger from the Christmas-cookie baking.  I called it close enough, as the babies were napping and I couldn't run out to get more right then and there.  

Now I am out of pretty much all of these spices, save for a tiny amount of garlic powder that is left:

The spices were mixed into the flour mixture, by hand, as instructed.  

      

Then I was instructed to add the suff "until mixture thickens".  I have no idea how adding a couple of cups of liquid to what is, at best, a slightly viscous mixture is supposed to thicken it, but I thought maybe sunflower juice reacts with flour and jarsful of spices in some way that is binding.  It doesn't.  After the suff came more liquid in the form of several tablespoons of lemon juice, after which my dish bore rather little resemblance to even a very liberal definition of paste:

At this point, I sealed it in airtight container and placed it in the refrigerator for three days, as instructed.  Perhaps during this time, it would somehow turn into a paste?  

Not quite:

But it did seem a bit firmer than when I left it on Tuesday.

This is definitely more of a condiment/side dish, meant to be eaten in small amounts.  It's just too overpowering as a main dish and I think it actually upset my stomach a little!  And while the two-year-olds can eat a level of spicy that I can't, they don't like sinus-emptying harshness like that of dried mustard, so I prepared a second option for them (to their credit, they did give the yegebs siljo a try):

It's called "Dinty Moore Wet".  Seriously.  My husband suggests I add berbere to it next time.  However, the two-year-olds revolted against the injera that I had purchased from EthiopianSpices.com.  Even when it was fresh, they weren't enamored with it...it left a funky residue on the fingers and wasn't all that supple; freezing it just made it worse, despite thawing it gently.  Though I still have 20 more pieces in the freezer, I think I'm going to save it for some fitfit (stew mixed with pieces of injera....my favorite is doro fitfit) and go back to getting the injera from our local Ethiopian restaurant.  I can't have the Ethiopians unhappy with their injera.  


What's next?  The next recipe is a bit daunting, mainly because of the quantities involved.  Fifteen pounds of this, five pounds each of x and y, and a pound of something else, just for starters.  I also have to source a couple of things, so it might not be coming next week, but it will be coming!  It's considered a basic ingredient, so it will be good to have on hand as for future recipes. 

Suff ("Refreshing Drink Made from Sunflower Seeds")

"Suff is a delicious, refreshing drink consumed primarily during Lent or fasting.  The liquid can be mixed with injera to make Yesuff Fitfit." ~ D. J. Mesfin, Exotic Ethiopian Cooking


This Friday's dinner (Yegebs Siljo, or barley paste) has a few steps to it and it has to sit for three days, so I needed to get started early.  The first step involved making barley flour, which I'm totally game for, but, unfortunately, I don't have a flour mill and couldn't find one locally (a neighbor suggested using my coffee grinder, but I think grinding up four cups of flour is too much to ask of it).  By the time I get a flour mill in, it will be too late for this recipe, so I simply bought another package of barley flour at the store.  Easy enough!


The second step was discovered as I read through the ingredient list for the yegebs siljo: sunflower juice.  A Google search yielded not sources, but recipes, including this one.  If you have a chance, visit the blog of the person who submitted it, Yewoin's Family Cooking.  It's in my sidebar, but I felt it deserves special mention, as it's truly the real deal: an Ethiopian woman and her recipes.  

This was the recipe I used, though I later discovered that there is a recipe in Exotic Ethiopian Cooking, on page 72.  Of course there is.  I do wish this book was cross-referenced; it would make some things much easier!


There wasn't much to this recipe.  You get some sunflower seeds (raw, I assumed):

Bring them to a boil for 15 minutes:

Drain them:

Throw them into a blender with some more water:

And blend:

After blending it, you need to sieve the liquid to remove the sunflower seed mush:

It looks like sunflower milk!

At this point, you're supposed to add some rue (also known as "tena adam" in Ethiopia).  The recipe I referenced above mentioned using rue or ginger, so I went with the ginger.  I think I'm going to have to convert one of my raised beds into an Ethiopian herb garden this summer!  And maybe another into a teff field.  

I just peeled the ginger on the non-nubbly sides and dropped it into the sunflower juice.  The instructions state that when you're ready to drink it, you add sugar or honey to taste.  The two-year-olds demanded a taste and I forgot to sweeten it for them; it didn't go over very well.  I haven't yet tried it because I want to make sure I have enough for the yegebs siljo! 

Yebunna T'ej (Coffee-Flavored Honey Wine), part IV

Today was a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone kind of day.  I needed to make coffee, and I needed to move onto the next step with the t'ej, which included adding the coffee!  


Yesterday, I had strained the t'ej mixture, then returned it to its place on top of the stove, covered.  Approximately 24 hours later, it was looking a little less green/muddy than it had yesterday:

Today's first step was roasting the coffee, which is covered in the prior blog post.  I should have purchased two pounds of green coffee beans, because I needed an entire pound for the t'ej alone.  And because I really wanted to brew what I roasted, I needed to use a cup of the beans originally intended for the t'ej.  To make up for it, I pulled out some coffee beans that were purchased in Addis Ababa.  This coffee comes from the Sidama region, the region where the girls were born.  

I'm glad I only needed a little bit of it, because it looked so inadequate next to my home-roasted stuff:

(the dark stuff is mine; the lighter stuff is the coffee we bought in Addis)

I never realized how much coffee beans expand after they're roasted.  The pound of green beans I received was in a little rectangular pouch not much larger than two Pop-Tart wrappers side by side.  The volume of those beans roasted filled a colander.  Ground, there was simply a TON of it!

The challenge today was how I was going to get cheesecloth-ensconced coffee grounds into a giant carboy with a neck that was approximately only an inch in diameter.  I started with the idea of making a sort of coffee-ground/cheesecloth string of sausages, but there were just way too many grounds and it quickly became clear that I wasn't going to be able to get the "sausages" narrow enough to fit into the neck.  

So, I went with my husband's idea of making a sort of pouch with the cheesecloth, poking it down through the neck, and adding the coffee grounds through a funnel.  

I quickly discarded the funnel because it wasn't very large (yet it was the largest I had) and the bottom was narrow enough that it got clogged quite quickly.  Plus, the grounds just weren't flowing smoothly through the cheesecloth-lined neck.  I ended up tediously spooning the grounds into the neck with one of the girls' old baby spoons.  Every few spoonfuls, I'd need to loosen the cheesecloth, shake it to settle the grounds, and release a bit more cheesecloth into the bottle to make more room for more grounds.  To reduce the risk of grounds seepage, I originally doubled the cheesecloth, which actually made it even more difficult to get the grounds in.  About halfway to three-quarters of the way through, I lost control over an edge of the cheesecloth and grounds started leaking out.  At this point, I tied it the best I could, realizing that it was going to be inevitable that the grounds would be leaking out.  I'll just have to filter the t'ej again later on.  

Because I hadn't gotten all of the coffee grounds into the carboy, I grabbed another piece of cheesecloth, except I kept it to one ply and it was still damp from being rinsed out yesterday.  This made a huge difference; while it was still slow going, it went much more quickly than it did before, and I was able to tie the cheesecloth so that there would be no leakage at all from at least that group of grounds.  

After getting all of the grounds into the carboy (I have no idea how I'm going to get them OUT again....I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it), I added the t'ej.  It is actually starting to take on a nice honey color.  

the cheesecloth-covered grounds floating in the t'ej

A notation in the recipe mentioned adding some brewed coffee to impart some coffee color to the brew, so I took some of the coffee I had made in the previous post and poured it on in.  It didn't give me any idea of how much to put it, so I just poured it in until I thought it looked good. 

with some brewed coffee added

Then, it was just a matter of adding a water lock (recommended by the dude at the home brewing supply store) on the top:

Now it gets to sit for 20 days!  And though I mentioned yesterday that today's step would be the final one, I discovered that I missed one additional 2-3-day step, so this is the penultimate step.  

If anyone is at all interested in having a taste in 3 to 4 weeks, please feel free to e-mail me with your address and I'll be happy to send you a small sample!  That offer stands for anything I make, as long as it's something that can tolerate shipping.