At long last: Injera

Apparently there are folks who have found this blog while looking for injera recipes. Ha ha ha ha ha... I'm sorry dear readers.  Thanks for sticking around, even though the recipes are few and far between. :)

I have at long last begun to live up to this page's name: We made injera!  (And ate it too!)

In between our half-hearted potty training and our desperate sleep training and our attempts to keep our tempers with our sometimes surly little boy (who thinks he's 16 instead of 6 some days), this week we had a hugely successful parenting moment.  As evidenced by the huge grin of our boy, who declared after his first bite "It's tastes like Ethiopia!"  That sentence will feed my soul for weeks and weeks...

Here is the recipe that we followed, by another adoptive mom/blogger and wonderful recipe sharer: INJERA RECIPE HERE

Injera is time consuming.  It is a labor of love.  Injera is made from a yeasty fermented dough (like pancake mix, only with lots of bubbles.) So at least a week before actually cooking the batter you have to make a start.  You can then store your start in the fridge and keep using it (like a sourdough starter).

  "START" RECIPE HERE. 

Note: It is very important to make your start in a super large tupperware. Otherwise when it ferments and doubles you will have a sticky, gooey, hard-to-clean-up mess in your pantry. (Guess how I know that?!)

The morning of the night you'd like to make and eat injera, you use your start to make the batter. The batter needs to sit all day to get nice and bubbly.  I didn't time my cooking and start-making very well and ended up needing to make injera on a Tuesday. Which meant a little panicked rushed batter blending in the morning, and a trip home at lunch time to start making doro wat (chicken stew) because ohmygod, what are we going to eat with all this injera! And a bit of extra snack and TV watching in the afternoon so we could get it all done and actually eat dinner before bedtime. This is definitely a weekend or holiday activity in future.  

Morning of : blending the start, teff flour, and water. 

Our batter in the morning.

This is the teff flour we are using. It is dark and very potent!

Injera batter before we start cooking- see all the bubbles!

Lily tries a taste. Hmm... a little sour?

I was a little terrified about how much batter we were going to be cooking up.

Our injera pan: a dedicated utensil, not sullied by frying eggs or grilled cheese. Yes, it's square. Don't tell anyone.

The top of the injera as it cooks- getting nice and airy. Injera is only cooked on one side- no flipping!

"This is how how you pour it Mommy. You go around, and around and around. Like this."

Injera topped with spicy lentils, doro wat, butternut squash and greens. YUM!

It ended up being a delicious evening. And we didn't have any leftovers! Most miraculously, making injera together helped Daniel remember helping his first mother cook. A precious, precious memory for him, forever enshrined in the taste of yeasty, bubbly, hot injera.

Next I'll write up my recipe for doro wat. It is totally not authentic, but it works well for Tuesday night dinners and if Daniel gobbles it up, it must be good!