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homemade injera
Saturday, November 5 2011
Gretchen and I are big fans of Ethiopian food (which I'd never had until Gretchen introduced it to me early in our relationship). For us, though, it has always been a restaurant food, and then only when we were in certain special geographic regions with large Ethiopian communities (mostly either the the District of Columbia or Rome, Italy). This is because Ethiopian food requires injera, a sour rubbery flat bread made from a fermented dough containing teff flour. Today, though, Gretchen tried making injera herself. She'd let the watery dough ferment overnight and today she poured small amounts into a heated frying pan. Within minutes, there it was, injera, complete with its odd surface of closely-packed craters. The recipe Gretchen had used didn't call for enough salt, but once that was remedied, it was a perfect vehicle for various dips and spreads (we didn't have any proper Ethiopian-style wats, although an Indian masala dip was close enough). Next time Gretchen will let the "dough" ferment longer (or in warmer conditions) so the injera will be as sour as she prefers it.
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Gretchen and I would be going out tonight, so I took an unusual afternoon bath. The reading material was Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain.
We picked up Nancy down at her house and went directly to Uptown Kingston for the annual release of seed packets by the Hudson Valley Seed Library. Every year the Seed Library guys get artists to paint or otherwise create art with which to decorate the packets of the various heirloom seeds they produce at their farm (which is adjacent to Michæl and Carrie's place out in Rochester Township; Michæl also acts as their art curator). We were there for awhile and bought $20 worth of seed packets. For a large fraction of our time there, Gretchen was in one corner talking to just one person whom she hadn't seen in awhile.
Next we went down to KMOCA on the Rondout for their monthly show. Three artists were featured, and it was an unusually good collection. One woman had painted a number of large paintings of sad ethereally-stylized girls. Another had done whimsical cartoons featuring robots, cats, and at least one chain saw. Gretchen bought one depicting a dog jumping up and down on a swivel chair.
A group of us ended up at Kyoto, the Chinese-run Japanese restaurant in Uptown. At some restaurants, the food is always better than you remember it. With Kyoto, it's the just the opposite. I had an veggie sushi (which, admittedly, might be inherently problematic), and it was sort of meh. Still, our group has fun when we're out together. We were talking about the music we liked when we were young and it came out that Carrie had been into heavy metal, while Michæl was into punk rock: the noisier and less-melodic, the better. We talked and laughed for hours and were the last table to leave.
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