Habesha tucker

All of the photos I took of Ethiopian food look pretty unappetising: piles of oily stodge splotched onto a sheet of grey-ish carbohydrate. I mean, on appearances, and without recommendation, would anybody in their right mind really want to eat this?The pancake-like rolls are injera, a kind of bread made from the grain tef, the only harvested seed which houses a naturally occuring yeast. Injera is thus like a combination between a crepe and a slice of sourdough bread. It's great stuff. My friend Myriam - the Eritrean posing as an Ethiopian expat - told me the marriageability of women is judged on the quality of their injera, how thin it is and the frequency of the little crumpetty bubbles on the surface. The tef is usually bought unground at markets like this one in Lalibella. Everyone goes to a local grindery to get their tef and coffee ground up.
The sauces are just piled in the middle of the communal dish of injera. Standard are tibs, pieces of lamb fried up in butter with green pepper, garlic and onion. My favourite was the shiro, a stodgy paste made from ground up chickpeas and berberi and butter, with or without meat and lamb juices as befitted the fasting season. Not a particularly visually appealing dish, but very very good. The ground meat in this photo is cooked kitfo, mince which is rubbed through with spices, cooked and served with a local spinachy vegetable and curds. I vastly prefered the raw kitfo, spiced diced meat served with a little bowl of dipping spices, although this option, it must be said, was one which diced a little too intimately with gastrological (as opposed to gastronomical) catastrophe.

This vast plate of food served three people. All eating is performed cutlery free, using the right hand to tear off bits of injera and scoop up the sauces. Once you've ordered shiro, in particular, you've tapped into an unending supply. If the injera stocks are low, new rolls will appear on the plate. If the shiro is drying up, ladlefuls will be dolloped onto your plate. It's a system which worked for me. And as a bonus, Ethiopian coffee is fabulous, not just the beans, but the coffee itself. The Italians only occupied Ethiopia for a brutal five years but they left loads of coffee machines as part of their legacy. Shots of sharp dark espresso with or without leche were available everywhere, a very good thing, in my opinion.

On my encounter, Ethiopian food does have the variety that characterises other faabuous cuisines. There's a stock of about ten dishes which appear on every menu with, at least in my experience, not a whole lot of regional variation. The palette of ingredients is pretty limited but this constraint produces extremely good food. If I hadn't just arrived in the land of a thousand spices, I'd be a bit sad to have left Ethiopian food behind.

Is there an Ethiopian restaurant in Sydney? And can one eat Shan food in Sydney? Just wondering...