The year before last (is it really that long ago?), while on holiday in Canada, we went to an Ethiopian Restaurant and had a fabulous meal. The dish we shared with our travel companions involved a big platter of injera – moist crepe-like flat bread covered in spicy meat and bean sauces that you eat by hand. I decided I had to try making it one day. When I got home I googled some recipes, but a few of the ingredients were going to be hard to find here so the idea slipped to the back of my mind.

Recently some friends of ours have been hosting dinner parties trying out social ways of eating food, like ‘steamboat’. They’ve inspired me to finally try those Ethiopian recipes. A few days ago I bought a spice grinder so I could make Berbere sauce (though the recipe I used is more a spice mix than an actual paste). Yesterday I got out our rarely used slow cooker and made a lamb sauce which included the Berbere spices, and then last night I whipped up the injera and we got nomming.

It went better than I’d expected. The sauce was fabulous. The injera was a bit bland, but I suspect that’s because I used ordinary wheat flour rather than traditional grains – one of the hard ingredients to find. Still, it’s better that than the other way around. The injera is used to mop up the sauce, so the sauce tends to dominate anyway.

Tonight I’m going to try 100% wholemeal flour and see if that makes a difference. In a couple of weeks I’m having one set of friends around to experiment on, and I’ll try two more meat sauces. Yum!