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| Thanks, Wikipedia! |
If you've ever had the good fortune to have dinner at the Blue Nile, you're probably already familiar with this dish. Dining there is a fun experience: your group sits around a big woven basket called a mesob and shares portions served on injera, a spongy type of flatbread that you tear off and use to eat your food - no forks anywhere in sight. When I mentioned the restaurant, my African friend made a face and directed me to a completely different one; we tried it, but the experience of eating this delicious food off plates was simply not the same. Also, my palate isn't nearly refined enough to be able to tell the difference between a restaurant that is "the best" and another that is merely excellent.
Properly this is called yekik alich'a, but I have no idea how to pronounce this and don't want to mangle it: Ethiopian split peas it is. This recipe comes from Exotic Ethiopian Cooking, purchased as a birthday gift for David along with a promise to make a meal from it, after we discovered that some Ethiopian restaurants use wheat flour along with the teff in the injera. (We've since discovered that we can get injera made with teff alone, but we need to give a couple of days' notice in order for them to properly ferment the dough, a restriction that doesn't necessarily fit in with our haphazard scheduling these days.) This cookbook is distinctive in that it appears to have not one single recipe for a vegetable, only meat and legumes and bread. Also, please don't tell me that a split pea is a vegetable; while I realize this is technically true, they behave more like lentils and I'm going to persist in thinking of them this way.
I've been meaning to cook from this book for ages even though I find it a bit intimidating; there are assumptions being made here that I'm not familiar with and I'm not sure how to feel about the spice levels. Nevertheless I persisted. Sunday's dinner was yesiga t'ibs (meat cooked with spices and red pepper), which I've made previously with venison, and these split peas. I was glad that I did some adjusting as we went, as the meat recipe called for a full cup of berbere, a cayenne pepper-based spice mixture that blew our hair back from our faces even when we cut the amount in half. Variations of the split peas call for stirring in some berbere at the end, which I'm sure is delicious as well, but we needed something to cut through the spiciness of the meat. For which I used half the spices. Half. We're such cowards.
The recipe as written freaked me out a little, so I did some quick Googling and adjusted the recipe a bit based on what I learned, namely that using half the oil was completely fine as there are other versions that call for mere tablespoons. Apparently you can also make this with butter, which I imagine would make for a very rich dish indeed. I could see serving this as a main dish and adding some vegetables on the side - there have to be some Ethiopian vegetable recipes online! - or feeding my vegetarian/vegan friends with it. It can be served hot or cold and would make an interesting addition to a potluck. The version that appears below includes my adjustments.
From Exotic Ethiopian Cooking: Society, Culture, Hospitality, and Traditions by D.J. Mesfin.
Yekik Alich'a
2 cups split peas (red or green; I used green)
4 cups water
2 cups red onion, chopped
1 cup oil (we used canola for the neutral flavor)
1 Tbsp ginger paste (or chopped fresh ginger)
1 Tbsp garlic paste (or chopped fresh garlic)
4 fresh jalapenos, chopped
1 tsp black pepper
salt to taste
Rinse the split peas and boil until soft; this took about 30 minutes but your mileage may vary. Drain.
Cook the onions with the oil, stirring often. Add the peas, garlic, ginger, and black pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, about 20-30 minutes. The longer you cook this, the less defined your peas will be so keep going if you want something that is more like a paste than separate peas. Stir in the jalapenos and salt to taste. Serve over rice (or ideally with injera, if you've thought ahead 3 days to ferment the dough).
