Dinner Bowl #68

 

As I have continued to use my freezer stash, and I still had some collards to use, I pulled out some frozen Ethiopian lentils in a ginger-garlic sauce and had them with a few other Ethiopian dishes: atikilt ruz (vegetable rice) (recipe from Rayne Drops on Roses) and ye'abesha gomen (colllard greens) (recipe from African Bites). And I then, for reasons unclear, decided to try to make Johnnycakes again, and although my batter was thicker, it was still not thick enough to make the pancakes I was trying to make, so I ended up with more tortilla-like cornmeal cakes.

Johnnycakes are not Ethiopian. I just thought they'd go with the other things. I didn't find that to be the case, but that's okay; I ended up saving them and setting them aside to have with jam as a sort of dessert course.

This was all good, but the vegetable rice was amazing. It may be because I already know I love cabbage, so cabbage is always going to be delicious. It may be because one practically caramelizes the onions before adding everything else. It may be because I used jasmine rice, which I rarely buy but decided to splurge on because I was running really low on other kinds of long grain rice anyway and needed to by some sort of long grain rice soon, and that gave it a flavorful aromatic quality. I do not know any of that. But I did find it addictively good. I will recommend simmering for 15 minutes and steaming for 5, though, because my rice didn't cook all the way with the 10 and 10 method recommended in the original recipe.