Nyala - Ethiopian Cuisine

I guess this'll be a slightly shorter version of Date Night, since we mostly had time to try out a new (and interesting) restaurant in our neck of the woods. No on-the-spot adventures, no getting lost in the hills of Hollywood, no angry comic-book-store rants. Nope! Just dinner.

Not any old dinner, mind you! Hands-on Dinner at Nyala Ethiopian Cuisine. And by hands-on I mean literally hands-on. Ie, no cutlery. The basic idea is this:

You have sour-ish spongy bread (Injera).
You have some meats.
You pick up said meats with sour-ish spongy bread, and consume.

Simple, yes? Indeed! And messy! I have, I admit, not mastered the art of eating my food with my bare, manly hands and keeping some level of cleanliness about. I discovered that when I eat, I do so as I suspect a normal person might: with elbows pointed down. This is fine for normal people, unless aforementioned normal people are eating juicy meats their bare, manly hands. In which case said normal people might find an overabundance of delicious meaty juices running down the lengths of their arms. As I did. This is unpleasant for me as I am torn between the great desire to lick the juices from my arms and suffer the glare (and perhaps scolding) of the Wifey or... not.

I opted for not. "Yay" for manners ;)

Anyhow, over-exaggerated recollections of eating food with bare hands aside, the meal itself was pretty good. The meats we had (a bit of a sampling of various offerings) were quite tasty, especially the lamb which, somehow, managed to not taste like old animal fat. Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoy eating the occasional baby sheep, but it's a difficult meat to prepare properly. And Nyala did so wonderfully!

That covers the meat. Now on to the bread: Injera. I do not know what this bread is, what it is made of, but I do know this: It is delicious while dry and wrapped around meats. It is vile and disgusting when it has been soaked in meat-juice over the course of an evening. Mainly because it turns into a squishy soury-meaty .. mush. Perhaps I'm biased, because if it's one thing I cannot stand it's wet bread (gag). And this just about amounts to wet bread. Wet bread by way of meat-juice, no less. Sourish wet bread, no less. Grah. The thought gives me chills.

Anyhow, point is, if you find yourself in a position whereby you may be presented with the opportunity to eat delicious Ethiopian meals make sure to do so before all the meat-juice has soaked into the Injera bread. Unless, of course, you like that sort of thing in which case you are dead to me.

Where was I going with this? Not entirely sure anymore, this was meant to be a shorter post and I seem to have stretched it out quite a bit on the topic of wet bread. Let us recap? Nyala - delicious. Wet-bread - disgusting.

That is all!

Hubby