Ethiopia

I ate Ethiopian food for dinner tonight. There's a restaurant on Haight street, really not very far from home, called Massawa. I think I went there once years ago with some friends, the same friends who treated me to it tonight. The time years ago I remember not being impressed. I didn't like the spongy fermented bread (injara) and I thought too many things had tomatoes in them. Tomatoes are usually avoided in macrobiotics because they are part of the nightshade family and therefore vaguely harmful. Apparently if you have arthritis you should avoid nightshades as well as they can exacerbate the condition. I don't have any real health problems that keep me from eating them, but my partner does, so we tend to strictly avoid them. We've been on tour for the last few weeks so I took the opportunity to overload on them. I had potatoes made up as cajun french fries a few weeks ago. And now this Ethiopian food, which really did have tomatoes in pretty much everything. I found I enjoyed the injara much more than in the past. I think my tolerance for fermented things has grown over the past few years what with our experiments with sauerkraut, amazake, and pickles. So this time I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed it greatly.

In other news, I am trying to harvest wild yeast. I am hoping to land some of the famous San Francisco sourdough yeast but since I don't have a clue as to what I'm doing I may be lucky to get anything at all. So far I have a small bowl with flour and water and raisins (for the sugar). I had read that you could use raisins or other dried fruit as a way to get it started but I don't know if you were supposed to take them out or not. Mine are still in. If nothing happens after a few days I guess I will compost this and try again, with perhaps more instructions.