Ethiopian combination plate with (clockwise from upper left) Ethiopian Mixed Vegetables, ye’bedergan wot (puréed eggplant in a spicy sauce), ye’misser wot be’timatim (lentils in tomato sauce) and Ethiopian Fried Beef and Onions (siga tibs) with salad in the middle.
When you go to an Ethiopian restaurant in the U.S., you likely order a vegetarian Ethiopian combination plate and then a meat dish or two (which tends to be much more expensive) on the side. This is a satisfying and filling meal for 3-4 people and it’s what we have been aiming for with the recipes we’ve published here over the last few months. (Do a search for “Ethiopian” to list them conveniently on a page.)
We wanted to use the correct terminology for describing an Ethiopian combination plate, and when we turned to Google we got a bit of a surprise. We had seen the term yetsom beyanetu referring to a veggie combo but it turns out this means literally “fasting of every kind” according to this article in East Bay Express by Ruth Gebreyesus, an excellent reporter with Ethiopian ancestry who hardly ever writes about food.
The Ethiopian “veggie combo”, Gebreyesus tells us, is a fairly recent arrival on American tables; the first Ethiopian restaurant to open in the U.S. (Mamma Desta in DC, in 1978) served only meat dishes. That’s not to say the foods on Ethiopian combination plate are not authentic. 40% of Ethiopians are orthodox Christians who abstain from meat products the majority of the year. Hence the wide variety of vegetarian dishes that go onto a tsom (another word for fasting) platter.
According to Gebreyesus, “When you order yetsom beyanetu at a restaurant [in Ethiopia], the star of the platter is the timtimo or misir wot, a lentil stew with a berbere and onion base. The typical platter might also include kik alicha, a split-pea stew that’s rich in garlic and ginger; hamli or gomen, which are uncomplicated collards greens; and shiro, the chickpea-flour stew that sheds its indulgent butter and minced-beef supplements during fasts.”
We’ve yet to experiment with shiro, but you can find variations of many of the other above dishes on this site. Put four of them on an injera with some simple salad in the center (just chopped romaine with a bit of cut-up onion and tomato and Italian style [think Wishbone] dressing) and you’re good to go.
If you’re in the Bay Area, you can refer to the article for a list of Ethiopian restaurants with especially creative tsom menus. (Sadly, Anfilo Coffee, a place with an ever changing tsom buffet, seems to be out of business.) Also note that when Ethiopians go out to dinner at these places—unless it’s a fasting day—they tend to order meat dishes.
