I hope they don’t eat seaweed

Good news.  Our adoption agency matched several more waiting families with their children in the last couple weeks, and we were able to remove more links from our paperchain.  There are currently 33 links on our chain (which we think roughly corresponds with the number of families who are waiting in front of us to be matched with their Ethiopian little ones).  So, we’re getting there.  We’re hopeful for a referral (that just means getting matched with our child) this coming summer, with travel to follow later in the year.

In the meantime….Ryan and I went to an Ethiopian restaurant several weeks ago for date night.  On the way to the babysitter’s house, we mentioned to the kids that Daddy & Mommy were going to eat Ethiopian food for dinner.  Our four year-old said, “Wow, Efiopia is going to take a long time.”  He clearly thought that we were going straight to the source of the Ethiopian cuisine.  Ryan explained that the restaurant was here in town and that they just serve the kinds of food that people traditionally eat in Ethiopia.  Just to see what they would say, we asked, “What kinds of food do you think people eat in Ethiopia?”  Our six year-old answered, “I hope they don’t eat seaweed.”

Well, they don’t eat seaweed so much as they eat a lot of “stew-type” dishes.  Ethiopian food generally consists of spicy vegetable and meat dishes, usually in one of two forms: wat, a thick stew, or tibs, a mixed, sautéed sort of dish.  The food is served along with injera, a large sourdough flatbread.  Ethiopians eat with their hands, using small pieces of injera to pick up bites of entrées and side dishes.  So, our dinner at the restaurant was served family-style and eaten without utensils (though they had them on hand in case we weren’t up to the challenge), but rather using the flat, soft bread to scoop.  We were both pleasantly surprised by how tasty the food was (some of it quite spicy), and I would assess that we were both able to feed ourselves about as well as the average Ethiopian 3 year-old. 

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