A friend of mine showed me today how to make tagabino out of shiro and onions - this is one of my favorite Ethiopian dishes. You just fry quickly a couple of onions in olive oil or butter in a casserole together with berbere and fresh green chili, then add some water and tomato puree (or fresh tomatoes why not) and mix in some shiro flour to make it thick and smooth.

Enjoy with any kind of bread. Simple, cheap, hot and tasty!

Last Friday I was stranded with about 26 000 other passangers for 24 hours in London, when the Southern train services & Eurostar were suddenly suspended for 24 hours due to a track side fire. I was already happily sitting in the train waiting to go, but the train would never leave… and suddenly I found myself in a situation where there was nothing to be done but wait, wait and wait. The next day, a frustrated crowd in their hundreds if not thousands gathered in Waterloo and queued and I was expecting some kind of primitive behaviour to take place when the gates would open and the crowd would fight over remaining seats to Paris and Brussels. The Eurostar staff outwitted us all with a clever sticker system to prioritize who would travel first, and I got a seat in the first train back - for once I was lucky and my stoic silent standing in the queue paid off!  

This was the first time that being stuck like this in a country happened to me and apart from the rather frustrating not-knowing-when-and-if-there-are-trains-back feeling the whole experience was at the same time strangely liberating! This must be something that people possibly experience also when their houses burn to ashes or when they are kidnapped and held hostage… A momentary tabula rasa. 

For all the odd beginners in Amharic out there: repeat through the day the following sentence and you’ll soon enough twist your tongue around some of the hard consonants:

Yene be’tam ‘kaz’kaza biira ‘tara’peesa lay alle - my very cold beer is on the table!

Do you know this mental excercise where you close your eyes and picture yourself as a tree? I once tried it at work in a group training session - the idea is to find out (to yourself mostly) what kind of a person you are and what your potential is etc. I saw myself as a majestically growing old oak…

But I like baobabs even more than oaks. There is something humbling about that tree and at the same time their strange shape and funny looking fruits - the monkey bread - are very appealing and inviting. Their character is almost epic, as if they knew much more from the past than we do! The baobab pictures in the banner of my blog show the species from Madagascar, but I’m talking about the African baobab Adansonia digitata. These are abundant e.g. in Senegal.

Then I’m also fascinated by the acacia trees that grow in the Rift Valley and I guess also elsewhere in Africa in the savannah, I’ve seen these in Ethiopia mostly. They look strangely two-dimensional and make the landscape look surreal, almost as if you were looking at a huge painting spread in front of you. One more arboreal memory from Ethiopia is from the Bale mountains, where the juniper reaches incredible heights and where in the steep mountain slopes it grows downwards!   

I read somewhere that in Senegal it is a general belief that you should never seek the shadow of the zaqqoum tree, no matter how scorching the sun. I haven’t quite figured out what this tree really is, but as they say, that’s the place where you may have to meet with the devil himself! 

Baobab from Senegal - Photo by Nicholas Tardif

I participated in a discussion forum of a newspaper today and after a few posts came to realize that these forums really aren’t my cup of tea. Instead of a discussion and exchange of ideas it so easily turned into a list of ridiculous attacks on whatever argument someone submitted to the site, and there’s always the odd religious etc. fanatic who sends in cryptic messages of the forthcoming judgement day and so forth. I was particularly annoyed with such a large amount of shortsighted, xenophobic and racist remarks by some of the participants - not so surprising when the topic was immigration. What a waste of time the whole thing!

To wipe off the bad vibes I endulged myself with a collection of short stories by Cheick Aliou Ndao aka Sidi Ahmed Alioune and made myself a new wallet out of cowskin.