Ethiopian Dabo Kolo (Spicy bread bites)

Ethiopian Appetizer

DABO KOLO
(Spicy bread bites)

INGREDIENTS

2 cups wheat flour
2 tablespoons berbere spice
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
4 tablespoons butter
2/3 cup water
no-stick spray

SPECIAL UTENSIL

cookie tin

PREPARATION

Take butter out sufficiently in advance to let it soften. (Less preferred is nuking it in the microwave for 15 seconds. The worst way is hitting it with a sledge hammer. Sure there’s never been made a half stick that won’t soften under the blows of such a heavy, blunt instrument, but you have to ask yourself, “Do I really want butter all over the cabinets? Would I truly want a hole in the counter top?”)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add flour, berbere spice, sugar, and salt  to mixing bowl. Combine with whisk or fork. Add water. Knead mixture for 5 minutes or until you have a stiff dough or paste. Add softened butter. Knead mix for 5 minutes.

Tear off a ball of dough about 1″ across. Roll it in your palms until it looks like a brown bread pencil about 1/2″ wide. Spray cookie tin with no-stick spray. Put brown bread pencils on cookie sheet. Put cookie sheet in oven. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Turn brown bread pencils over and cook for another 10-to-20 minutes or until they become lightly browned (Okay, a slightly different brown as they started brown.)

Serve to guests you like. If you don’t like your visitors, serve them anyway. Just tell them these bread bites are sweets.

TIDBITS

1) Salt is used to preserve food and add flavor.

2) S.A.L.T.. the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was designed to preserve peace by limiting the construction of nuclear weapons.

3) However, butter is an anagram for Bert Ut. Bert Ut was Mrs. Ut’s little boy, Bert.

4) Moreover, Dabo Kolo is an anagram for: Look! A Bod!, Lab Book., and Bodo KolaTM.

5) And by the way, does it still make sense to party like it’s 1999?

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.