Ethiopian Appetizer
NITER KIBEH
INGREDIENTS
1 pound unsalted butter
2 garlic cloves
1 cinnamon stick
3 cloves
1/2 teaspoon cardamom
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
PREPARATION
Mince garlic cloves. Melt butter on low heat in saucepan. Add garlic cloves, cinnamon stick, cloves, cardamom, ginger, turmeric, and fenugreek seeds. Simmer on lowest heat, between off and warm, for 1 hour. Stir occasionally.
Put bowl beneath colander. Pour buttery liquid into colander. Discard solids in colander. Keep buttery liquid. This Ethiopian butter may be stored in the refrigerator.
Makes two cups. Be the first on your block to do so.
TIDBITS
1) In 1870, the French Emperor Napoleon III asked his nation to come up with a substitute for butter.
2) In 1870, the German Kaiser’s armies at Sedan captured Napoleon and over 100,000 thousand soldiers under his command.
3) This was one of the decisive defeats in the Franco-Prussian War.
4) This war gave birth to the German nation, the French Republic, and sowed the seeds for World War I, the rise of Nazi Germany, and World War II.
5) We are less sure if Napoleon III enjoyed margarine on his toast during the battle of Sedan.
6) Maybe if Napoleon had spent more time instead getting the world’s first machine guns from his nation’s arsenals to his troops in the field the war would have turned out differently.
7) But then we wouldn’t be able to have cinnamon toast with fewer calories.
8) There are pluses and minuses to every culinary advance.
– 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.
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