Friday, April 4, 2014

D is for Doro Wat

Wat is a type of dish here. Essentially a one pot meal with a base of onions, garlic, burbere, and oil whose extra ingredients change: lentils, meat, chickpea powder, potatoes, tomatoes.

Doro wat though is special – it's only eaten for holidays. And fancy dancy important meals. But regardless, it's a rare dish. Doro means chicken.

It's the common wat base, onions, garlic, oil, burbere with a whole chicken and usually about a dozen hard boiled eggs thrown in. Depending on who makes it, it can be very oily, or very spicy. It's sometimes mixed with the local variant of cheese.

I guess I just get a kick out of chicken being the holiday, and most expensive, meat. Chicken was a cheap, biweekly meal in the states. Here, you can go to a fancy hotel and either get a meat stir-fry for 30 bir or doro wat for 70.

1 comments:

Rosalind Adam said...

It sounds delicious, especially the spicy version. I remember when I was a kid in the UK in the 1950s a chicken was expensive and something we only had for special occasions. I suspect that, sadly, things have changed here because of the cruel intensive way that these poor birds are farmed. I could so easily become a vegetarian!

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