Well, yesterday was not a NSD, but considering my day I was happy with that. I got out of class around 2:00, and had a really strong urge to try and make ethiopian food. I may have mentioned before that last week BF and I went to an ethiopian restaurant, and really liked the food. So I hopped online, found a few recipes. The bread that they eat uses a specific flour (teff flour), and the only place I could find that had it was whole foods. So I hopped a bus to that area, and started shopping.

Now. I love Whole Foods. They have an amazing selection of organics, naturals, you name it. However, it's very pricey. I had relatively few items to buy to make all this. I ended up buying 2 small bags of teff flour (I wasn't sure exactly how much I was going to need because I needed to find a new recipe). Which were $6 each. The good news is that I have plenty left over which means I wont have to buy it again for a quite a while. I also needed to pcik up some paprika and turmeric, a head of cabbage, and a few sweet potatoes. Once again, everything was a little pricey.

Beyond what was on my list, I needed to buy some more honey. I looked at thier selection, and stuck to the basic stuff. The regular non-organic was $3.69 or something, and 12oz. The organic 24oz. was $5.99, so that's what I went with. I wont have to buy honey for a while either. haha. The only other goodie I got was some tea. They carry yogi tea there, and it was just over $3-- mayan cocoa spice tea. It's sooooo good. Totally worth it. All in all I ended up spending about $40 at Whole Foods.

I also made a trip to Rite Aid earlier in the day because I needed to get some anti-itch lotion for my elbows (I have very dry itchy elbows, and I've been getting these little bumps). My mom reccomended I use this aveeno lotion, and I bought the rite aid brand stuff with the same active ingredient. I also needed to get some face wash-- as the summer months are coming up, and my face tends to go from dry to oily with the coming of warm weather. And I haven't owned facewash for months.

When I got home, I started cutting up onions, as BF was on his way home. I had him stop and pick up club soda-- the only ingredient that I hadn't picked up. Then I spent some time cooking. I made Doro Wat (a thick stew with chicken and onions mostly), and a cabbage and sweet potato alicha (not so stew-like, sauteed cabbage and potatoes with yummy spices). BF helped, and we had a good time. Especially when it came to the Injera (the bread). You make it in a pan, and it's thinner than a pancake, but thicker than a crepe. We had to do a lot of trial and error to get the consistency right, but we ended up making a lot more than we needed, so we still ended up eating the good ones

After finished, we sat down and ate our food-- which proved to be delicious! Our injera was certainly not authentic (I dont think they had club soda in traditional ethiopian culture. haha), and I cant say the chicken dish was entirely either (the page I got it from used cayenne pepper instead of the authentic ethiopian pepper). But it was rather inexpensive. One might think that $40 is a pretty expensive meal, but really once you have all the spices, the only ingredients you may have to buy that are not always on hand are the cabbage and potatoes (and chicken)-- because I usually have onions on hand. I already had chicken-- though I used tenders instead of the whole chicken the recipe called for. I'm sure it would have been better, but eating chicken off the bone with a peice of bread proved to be difficult when I tried it the first time.

I stuck to peices that could be picked up easily, as you dont use silverware to eat ethiopian food, but you tear off peices of this spongy pancake-like bread to pinch your food and eat it. It's so much fun, something I'd like to have people come over and eat

May have not been gourmet ethiopian cuisine, or even completely authentic, but I thought we did pretty good for our first time! After eating, we cleaned up the kitchen, then laid down to watch some scrubs. It was a fantastic evening, I must say. Much needed

As for today, should be a no-spend day. I have class all day, and a presentation, and then a lecture. It's going to be a long one. Well, everyone have a good day! The week's almost over!