Melkin Yelidet Beaal

Merry Christmas! January 7th is Christmas according to the Ge'ez calendar that they use in Ethiopia. We celebrated by cooking a huge Ethiopian dinner, and a few fun people came to help us make it seem like Christmas. We had a wonderful time, as did Meron. I decided I had to include some pictures of the less popular moods of Meron, since I keep hearing that she is always so sweet and happy. Well, 98% of the time she is, but she is pretty darn cute even when she is crying, annoyed or mad. As you can see from the pictures above! My favorite is the mad face. I'm beginning to fear her wrath.



It took us about 5 hours to cook 5 Ethiopian dishes. We had doro wat, alicha sega wot (my favorite) lentils, shiro and collard greens. For the first 4 recipes we needed to cut up 10 onions. Our house will not be popular for a while... Everything turned out pretty well, and I was excited. It really wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It was so fun to watch everyone try to eat it! Everyone was a good sport and tried to eat with their fingers first, although a few did eventually cheat. We did allow silverware for delicious pecan pie for dessert (thanks Mary). We weren't sure that was the traditional way to end the meal, but I think it might need to become part of our new tradition! I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas... even if you didn't know it was Christmas!