Happy Easter! / Melkam Fasika!

In Amharic, Melkam Fasika means Happy Easter. Here in Canada, we celebrated Easter last weekend, but Ethiopia and Eritrea follow the Eastern Orthodox Calendar, so Easter is celebrated anywhere from 1-2 weeks later (depending on the year).

Easter is a time to spend with family, talking, celebrating and eating lots of good food! A common meal that you will see shared among families and friends is a large plate with injera and a variety of sauces or wot on top. Here’s an example:

Vardeman, Kimberly. Taste of Ethiopia. 2 Oct. 2010. Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/kimberlykv/5097664539/.

Here you can see doro wot, (doro meaning chicken) a deep-red sauce with chicken and boiled egg on the left. Surrounding it can be a variety of other sauces like misir wot (the lentil stew in the centre), tibs (the sauteed meat, vegetables, spices, at the south end of the plate), and much more.

For those of you that want to try injera, it is a meal eaten by hand, and extra rolls of this gluten-free flat-bread traditionally made with teff flour would be shared among the people eating. 

People eating together sharing food and laughter, is such an important part of the celebration of new life that Easter is. 

We hope you have a Melkam Fasika and check our social media pages and website for future blog posts! 

To learn about what it means to re-discover the lost grain, click here.