How To Cook Ethiopian Food: simple, delicious and easy recipes Paperback – January 3, 2013

My hopes were initially high for this cookbook. I found positive reviews of it other places, thought well of the quantity of recipes it offers, and was relieved by its modest price-tag relative to the classic Ethiopian cookbook, Exotic Ethiopian Cooking, by Daniel Mesfin. However it has disappointed in almost every way. The disappointment begins with the poor printing job, which renders the table of contents unusable after the first several pages; there is almost no correspondence between the pages the recipes are on and the pages the contents directs you to. To further the confusion, recipes are listed in obscure measurements (soup spoons, Ethiopian coffee cups, etc.) that give a faux-authentic feel ("faux", for reasons I'll go on to enumerate), but do little more than present obstacles while you cook, requiring you to regularly flip back and forth to a vague conversion chart. The feel of the book only has a pretense of being authentic. Nowhere, for example, does it provide a recipe for berberrie - a spice blend that is essential to many Ethiopian recipes and that is called for in many of the recipes in this book. Nor does it provide recipes for mitmita or other Ethiopian spice blends. (Of course one can buy these blends in the store. But then, one can also buy Ethiopian food in an Ethiopian restaurant.) If you are not an amateur cook, and if you would like to delve into cooking authentic Ethiopian food at home, this book will not help you.

I'm very glad I purchased this cookbook despite some poor reviews. It isn't tailored to western cooks but that is just fine. For example the measurement units are in a general system of cups and spoons that require simple conversion. Hard to find recipes like traditional breakfast and snack foods are included along with the restaurant dishes everyone loves. The photos are very helpful to show what the results should look like - photo quality is the same as the cover photo. If you just want to recreate a few restaurant dishes, you could get by without this book. If you want to feel like you're learning at the side of an authentic Ethiopian cook, this book's for you.

I am quite disappointed by this purchase. I do not know if I switched with another book that had excellent reviews or what?The print looks like what I get out of my home printer. Pictures are fuzzy. There are plenty of miswritten words that could easily have been corrected by a single proofreading.Half of the book will tell you how to boil vegetables side dishes (Nothing Ethiopian in it, just plain boiled vegetables)Pictures are displaying nice food, for example you have a picture of green beans and carrots, but the recipe only mention carrots.Basic recipes for berbere, mekelesha, awaze and whatever you need in the recipes is simply missing.There is 25 Wet recipes, but safe the main ingredient, there is no difference between the recipes, it would have been easier to give one recipe and mention that it can be used for several ingredients. Same for aleyicha. The injera section looks very interesting, but ingredients are not to be found outside Ethiopia, so it is absolutely useless here.I wonder how and who can publish such an incomplete book? I do not know if there was much more and somebody decided to shorten it till everything useful disappeared?I feel so sorry for its author. Something went wrong, I hope that It will be improved and implemented if there is a reprint.

Badly written, no definitions of ingredients with which we are unfamiliar, no substitutes for unfamiliar and unavailable ingredients. I would not suggest it for purchase.

The recipes are easy, however the book is poorly edited.

I was considering buying the book, but just looking at the picture made me think twice. The lentils and yellow split peas look way too runny. I have found wonderful recipes online. I think I will much rather stick to those... Is the publisher going to blast my review as well?