The Story Behind the Recipe: 

When I graduated from college, I faced several culinary challenges. Now that I could no longer rely on my meal plan to keep me full, I had to turn to my own cooking skills for survival. It’s not that I was an incompetent cook; my skills were solid, but rusty from my lack of practice. The bigger problem was that I had a very hard time finding low-effort weeknight dinner recipes. They did not need to be quick; I was prepared to wait an hour or two for a soup to simmer. But I was not prepared to spend 1-2 of my precious free hours each night laboring over dinner – and finding recipes that would not demand so much of my active time was difficult indeed. Doing nothing, however, was not an option. There are only so many times you can make roast chicken before the taste buds cry out in protest, after all; I needed variety and flavor in my diet, and I couldn’t spend a whole evening putting it together. 

Around the same time, I realized that my desire to travel the world was running into a major obstacle. While I loved the idea of experiencing another culture – especially its food! – I detested airplanes, hotels, and long periods of time away from home. I loved travel; the only problem was all the traveling it entailed.

I decided to kill two birds with one stone by cooking my way around the world instead of traveling around it. Each month, for one year, I would pick a world cuisine and cook through its signature dishes, appropriately chosen for my time commitment and skill level. My wallet breathed a sigh of relief, burdened only by the purchase of a few cookbooks instead of airplane tickets and lodging, and my taste buds looked forward to each new experiment to come off the stovetop. 

Each month brought with it new spices, new tastes, and new lessons about what food could be. From Moroccan cookbooks, I learned how to blend savory and sweet flavors together, and began a love affair with the cuisine that continues to this day. Turkish recipes taught me to respect the power of a short list of wisely chosen ingredients; more fuss does not always mean more flavor. And after a month of disastrous attempts and fruitless reviews of the recipes to see where I had gone wrong, I regretfully concluded that Indian food was best left to Indian restaurants – or at least, out of my hands. 

The recipe you have today comes from my foray into Ethiopian food, which proved to be a gold mine of low-effort, vegetarian stews. There are very few English language Ethiopian cookbooks in print now, and even fewer when I attempted to learn the cuisine. Most of my recipes, including this one, were therefore cobbled together from Internet research. 

Because of its relative invisibility on the world scene, the only Ethiopian recipes that I could find came from health-conscious food purist bloggers who thought it only fair that prospective cooks peel and grate their own ginger (none of that ground stuff, for heaven’s sake!), empty their wallets and their gas tanks searching for obscure organic legumes and flours, and complete a 2-week pilgrimage to Addis Ababa to obtain a single vial of garam masala from the blogger’s favorite store. The recipe I found for mesir wat, a traditional red lentil stew often eaten with flatbread, was no different. Unwilling to complete these rites of initiation, I simply substituted more common ingredients for the rarer ones. To my great pleasure, I found that by the end I had a hearty stew, made creamy by the cooked lentils, with flavor to spare and just enough heat to be interesting.   

Suddenly confident in my ability to defy the edicts of the purist wing of the food blogosphere, I have returned to this recipe countless times, learning by trial and error. Want to use berbere spice instead of paprika? It leaves a bit of unpleasant bitterness in the final dish. Add tomatoes instead of tomato paste? It creates a nice difference in texture, but the tomato gets washed out by the other flavors. 

What I present to you above is the best version of the stew that I have found so far. It remains a work in progress, and I am still constantly adding to it and experimenting with it. Yet the fact that I return to this dish regularly, even seven years after encountering it, is the greatest testament to its worth. I have made flashier dishes than mesir wat. I have made dishes more memorable than mesir wat. But on a cold night after a long day at work, there is still nothing I want more than a bowl of this red lentil stew. 

The recipe itself takes about an hour, of which you can expect to spend 10-15 minutes of that as active time. Take the other 45 minutes to unwind. Read some of your favorite book. Watch an episode of your favorite TV show. Savor the smells wafting out of your kitchen.  

Enjoy!