Funday Fridays

After a prepared blog yesterday, written on Wednesday and posted automatically last night while I was out at poker, I'm suddenly under pressure to write another blog tonight before we get to midnight.

I'm late on starting with writing tonight because Chrissi and I were out for a meal with my sister Rachel. I'm not sure why I added her name; I only have one sister, so everyone either already knew that or didn't care.

So we met up this evening for a meal, and from the list of options she picked an Eritrean restaurant near where she lived. Now, I know the first question on your lips - where is Eritrea? It's a country on the horn of Africa, north-east of Ethiopia and up the coast from Djibouti; across the Red Sea from Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

The obvious second question is what precisely is Eritrean food like? Well, I suppose the easy get-out would be to reply 'tasty' or something equally glib. However, I'll try to describe it, because it was rather interesting. Most of the food was around a traditional North African / Arabic cooking style - stew, spices, sauce and traditional ingredients like chick peas and lentils. You would eat this with bread, so it was a very inelegent meal as you would tear off a piece of bread, grab a bit of food with it and then repeat.

The bread itself was interesting - called injera, it is, to quote remorselessly from their website, "leavened pancake made with sourdough of Taff flour, hence the tangy flavour". This was delivered in rolls to eat the meal with - no cutlery required whatsoever.

There were lots of lovely touches - the restaurant was named Adulis, after the ancient port city on the Red Sea; the menu had traditional Eritrean Ge'ez script alongside the English, and this was even printed on the receipt as well. The restaurant itself was superbly decorated, ornate and with fantastic character, and every single one of the waiters or waitresses were polite, friendly, helpful and welcoming - which is often a rarity in one person, let alone an entire staff.

We had a great time, and ended up having been there for two hours without even realising it. I'll definitely be visiting it again if I can, and I recommend anyone else in the Clapham area takes a peek if they can.