Sharjah24: “Communal food preparations and eating form a big part of the Ethiopian way of life; I choose to prepare a lot of vegan dishes because my community from Tigray observes a vegan fast for almost 210 days a year,” said Chef Saba Alemayoh during the “Ethiopian Cuisine” cookery show at the 15th edition of the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival (SCRF) taking place in Expo Centre Sharjah from May 1-12.

The Melbourne-based chef prepared a snack from Ethiopian cuisine, which she called “Tekebash’s Cauliflower”, named after her mother Tekebash Gibre who is an authority on traditional Ethiopian food and who had migrated to Sudan and later Australia due to the civil war in her country from 1974-91. Together, they run a restaurant in Melbourne and Saba has also published a cookbook called Tekebash & Saba: Recipes and Stories from an East African Kitchen that features delicious recipes from her home country.

The snack, similar to an Indian pakoda (fritters), was a flour-coated and deep-fried snack that went well with a blue cheese dip. For this, the cauliflower was first cut into small florets and dipped in a bowl of shiro paste – chickpea, onion, garlic dried and powdered and mixed with chilli powder, adding water to get a thick paste – and then coated with a rice flour and the regional teff flour (corn flour or all-purpose flour if unavailable) and dropped into hot oil to get a crisp golden-brown consistency.

For the blue cheese dip, she mixed blue cheese, full-fat mayonnaise, minced garlic, salt and whole milk in a food processor and gave it a good swirl.

Chef Saba suffused her dish with the history of her homeland and its people, and how different communities coexisted while embracing their individual practices, particularly in the kitchen. The young chef will be preparing a meat dish in the coming days.

The Cookery Corner is hosting 60 workshops and 36 live cooking sessions led by 12 renowned chefs and 25 experts from 12 countries.

SCRF has 1500-plus activities this year and the festival organiser, Sharjah Book Authority (SBA),has ensured that the 12-day festival is completely action packed for young readers, artists and creatives as well as their families.