An Ethiopian family with a house like ours usually employs a cook or housekeeper who prepares meals in an outbuilding. Ethiopian cooking is slow and spicy and this arrangement keeps the onion and pepper aroma from permeating the house. There is usually a small room off the dining room that’s used as a serving station.

Being the faranji foodie that I am, I enjoy doing my own cooking, and I like to do it inside the house where the rest of my peeps are. So the former serving station is our “inside kitchen” with stove and sink, and across the breezeway is our “outside kitchen” which houses the refrigerator and pantry (also the clothes washer).

I don’t mind that my inside kitchen is small – I lived in student family housing apartments with kitchens smaller than this. I also don’t mind stepping outside to the other room to get things from the fridge – in the US many people’s kitchens are bigger than the distance from my stove to my fridge. But what I do mind is using the dining room table as a prep station because I don’t have any counter space at all (and I do mean none at all).

But then we had the most wonderful surprise when we got home from work Thursday night.

Thank you, housing department and ICS workshop. Life is good!