Berbere spice paste

When you spend as much time as deep in vegetarianism as I have, there is one truism: North American's (us white-bread redneck country folk, anyhow), don't generally know how to make veggies taste good.  When I returned to Gaspe from the city as a vegetarian, my mother didn't know what to offer me beyond bread.  As much as I have always loved bread, if you really want a healthy, balanced, and tasty diet, you usually have to get creative and look beyond our sea-bound borders.  While spices are not local and arguably at variance with my locavorism, they're a small part of the global food trade that I can live with.  After all, they are the progenitor of the globalization, so we can tolerate them for the sake of nostalgia, right?  

Ethiopian curries were the first to be made in my kitchen and large jars of fermented berbere paste were the first to sit patiently in my fridge, awaiting their application.  Berbere is the heart and soul of Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine, the way that garam masala is the heart of Indian cuisine.  Don't tell my Indian friends this, but berbere takes the cake.  I even drop dollops of berbere into lamb meat with a bit of salt to make merguez sausage, it's very versatile.

But, I should say the recipes were Eritrean, since the family of restaurateurs who taught me their recipes hailed from that state.  We met at a backyard BBQ in Dorval and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.  

Berbere Paste

2 tbsps onion seed (nigella)
1 tsp ajuwain (bishop's seed) optional
1.5 tbsp cumin
2 tsps all spice
1/2 tsp cloves
1 stick cinnamon bark
1.5 tbsps Hungarian paprika
1 tsp tumeric
1 tbsp coriander
6 black cardamom pods
4 green cardamom pods
1 tbsp black peppercorns
1/4 cup cayennne pepper
2 bulbs garlic
1/3 cup fresh chopped ginger
2 french shallots
3/4 cup red wine (something full-bodied and dry; spicy and fruity)
1/2 cup good olive oil
1/2 tbsp salt optional

In a heavy skillet, roast all of the spices in batches - necessarily in batches, since they roast in different amounts of time.  Grind those roasted spices.  Put the onions, garlic, ginger in a food processor with the oil and red wine. Add in the spices.  Let sit out of the fridge for up to a week to ferment.

Note  I change this recipe almost every time I make it, swapping ingredients in and out and changing the quantities.  It almost always still imparts the same amount of flavour.  The key is a heckuva a lot of hot pepper.  I generally also keep a solid base of cumin, coriander, and onion seed, upon which a healthy dose of aromatic spices floats.

Other Optional Ingredients: fenugreek, nutmeg, chilies, sweet basil seeds, mustard seed