Breakfast in Dorne

Some time ago, I treated myself to A Feast of Ice and Fire, the official Game of Thrones cookbook. It's a mouthwatering collection, which came out of the blog Inn at the Crossroads, and has been endorsed by George RR Martin, who says he has tried several of the dishes that have been included. "I can't cook," he says in the introduction, but fans have turned up to book signings across the United States with lemon cakes and meat pies and other goodies for him to try.
The book is helpfully laid out with an original medieval or Roman or Elizabethan recipe, followed by a modern equivalent, and has a quotation from the books for each recipe - and lots of glossy pictures of the food.

I haven't actually tried any of the recipes yet, but I have eggs I need to use up, so last night I looked through the book and found the recipe for "Breakfast in Dorne". It's hot weather here at the moment, just right for the spicy food that Dorne seems to specialise in. The book is American, of course, so some of the terms are unfamiliar. Along with the eggs, there are various sorts of peppers - I'm pretty confident I know what a jalapeno pepper is, but the bell peppers are divided into "orange" and "cherry - in different colours", and I really have no idea what cubanelle or poblano peppers are! (I know, Google is my friend....).
More to the point, I don't think my local friendly greengrocer knows what the different sorts of peppers are, either. So I bought a selection of peppers that are available here, and I'm good to go! In fact, at the end of the recipe, the authors suggest improvisation, according to how spicy you want the dish to be.
So that's tomorrow evening's dinner organised - and if it goes well, perhaps I'll move on to a Sansa salad, or white beans and bacon - but maybe not the honey-spiced locusts from Meereen!

Honey in Ethiopia

This morning I listened to Michael Palin on the Today programme, visiting a project that his charity Farm Africa has set up in Ethiopia. They are teaching local farmers all sorts of techniques to make their farming more efficient, and one of the training courses they are offering is bee keeping. Michael Palin got kitted up in white overalls with mask and gloves while one of the beekeepers puffed smoke made from charcoal and cow dung at the bees and lifted the frames out to inspect them.
Honey is a useful cash crop for the local farmers, as it was in Wales in the Middle Ages (some rents were paid in barrels of honey), and in the Greek islands when I was there about ten years ago.

It reminded me of a book by Laurens Van der Post. He's mostly associated with South Africa, but in First Catch Your Eland, he travelled around the whole continent of Africa to look at the food of the different areas.
Before the Second World War, as a young army officer, he travelled through Ethiopia, and in one village he was given a meal that put him in mind of Homeric Greece. It began with tedj, or mead, followed by curds and whey and millet bread in wicker baskets, and then there was the honey:

"I looked at my own slab of honey in amazement; it had a "burnt face" too.* It was Ethiopian dark and yet so strangely translucent that it might have been made out of prehistoric amber....To this day I can recall every nuance of taste of the mead, the curds and whey, tart and fresh on my tongue and above all the subtlety of the honey which made my welcome in the humble hut so royal, and the purple bread that made it so real."

*He explains earlier that Ethiopia is Greek for "burnt face".