East African Spice Mix: Berbere

This is a common spice blend used in many countries in East Africa, especially in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is so commonly used, many families make their own, so there are numerous variations to recipes for berbere (pronounced as if, "bur-bur-ah"), including for the "heat level." In East Africa, many of the spices are first toasted in whole form, and then they are ground, but to make this blend a little more simple, you can use already ground spices, but you can toast them in a dry skillet briefly, if you'd like, but take care not to burn the spices, which can happen quite quickly... ah, that's what I've been told. (Let me uncross my fingers before I move on.)

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons cayenne pepper or other hot red ground chilies
1 teaspoon ground fenugreek
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon mild smoked paprika (Spanish paprika is smoked)
1 teaspoon onion powder   

This is the hard part... haha  Put all ingredients into a jar or other small storage container, put the lid on the jar and shake the jar until the spices are well mixed. You should shake the container before each use.

WORD HISTORY:
Zen-This word, distantly related to "semantic," goes back to Indo European "dhyae," which had the notion, "to look, to see." This gave transliterated Sanskrit^ "dhyana," meaning, "meditation" ("mentally looking in a focused way at the various aspects of a subject, often regarding a god, or religion, eventually as part of Buddhism"). This was borrowed by Chinese^^ as transliterated "dzien" (by pronunciation), and this was borrowed by Japanese^^^ as transliterated "zen," with the deep mediation part of Buddhism meaning. Seemingly first borrowed by English circa 1730.

^ "Sanskrit" is an ancient language from the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo European; thus, it is related to English, although much further down the family tree. It is still in use to some degree, especially in India.

^^ "Chinese" in its several forms belongs to the "Sino-Tibetan" language family. It's best known relative is Burmese.

^^^ For such a large language, the overall history and ties of "Japanese" to other languages is a bit sketchy, but it is part of the "Japonic" language family. Over time, some have attempted, unsuccessfully, to connect Japonic, and thus Japanese, to Korean. The similarities shared between Japanese and Korean have been generally assumed to be from borrowings due to contacts between the languages, not directly from a shared common ancestor.