New catering and meal service bringing taste of Ethiopia to Centre County

Etayehu Zenebe grew up in Ethiopia, where homegrown, organic and freshly prepared food was the norm.

“I grew up eating organic food. … I grew up eating fresh-cooked food every single day. Most of the people who have land have a backyard with a garden — your kale, your collard greens and your tomatoes, all those kinds of things,” she said.

When Zenebe first moved to Pennsylvania, one of her first questions was, “What am I going to eat?”

That question, as well as a small business class in Lancaster, would spur Zenebe’s entrepreneurial spirit and lead to the creation of her Ethiopian catering and meal service, Etey’s Gursha — named for the Ethiopian word for “mouthful.”

After starting a farmers market in Lancaster featuring international vendors and cuisines, Zenebe found herself in Centre County, where she teamed with Centre Markets in mid-August to deliver her Ethiopian meals to the public.

Ethiopian cuisine, Zenebe said, is “a little bit spicy, but palatable.”

“It’s also nutritious,” she said. “Someone this week thanked me; they said their friend has cancer and he’s not eating a lot of things, but he tried my food and he was very, very happy with it. That kind of story makes me really happy.”

Common ingredients in Ethiopian food, Zenebe said, include “berbere and a lot of onions.” Berbere is a mix of spices, typically including chili peppers, coriander, garlic, ginger, basil and fenugreek.

Zenebe is offering two types of meals through Centre Markets.

“One is a plant-based combo, and the other one is a meat combo, in which I’m using just chicken — spicy chicken and a whole lot of greens,” she said. “The plant-based combo fits everyone. You can be vegan or vegetarian, or someone who wants to eat vegetarian one day instead of meat. Everyone keeps telling me that it’s amazing, and people are coming back, which is a good sign to me,”

The meals are gluten-free, and Zenebe explains that one gluten-free grain that’s popular in Ethiopian cuisine is teff, called a “future grain” and indigenous to Ethiopia. The plant-based combo is additionally dairy-free, and the only dairy the meat combo includes is clarified butter, used to cook the chicken.

In addition to Zenebe’s passions for her homeland’s cuisine and organic, nutritious meals, she also holds a passion for sustainability and the zero-waste lifestyle.

“We don’t have plastic (in Ethiopia),” she . “There are no plastic bags where I grew up. Everything was reusable.”

That’s why, Zenebe said, customers who order her meals receive them in reusable glass jars. Returning customers are invited to trade in their used jars with their next orders.

In the future, Zenebe hopes to expand her outreach to the community, providing not only food, but education.

“I really would like to have my own market, an Ethiopian market,” she said. “It’s not only the food, really. Through my food, I want people to know about me, about my country and about my family and about the culture. Ethiopian culture is a very rich culture, and people can learn a lot from it. I wish I had space where people could reach me five, six or seven days a week and learn more about not only the food, but the culture, too.”

This story was originally published October 11, 2020 at 8:00 AM.