One of my first memories of Columbus, Ohio — my home — involves Ethiopian food. Not eating it, exactly, but seeing it: it was late winter in Ohio, and I was visiting from Texas because I had applied to Ohio State, and I hoped to win some scholarship money in a big on-campus essay competition for high-performing students. (My complete inability to comprehend the poem we were given to analyze scuttled that possibility, which is ironic given that a decade later I’d walk away from Ohio State with a master’s in poetry, but hey, who’s counting? (Me, grudgingly, years later, that’s who.)) My uncle had picked me up from the airport, and we were driving through North Campus, trying to find our way, when the Addis Ababa Restaurant hove into view, a black lion standing proud on its sign bordered in red, green, and yellow. I don’t want to overplay the aw-shucks card, but Ethiopian food was not something I’d ever even thought about in rural East Texas: in hindsight, I think this was the moment I decided I was coming to Ohio State.

Ironically, I never actually ate at Addis Ababa, which closed right around the time I started my freshman year. But its near neighbor, Blue Nile, was a frequent destination for me and my friends, where the proprietor greeted everyone with “hello, my friends!” and the staff served a selection of richly-spiced stewed meats and vegetables, accompanied with chewy injera bread, fruit juices, and honey wine. I never made any Ethiopian dishes at home, however, until I bought Marcus Samuelsson’s Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa. It’s a great book — necessarily a bit of a survey, since it’s covering cuisines across the world’s second-largest continent, but with enough depth to lead the home cook onto a new and interesting path.

Which is all a very long way of explaining why I can blithely call for nit’ir qibe and berbere: they’re fairly common in my pantry, thanks to Samuelsson. (But never fear: they’re substitutable. It won’t be quite the same, but it’ll be good.) This recipe has been kicking around in my head for a while, and when I saw that the El Niño pattern was lessening enough for our first real snow this past weekend, I knew it was time.

I should hasten to disclaim: while I’m using flavors adapted from Ethiopian cuisine, this isn’t a recipe I’d expect to see from an Ethiopian home cook or restaurant. With the exception of some mixed-vegetable stews, the dishes I’ve encountered have had one star ingredient, not a legume plus tomatoes plus a leafy green as I have here. In a restaurant, however, you’d likely have multiple dishes all on a platter — this dish is, basically, me adapting the platter into a one-pot dish. Furthermore, while ground chickpeas (shiro) are a ubiquitous ingredient in eastern Africa, I don’t recall ever seeing whole chickpeas in an Ethiopian stew. (Though if someone knows differently, I’d love to hear of it!)

All that aside, and not to pat myself on the back too much, but: knocked it out of the park, first try. Not that it’s hard, when you’re layering in so many warm, comforting flavors: the hearty onions and garlic, the bright cardamom and ginger, the sweet fenugreek and basil. And all those flavors wrapping themselves like the softest sweater around tender chickpeas and melted-smooth spinach and tomatoes: I’m getting a little verklempt. As the snow has continued to fall along with the mercury, this stew has been a huge comfort in my workday brown bag: I’ve really needed it!