Fantastic!
If you have a good injera recipe please link to it if you can. I haven’t explored Ethiopian cuisine yet, I might have a go at it. Or, heck, maybe just make some injera wraps with non-traditional ingredients.
“traditional French meal” actually has a pretty wide variation. Having actually eaten French food in France, while you can get some pretty fancy and sophisticated stuff (one meal spanned five hours and many, many courses - quite decadent) there’s also a tradition of some pretty simply made food as well. Also, France is more than Paris - there are many regions with their own distinctive take on food.
Likewise, despite poke restaurants springing up around here like weeds. I like sushi just fine, but for some reason the thought of raw fish in a bowl turns me off. There is no logic to it.
FWIW, I was happy with the Anthony’s cocoa butter.
There’s a Taiwanese version of that sort of soup that is also terrific. A very small restaurant in our neighborhood called Wei Wei makes it along with other typical dishes from Taiwan like scallion pancakes.
I think I used this recipe when I tried making injera years ago, though I used buckwheat flour instead of trying to source teff. I’ve made the berbere spice from this site and it was very good, better than pre-made berbere blends I’ve bought, so I trust the other Ethiopian recipes from this site.
I went ahead and ordered the teff on Amazon! It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow. Though, I forgot there’s a fermentation step to the injera recipe that takes 4 or 5 days, so having it ready for the weekend is going to be tight-- might have to wait until the following weekend 
Heck, boeuf bourguignon with cheap ingredients and minus the burgundy wine … that’s a very common version of prosaic “beef stew”. Even Dinty’s Moore’s canned variety is recognizably in the same class of dish.
The South Bay is crawling with Peruvian restaurants (a quick google maps search shows at least a dozen within 20 minutes). In 2020, I found out that one near me is always open on holidays. So instead of the alternatives of pizza/fast food or $75-100 fancy Christmas dinner, it was Lomo Saltado for Christmas (with extra green sauce).
I’m both an adventurous and picky eater. So I’ve tried most of what’s been listed here, but I admit I don’t care for a lot of it. Shaksuka? It usually has bell pepper in it, which makes it taste horrible to me. (And eggs with tomato don’t really appeal that much, although without the pepper and cilantro, I’d eat it.) I used to go to a place that was supposed to be one of the best Ethiopian restaurants in NYC, and I pretty much couldn’t eat anything they served. The dishes were all too spicy for me, and the bread they sat on tasted to me like a child’s volcano toy (the one where you mix baking soda and vinegar to create the explosion.) And poutine? The potatoes get soggy. I like french fries, gravy, and cheese curds, but to me, the dish is less than the sum of its parts.
But I’ve had awesome Peruvian chicken, and fabulous poke.
Perhaps more accurate to say that I’ve had few upscale meals, let alone any French haute cuisine meals.
But it’s SO much better with the wine and some crunchy bits of fried cubed bacon in it. (There must be a shorter name for that garnish.)
I wonder what would happen if you dropped $7,000 on a bottle of Leroy Domaine d’Auvenay Les Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru … and just dumped it into a huge pot of Dinty Moore 
Lardon?
There’s plenty of Indian dishes without tomato – it’s such a large and diverse group of cuisines. Just google “indian dishes without tomato” and you’ll find plenty of recipes. You can do something like aloo gobi and leave out the tomato if the recipe includes it (aloo = potato, gobi = cauliflower.) Or look for something like chicken malai (malai=cream), a creamy chicken stew, or chicken malai tikka, which is like the grilled kebab version of it.
Neither does Indian food necessarily means “very spicy”. There’s lots of it that’s mildly spiced (though little is bland).
We do a lot of Indian cooking. If you cook it yourself, you can leave out any problematic ingredients. (So, our home-made Indian food is only too spicy for me if it’s mostly for company.) There are tons of delicious Indian dishes that have no tomato, or where tomato is a minor ingredient that you could leave out. We all enjoy tomato, but even so, I’d guess that less than 1/3 of the Indian dishes we cook have any tomato in them.
Sounds like you could do Tandoori chicken (chicken marinated in yoghurt then roasted in a tandoor, not spicy) with sides of saag paneer or palak paneer (basically creamed spinach with hunks of paneer cheese, not spicy) and basmati rice. The flatbread naan is a nice accompaniment, too.
Plus all the stuff pulykamell mentioned.
Absolutely. I go to many South Asian events for South Asian guests. The average dish does have what I would call a medium amount of spice, but there are usually a few in the buffet line that are mild (such that I don’t detect any heat at all, but my sense of heat detection starts a bit higher than the average person’s.) It’s mild enough that my second grader and kindergartner will eat it if I bring some back home for them.
Well if you’ve had steak with fries, you’ve had ‘steak frites’. You’d be amazed what most of us regard as ‘normal food’ is derived from French. Most French food isn’t haute cuisine - it’s chicken casserole and grilled ham and cheese toastie.
Is a McDonald’s meal (hamburger, fries and a Coke) considered steak frites?