Hello dear reader,
I know it’s been a while again but it has been a busy October this year. Most important of all, a dream of mine has come true: I started studying medicine in Berlin. I realized that going to school and going university are two completely different things and I do my best to enjoy as much as possible.
So my new life is really exciting and fabulous thus far, but let us with over to food.
More than a month ago, back in September, I was at my grandma’s again. I spent about 10 days in Bulgaria, where the beginning of autumn is still warm and full of life. The following pictures show you this year’s impressions of the journey.
My grandma has violet chilies growing at her balcony. They are tiny, but really hot! Beware, beware, beware…
Since nobody has cooked for me in a long time, I was very happy to get a fabulous vegetable lasagna à la Gran, with eggplant, zucchini and Bulgarian cheeeeeese.
This year, I had the wonderful opportunity to help my grandparents can some harvest for the cold season. We had plenty of tomatoes and peppers, parsley and plums.
We roasted the peppers in a special gadget for roasting peppers (my grandma owns this kind of stuff) and shredded the tomatoes through a mill.
It is wonderful to have cans with veggies that have actually ripened in the sun, so when you open them to make casserole or whatever, everything tastes like summer.
We also had plenty of plums, as it was the season back then and converted them into some yummy marmalade. (Guess what I did? Licked the spoon and the large pot, of course.)
If you have followed the blog for a longer time, you might have realized that I adore figs. Luckily, my grandparents’ fig tree had already plenty of them ready to make their way to my stomach. Honestly, I ate a huge amount of them during my stay.
I really love looking at these pictures again, because they remind me of the warm late summer days at the coast of the Black Sea and most of all, I love the light at the time. It makes all the colors look so bright and natural.
Hope you like it just as much as I do.
I already announced that another ‘Food on the go’ would appear on the blog soon, since I was on vacation again. It is the pretty cool thing about having finished school: you have time to go wherever you want. So I was in a couple of cities and towns again. Let me show you, what precious food I found there.
First, I was in Berlin again and visited a vegan food market there. For refreshind, we tried the flavoured coconut milk with a cute design. The ‘Veganz’ shop was pretty expensive, you’d better buy normal stuff like fruit, vegetables and bread in a normal supermarket. But there is everything and more in a vegan version available. I had a chocolate coconut milk, which I liked, because it reminded me of Bounty.
If you want some interesting and cheap food, you should walk around the area of the Adalbertstraße. There are many restaurants and bars offering food of foreign origin. I had an awesome falafel wrap at a Lebanese restaurant which offers a lot of Oriental vegetarian and vegan meals.
The next day I was in Leipzig, where I found a neat place called “Bagel Brothers”. I am not that into bagels, but the hop offers homemade apple lemonade with fresh apple juice. Perfect on a hot day!
Walk along Karli street for some good vegetarian and vegan food. You should try one of the kebab shops, they often have fancy menus with falafel, tofu and seitan fillings as a substitute for the traditional meat stuff. I had a wrap with cheese and spinach which made me very happy (you do realize I like wraps).
I was also in France for several days where we visited Nice, Cannes, Monaco and Marseille. On our first day in Nice, we found a bakery providing traditional sweets of southern France, offering these buttery cookies and the traditional navettes, butter cookies with orange flavour. I personally liked the violet flavoured cookie above, but I am sure it tastes best as a part of a triffle or cheesecake, since it was a bit dry.
The best food I had was at a small restaurant a few metres away from our hotel in Nice. ‘Chez Moi’ offers a delicious menu with three courses for 15 Euros. You have the choice between about 3 different meals per course. When we had dinner there, we only saw French people there, which means this place is not a tourist trap. I had a very interesting salad with roasted bread, fresh tomatos, peaches and fennel. The main course was a risotto with vegetables and pickled citrus – try this and you will know what heaven is like. As a dessert, I chose a slice of apricot tart and concluded that I have to learn more about french patisserie. Danm, they know how to cook!
In Marseille, we proceeded with exploring French pastries. First thing, we ate our was through fruity macarons and then I fell in love with a citrus meringue tart.
The markets in southern France offer a lot of good fruit and vegetables which are ripe and full of flavour. We went across a food market and had some figs, apricots, watermelon and honeydew.
In Cannes, we tried some sugared churros. These are really fun to me, because I love finger food and food that can be dipped into different sauces. Maybe I should give these another try (The last time I fried churros, one of them exploded and my whole kitchen was messed up).
In Le Souk, a restaurant at the Old Harbor in Marseille, you can try very good Moroccan food. We ordered couscous and got a big pot with a kind of spiced vegetable soup, chickpeas, raisins with chinnamon, chicken with curcuma and chili paste. It is a lot of fun to sit together with friends and combine the different components.
And last but not least: our food at Lafayette Gourmet. We tried Belgian chocolate and caramel soft ice cream in the mall. I had a salad with parmesan and a vinaigrette dressind in a cute little glass bottle.
One highlight was the creamy mousse au chocolat. I really need to make this at home or look for a Lafayette Gourmet in Berlin, so I can buy some fresh mousse as a dessert.
Hope this post gave you some inspiration!
My trip to Bulgaria was very interesting, also from a culinary point of view. Go with me on a trip to the coast of the Black Sea and I will tell you what I ate.
This lollipop brought me back to my childhood, I think you might know this (if you are a 90’s kid you definitely will).
Found a truck with a sign promoting Thuringian sausages right before my grandmother’s house.
My brother’s favourite donuts were to be found in Varna’s park by the sea. He ate 20 (!!!) for breakfast topped with chocolate sauce and I ate five with fig sauce. It is a rare event that I eat deep-fried food, but this one was totally worth it.
The pictures below were taken on a food market in the city.
Here we have my dinner at the mall. Yummy sushi with avocado. And the pic below shows my brother eating some really good pizza. Grand mall Varna has a really nice food court, my dears.
These are bread cups filled with a kind of sour cream. My mother’s cousin has created them. I really liked the poppyseeds in the dough in combnation with the savoury cream.
Here we have a topping bar for frozen yoghurt at a mall in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. I had a banana milkshake, though, because I did not really feel like eating something ice cold. No regrets.
I soooo love fresh, soft and fluffy Easter bread, no matter what time of the year it is. By the way, you cane make Easter bread by yourself with the help of this recipe.
There was a lot of fruit at my grandma’s garden, fresh and ripened in the sun. Look at this giant tomato the neighbours gave to me!
This. This is IT. That’s what I went there for. Figs. I LOVE figs. There is no better fruit than freshly picked violet figs. I enjoyed each and every bite.
And here we go with one more special thing – grandmother’s homemade banitsa, a phyllo dough “cake” filled with cheese.
I was honored to bake for our guests this summer. I used my mini cheesecake recipe and made one large cake in a round pan. It turned out so beautiful I could not resist to show you.
And these ones were my favourites: Grandma’s pancakes with chocolate cream for breakfast – my brother had them for 6 weeks almost every day.
And my favourite savoury meal: roasted peppers with tomato sauce. Ripe vegetables make this meal finger-lickin’ good.
