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.

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!

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.

Bulgarian pumpkin strudel is originally called ‘Tikvenik’, because ‘tikva’ means ‘pumpkin’. To keep at least a bit of the tradition when I prepare it here in Germany, I use bulgarian phyllo dough, which I take with me when I visit my granny.

I do not have exact measurements for this recipe but I hope you can get along with the pictures showing the process step by step. Let’s just start.

You’ll need:

about 100 g (3 1/2 oz.) ground walnuts or pecans
white sugar (have about 150 g/5 oz. prepared)
1 small butternut, grated
125 g (4 oz.) butter, melted
400 g (14 oz.) phyllo dough
cinammon, powdered

Prepare your ingredients, place nuts, butter and sugar in bowls so you have them on hand.
Divide the grated pumpkin into 6 portions, about this size. Preheat the oven to 175°C (350°C) and line a rectangular pan with a sheet of baking paper.

Roll out two pieces of dough. Butter one of them with a silicon brush, place the other on top and butter it as well, using very little fat.

Spread one portion of pumpkin across the buttered sheet.

Now spread nuts, sugar and cinammon on top. I use about 2 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tsp cinammon and 2 tbsp nuts, and the result is really not very sweet, but that’s how I like it. Use more sugar if you like.

Now roll the phyllo sheet carefully and place it in the pan. Repeat with the rest of the sheets.

If you have some butter left, you can pour it on top. Now bake for about 20 minutes or until the cake is slightly browned. Dust with powdered sugar and enjoy warm or cold.

First of all: there is a lot to eat. Food stalls are an important part in markets and you have a big choice of sweet and savoury stuff. We tried a lot of things and I will tell you about them all in a second. Please excuse I did not take pictures of the food buffet we got in the camp, I can give you a short description about that. We always had boiled rice as a main component, some dishes contained noodles. There were always several dishes with stir-fried vegetables, such as cabbage, carrots and corn. There were different kinds of tofu or fried protein stuff used (the people did not know enough English to explain to us, what exactly it was) and also fried eggs. As a dessert, we always had fresh fruit, which was great, because thai pineapple and melon was reaaaaallllyyyyyyyy gooood. I miss that here. For real. Breakfast mostly contained fried stuff like bread or bananas, sometimes we had pancakes. Not bad for a sweet lover like me :).

And now some pictures, okay? Here we go.

I had exotic fruit in Thailand, such as mangosteen, papaya, pitahaya or lychee. Their taste is quite different, if you buy them in Europe. They are much sweeter and softer. My favourite was definitely mangosteen, this very soft and juicy fruit is just awesome.

This is a coconut pancake. It was yummy, the texture was quite similar to the one of American pacakes, only a little more sticky and with a coconut taste. Yum.

And here we have a fried banana. It was crispy like chips and interesting, too. But I liked the fried bananas wrapped in dough better.

It was very hot on our trip to Ayutthaya. So I had some coconut juice to hydrate and cool down. Very refreshing.

Thai sweets. Cool, eh? These are a kind of yeast muffins, very light and fluffy. They are served with a cream, which tastes like vanilla pudding, whatever it is made of.

Now this is one dish we got during our work in the orphanage. We had a menu of 9 dishes, which were prepared by women living near the orphanage. They cooked everything right before your eyes and I guess you can’t get a dish more Thai than the one made by a Thai granny? Thise one was a little spicy, with small tangly noodles and lots of you sauce.

Another dish you could choose was this one: stir fried rice with vegetables. I really liked the way the rice and the vegetables were balanced. It was pretty much my favourite one.

This one you could order extra. One day, when I was sick of rice, I just ordered vegetables and got a plate full of fresh, lightly fried ones in a really yummy sauce (tasted like soy cauce with tomatos, maybe).

And finally, I have a step-by-step instruction for you. We made stir fried noodles in our ecohouse, and although I do not have exact measurements, I can still show you how it works.

This is what you need: Oil for the pan, garlic, salt, sugar, tofu, cabbage, baby corn, carrots, eggs and boiled rice noodles.

First sauté 1 tsp garlic.

Add 1 egg and stir-fry it. Add tofu.

Throw in some carrots and corn.

Add cabbage leaves and rice noodles. Pour over some soy sauce, 1 tbsp sugar and a little salt.

Et voilà!

I really hope you enjoyed some of my Thailand reports here and on my other blog. This is the very last one, I promise. But if you are interested, I can give you more information, just ask.