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.
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.
Everyone is crazy about pumpkin-flavoured stuff right now and I decided I would not make it that much worse, if I joined the movement. This strudel is my grandmother’s work, we made it in Bulgaria.
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.