La Fiesta de Nachos - Cinco de Mayo en Bulgaria

Yesterday, as I'm sure you all know, was Cinco de Mayo. We used to let this great holiday slip by us without much notice, but after last night, we have set a new precedent. Our neighbors, Kate and Mike, decided to host a Cinco de Mayo party, the main feature of which was a nacho competition. That's right - a no holds barred, no excuses accepted, no congealed cheese allowed, nacho competition. Contestants brought their efforts at 5:30, placed them at one of the numbered spaces on the picnic tables, and dreamed of glory (and a "Campeon de Nachos" hat). Soon, the judges arrived, with bright plastic ponchos and their judging rubrics.

Though Brett and I did not win champion hats, we did win two people's choice awards - for most interesting flavor combo (mango/grape/avocado/cumin) and for best homemade tortilla chips. So we're proud. We went unconventional...

Our first entry: avocado-strawberry-mint salsa with cinnamon lime chips

Our second entry: cumin chips with mango guacamole and grape halves (seeds expertly removed by Brett)

The prize hats, displayed on the Nacho Buffet

The Judging Rubric - get teachers together and...

The judges arrive, en masse

The entries

The Judging (which lasted about an hour!). We all started eating with them when they were still on category #1 of the rubric ("appearance") 10 minutes in.

For nacho recipes, head over to my food blog.

Happy Easter from Barcelona!

There are two main signs that is is Easter in Barcelona. One, the crowds of people are as densely packed as my luggage and the hotels all bear signs saying "completely full" in three languages. Two, every bakery and candy store window is stuffed with bright feathered cakes and strange objects made out of chocolate.

Barcelona has taken the chocolate egg to a whole new level. Chocolate soccer balls, a chocolate tractor, a white chocolate "Hello Kitty" castle. I've seen it all. But I haven't been tempted to buy any of them yet. Maybe if I see a pair of chocolate rollerblades...

Introducing "It Started in Bulgaria"

Over the last year I've frequently posted on some culinary adventure or other. Living in Bulgaria provided me with the impetus to learn to cook all my favorite foods, as they were not readily available here. I've blogged about burrito creation, cookie cakes, bagels and more. So as not to let such posts take over our travel blog, I've decided to start a separate site for kitchen experiments - a cooking blog.

From Another Angle, meet It Started in Bulgaria.

For those of you who like to cook and bake as well as read about travel adventures, I hope you like it!

ACS Christmas Cookie Exchange

This year I am advising the ACS "Cooking Collective." Every week a few students cook and the whole club samples and learns on Mondays at lunch. Brilliant.

My first big contribution as adviser was to suggest a Christmas Cookie Exchange - every member of the club would bake different cookies and bring in copies of the recipe, and we would invite faculty as well.

Fun: Check

Festivity: Check

Good Food: Check

Highlights included "English Pie", "Dried Grape Cookies" and "Christmas Cookies with Honey." There was even a lovely Bulgarian version of the powdered sugar walnut cookie known variously as Swedish Teacakes, Russian Teacakes, and Mexican Wedding Cakes.

Now I just have to get through our Balkan dance performance at the Christmas concert and the Wednesday caroling through the halls and my festive teacherly roles will all be successfully completed....

Take a Local Bite

A Fig and Walnut Tart

Vineyards

Olive Grove

Our FAVORITE gelateria - definitely homemade

Our daily menu in Cinque Terre involved dimpled sheets of crusty focaccia, local pan dulce filled with candied fruits, clementine oranges, pine nutty pesto on homemade pasta, pistachio and cinnamon gelato, cream cake with strawberries, limoncino and white wine.

Our daily views in Cinque Terre included arcs of olive groves and grapevines hugging the cliffs and fisherman in small skiffs out in search of anchovies.

It's safe to say the Cinque Terre rates high on the Fresh & Local Fare scale.

Pastries and Chocolate and Cheese - Oh My!

When Brett and I woke up early Saturday morning in Vincennes, we didn't have to go far to find a boulangerie/patisserie (bread/pastry shop). In fact, on our 45 minute walk, we wandered into five or so. Later, as we drifted through the Latin Quarter with Lisa and Max, we dipped into perhaps five more. And then there were the cheese shops. And the chocolate shops. And the meat and cheese stands. And the gelaterias. And the creperies. All told, I believe we managed to spend about 1/3 of our day and 1/2 our money on the culinary delights of Paris that day.

No regrets.

The best sandwich on Graf Ignatiev?

When walking along Graf Ignatiev, one is presented with many consumer options. Most of them, as we discovered last Sunday, are shoe shops. But in between footwear boutiques are two rather different lunch options - Mimas, popularly known among the international community to serve the best doner kepaps in town, and Subway - a brand new and wildly popular addition to the usual Sofia lunch fare. This week we decided to try both.

First, we watched the doner man work his magic on the grilled chicken stack, massaging a pita into one side of his open oven while slicing off crisp pieces of meat, finally scooping it all together with some piping hot french fries. As Brett happily munched this Bulgarian version of the burrito/gyro/wrap/lefse roll, we wandered down into the new (packed) Subway store. How can something be so exactly what you expect and yet so different at the same time? There were the friendly sandwich options and gross-looking cookies of high school sporting days, and yet written in letters on the menu that would have been gibberish to me in high school.

As I walked out with my foot long roasted chicken sandwich on multigrain, Brett called for a return to the doner kepap stand. Subway was making him hungry...

A Quick Guide to Dining out in Sofia

A Restaurant Table featuring a Traditional Bulgarian Tablecloth and Local Pottery

(photo courtesy of Shannon Savage)

After one year in Sofia, we've visited quite a few great restaurants. So in case you're in the area, here are some recommendations...

Olive's: This chain would seem kitchy in the United States - kind of along the lines of T.G.I. Fridays - with fake antiques littering the walls. But for a slightly blue ex-pat missing home, it's great. Try the rosemary sea salt focaccia as an appetizer and then dive into a pizza "ce mozzarella" or one of their famous burgers.

Annette's: Annette's Moroccan food is a fabulous find. Enjoy hummus and pita, couscous and kepap, even traditional hookah pipes. You'll sit on lavish cushions and enjoy the ambiance of dozens of sparkling lanterns.

Taj Majal and Ramayana: While we've eaten their food only as takeout, if the takeout is that good, so is the restaurant. Get yourself some panak paneer or chicken tikka masala (it's hot), drag some naan (garlic, plain, or cheesy) through it, and then call it a (very good) dinner.

Oogo's: This place competes with "The Spaghetti Company" for the modernista award. But while Spaghetti Company leans toward IKEA, Oogo blends restaurant with disco. The colored lights on the walls change with the evening, and the giant photo gracing one end upstairs appears to pulse ever so slightly - or is that just a trick of the imagination? Nevermind, order the pear and avocado salad with candied walnuts and the tiramisu. Maybe a pizza too - choose what suits from the four pages of options.

O'Nice: Well, maybe not a romantic night out, since it is a bagel place, but it's a darn good bagel place. Enjoy a smoothie, a salad, the Thai chicken bagel sandwich, and maybe even one of those square chocolate tarts catered by Caramel, the local French bakery. While you eat, chat with the friendly ex-pat owner or catch up on the latest ex-pat news in one of the available copies of "Programata" or "Vagabond."

Pod Lipite: Probably the best Bulgarian cuisine I've had here, but really the coolest thing about this place is a toss up between the pottery spice buffet in the middle of each table and the incredible sink-fountain in the bathroom. Oh, and the giant marble slab tables in the courtyard are pretty cool too. Whatever you get, and there are a lot of options, be sure to compliment it with a miniature loaf of warm pitka - white or wheat.

Sladkarska Kushti: Highly Recommended

Part I: Fall Comes to Sofia

A Walkway on Campus

A Flower Vendor downtown

Sofia Street Musicians

"Mama" Dog, beloved by all of campus but always looking sad

Part II: We go to the Greatest Bakery in Bulgaria

Introducing: Sladkarska Kushti (House of Sweets)

These might be the best cookies in the bakery

But these are darn good too...

And then there's these...

We decided we couldn't take any risks.

On a warm beautiful day in Sofia, one must choose between many good options. Go to the mountain? Wander a park? Shop the fruit markets? Play tennis? Do laundry so it will dry quickly in the sun? Gather fall leaves and buckeyes for the windowsill?

Today, we fit in as many of those as we could, beginning with a lap of downtown. We cruised along Graf Ignatiev, stopping to admire the last raspberries and the first butternut squash at the fruit market, sidled through Slaveykov Square book market, noticing a new copy of Eragon in Cyrrilic, then stumbled about in search of our latest and greatest food discovery in Sofia - "The House of Sweets" on Rakovski boulevard.

If you are living in Sofia, or even Belgrade, Athens, or Bucharest, stop what you are doing. Find the nearest public transportation and head for Sofia. You need to eat these cookies. You need to experience for yourself the joy of walking down a not-that-nice street, looking in fairly random shop windows, when suddenly... literally thousands of cookies in perhaps a hundred varieties wink back at you from behind glass. You walk in, and you are the only one there. How is that possible? You choose from chocolate filled butter cookie shells, tiny baklava triangles, vanilla cream cones, miniature walnut tarts, "night and day" chocolate and vanilla cookies, garishly colored sugar balls that you're sure will taste better than they look, jam sandwich cookies that couldn't possibly taste better than they look, and so many more. Finally, after choosing perhaps thirty cookies, you stop, exhausted. The final bill? 7 leva, or about 4 euros, or about 5 dollars.

What's not to love?

Sladkarska Kushti

Rakovski Boulevard, near Slaveykov Square

FIVE STARS

A Different Kind of High

As Brett conquered the Rila mountains today, I worked on an altogether different challenge: making homemade pita bread, one of my favorite foods. In California, we bought pita every week at the farmer's market. In Vermont over the summer, I generally bought Otter Creek bakery out of homemade pita every time I stopped in. In Bulgaria, the only place to buy pita bread is at Annette's Moroccan restaurant downtown. And while I'm glad to have that option, I decided to give the recipe in my new Moosewood cookbook a try, to see if I could get a bread balloon with a bit more verve. The results, as you can see, rival the Rila mountains in height and grandeur (scroll down to Brett's post for the comparison photos). 

High

Higher

Highest

Higherest

Chocolate in Three Acts

I. Belgium

My taste buds wanted to commit euphoric suicide, leaping off my tongue to chase the silk ribbon of chocolate headed for my stomach. Chocolate so impeccable, so rich, so superbly unexpected. I had almost - perish the thought - not ordered it. Full, I almost ignored the invitation of "Molten Chocolate Cake" in lovely fine print at the bottom of that Belgian menu. 

Everyone around us was Belgian; they had had it before. They didn't realize the implications of their chocolate. The dangers. Chatting with friends and co-workers around the dimly lit cafe, they didn't seem to understand that this was the best chocolate in the world. Each day they passed Leonidas and Neuhaus, offering barely a glance to the incredible displays: coated croquant and ganache, caramelized pecans dipped in white chocolate, buttery caramels dripped in dark chocolate, holiday icons molded in milk chocolate. To acknowledge the perfection of these tastes and textures would be to lose themselves in one sense, taste, and abandon the world. Soon everyone in Belgium would swell and the U.N. would have to relocate its headquarters. 

Lucky me, then, to be just a visitor allowed to revel in my forkfuls of bliss, my "mixed most populars" box from Leonidas, and my hazelnut chocolate cream at Au Bon Pain. 

II. Italy

After dinner we trekked two miles of wet street to find Chocolat, the gelateria of choice among hip and happening dessert-lovers of Milan. Two steps inside the door and we were face to face with the heart of the place, 20 rotating gelato flavors under glass, half of them subtle spins on chocolate.

"So what will you pair?" asked the case, as each flavor vied for our attention. 

"Pick me," whispered the cinnamon chocolate.

"No me," said the ginger chocolate heatedly.

"I go well with milk chocolate," said the Honey-Poppyseed Cream, hoping for consideration.

Raspberry sorbet might be good with dark chocolate orange. Perhaps white chocolate with chocolate pear. Might mango compliment chili chocolate? I just didn't know. 

A big decision lay in front of us. Luckily, our train didn't depart for another hour.

III. Bulgaria

"Chocolate Romance Pie?" I needed some cake, and that seemed close enough. I was sitting in a reclining wicker chair at "Sweet" Cafe, across the table from Brett, and it was my birthday. 

We hadn't yet learned that Sweet was a popular hangout for folks we probably shouldn't be hanging out with, and we sat blissfully unaware of the career paths of our neighbors. I had finished a pretty OK mojito, and there is something about one drink that makes dessert that much better to me, as if it sharpened the sweet side of my tongue a touch, and opened extra room in my stomach. 

As the Chocolate Romance Pie floated across the room on its tiny plate, I imagined heads turning, everyone wishing it were theirs. I'd never had anything quite like it. It was as if a triangular wedge of fudge fell in love with a plate of roasted hazelnuts, and the two went skinny dipping in cream together before lying down on a bed of soft vanilla.