Buguirdi

I love simple vegetable summer dishes and as we live in a southern country, they are a natural part of our cuisine. This summer I expanded my cooking experience with new dishes, like grilled filled eggplants, various types of zucchini dishes and others. And this grilled cheese dip is my latest addition. It is called buguirdi (it is also bouyourdi and other spelling variations) and it was suggested to us by our Greek waiter as something unknown and rarely chosen by foreigners because of its unfamiliar name. It turned out to be simple, but super delicious and it was the first thing I wanted to try when we got back home.

There are many recipes online, I chose one, that sounded close to the dish we tasted in Greece.

The ingredients are simple and in Bulgaria they are things we usually have in the fridge at home:

• 250 g feta cheese - the Greeks favour sheep and goat cheese, as they have little land for cattle, in Bulgaria we make feta cheese mostly from cow milk and this is the type I used today. However, I really like the richer taste of mixed sheep and goat cheese and next time I may try buguirdi with a different type of feta cheese
• 50 g grated yellow cheese. Here we call it kashkaval and it is similar / identical to the original Kasseri cheese. I used again whole cow's milk cheese.
• 2 tablespoons Greek extra virgin olive oil
• Dried oregano - I bought mine in an olive shop in Greece and it claims to be from Olympus (I like the thought)
• 250 g grated tomatoes
• a dash of paprika
• a bit of spicy green pepper - this is where I diverged from the original recipe, as we had only Jalapeno peppers at home. I wish we had the traditional long narrow spicy green peppers, that are much milder, probably next time :)
  

The preparation is as simple as the ingredients:

Crumble the cheese in a cooking dish (preferably a clay dish, but mine were either too big or too small for this quantity for two persons, so i used an Jena dish). Sprinkle with sweet paprika on top. Layer the grated yellow cheese. Cover with the grated tomatoes. Add two table spoons of olive oil and sprinkle generously with dried oregano. Finally add the thinly sliced spicy green pepper.

Bake as layered in an oven at 190 C for 15 minutes, then take it out of the oven, stir to mix the tastes and continue to bake for additional 30 minutes. Serve hot with bread and wine (or beer).

I don't have the habit of taking pictures of our food in restaurants, but the buguirdi is the dish at the front of this photo my husband took of me, while we were dining. The one I made today was almost as delicious :)