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 :)

Apfelstrudel

March is my month of Austrian cuisine. So far I've tried two traditional Austrian dishes - Spätzle and Apfelstrudel. The Spätzle was fairly easy and came out well, but the apple strudel will take some practice. I made it today with a lot of help from my husband, who peeled and sliced the apples, after we binge-watched half a dozen of videos on strudel recipes. In the end we chose this recipe by My German Recipes.

I think, as a first try with this tricky dough, my apple strudel came out fairly decent, but not perfect. The dough was too much for one strudel and next time I will try to make the strudel with half of the dough. The legends that you have to be able to read your newspaper through the stretched dough have their reason - the thinner it is, the crispier and tastier the strudel is. 

Another note - I followed the recipe and my apples were slightly sour and tart, I also added the juice of half a lemon, as the recipe calls, and as a result the filling is not sweet enough. Next time I will omit the lemon juice, it would be better if the filling is sweeter. Of course, may be the problem is that we didn't have any vanilla sauce or ice cream and served it with chilled white wine for desert, a sweeter addition could have made a difference.

Here are the ingredients I used:

For the dough:

• 400 g flour
• 150 ml lukewarm water
• 1 egg
• 1 pinch of salt
• 3 tbsp sunflower oil
  

For the filling:

• 800 g peeled and chopped apples
• 140 g sugar
• 50 g bread crumbs
• 70 g butter
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• cinnamon
• confectioners sugar
  

I baked the strudel at 190C for 1 hour, until golden. I also made a small bun, filled with pear jam, from the cuttings of the dough.

I am not perfectly happy with my first strudel, but making it was definitely fun and I will try it again. And of course, if all of the attempts at the perfect dough fail, one can always use filo pastry :)

Brötchen

After my exploits ;) in French cuisine in January, this month I'm diving into German cooking. The most worthy of my efforts so far have been these small bread rolls, which I've already made three times, always with great success.

I took the recipe from Thomas kocht and of all brötchen recipes out there this is probably the easiest and simplest to follow.

Ingredients:

• 500 g flour
• 300 g cold water
• 20 g olive oil
• 10 g salt
• 2 g dry yeast (he suggests 0.5 g, but I usually put more)
  

The whole trick with this recipe is that you let time do the work for you. Just mix the ingredients the night before and let the dough stay at room temperature for at least 12 hours. It will rise and be ready for baking the next morning.

The other important trick for achieving the soft inside and crispy outside of the rolls is the combination of water vapour and high temperature. Once you've made the rolls and let them proof again, you preheat the oven at 250C and right before you put the rolls to be baked in the oven, you sprinkle them with water and add hot water to a metal bowl inside the oven, so that the oven fills in with vapour. The resulting brötchen are really amazing and super delicious.

French Apple Cake

This year I am more than usual drawn to challenges, especially such including lists. It is probably the structure and feeling of accomplishment lists provide, together with the boost of dopamine one gets from checking the items off the list.

The first of these challenges is Make Nine, of which I have already made two items (the second is to be revealed very soon, I hope). Then, I recently came upon Clean Lady's system for cleaning your house and maintaining it decluttered and clean - a problem that has always pursued me and bothered me. I watched a number of videos, read some of the posts on her blog and have decided to give it a go in February, following her Homekeeping Calendar - a neat sheet of lists for every day of the month with a number of tasks to accomplish for the day. Seems interesting and doable and I am really curious if it'll be better than my haphazard approach to cleaning and tidying. 

And the third challenge I have decided to uptake - International cooking. Recently FB offered me 10 Classic French Recipes Easy Enough to Make Anytime and I got hooked. First I planned to make all of the listed recipes, but then it occurred to me, that I would like to try other cuisines too, so I've decided to make 2022 the Year of International Cuisines. Each month I'll try at least five recipes from some region of the world. And because it was these French recipes, that gave me the inspiration, January is the month of France. So far I made the Omelette (not much different from what I usually do, but there were a few useful tips, like keeping it moister and the dragging to create waves); the Pommes Persillade - these took some time to prepare, but were undoubtedly worth it and a hit at home. The Omelette and the Persillades are definitely worth becoming a staple in our kitchen.

The third recipe is the French Apple Cake. It is very moist and buttery and though kind of similar in the form of products and method of preparation to a cake I often make at home - the Hooligan cake, the different proportion of the products used and most of all the amount of butter, make it taste distinctly unlike the Hooligan.

So, here are the products and methods I used to make my cake:

Products:

• 3 average apples Golden delicious variety
• 100 g butter (unsalted, as is usually sold here)
  
• 1 cup flour
• 150 g brown sugar
• 5 g baking powder
• 2 eggs size L
• 2 vanillas, a pinch of salt
• 60 ml golden rum
  

I peeled and diced the apples, beat the eggs with the sugar, added the butter and the rum and then folded in the flour with the spices and in the end the apples. The resulting batter was very thick and not at all runny as most cake batter is. I baked the cake at 180C in a preheated oven, for about 35 min.

After the cake cooled, I served it with coffee for son and myself and tee for husband. And then I remembered to sprinkle powdered sugar on top :)

So, impressions: Husband loved it. He is a fan of butter and cakes and the more the butter the better. Son and I, however, were frankly disappointed. I don't like so much butter in my cakes, it overpowers the taste and does not allow the top to get meringue-like and crusty - the feature we all like most about the Hooligan cake. So, no, I'm happy I tried it but in this case I'll stick to my similar but different old recipe.