In July, 2011, Mikel and I moved to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he is the Peace Corps Country Director. We will be here until August 2013, when the post is closing. Some of my posts since moving here are specifically about the country, so I’ve categorized them as both Bulgaria and Travel. You can click on the categories above to see all the posts in each category. In July 2013, we will be moving to Chengdu, China, where Mikel will take over...
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Banitsa (Баница in Cyrillic) is one of the national dishes of Bulgaria. There are probably as many versions as there are cooks, but few home cooks younger than 70 make the filo-like dough themeselves. Tiny grocers, no bigger than newstands, often sell refrigerated filo dough, which is also often called banitsa (accent on the first syllable: BAHN eet sah), though kori means filo dough as well. Banitsa can also mean the savory pastries...
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December 29, 2011 Preparing for the New Year Sorry I’ve not been blogging a lot lately. I’m working on the 20th anniversary edition of my first book, Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking, which will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in Fall 2012. Yesterday’s Washington Post ran a story about Hoppin’ John in which I am quoted. You can read it here. I have been cooking and entertaining a lot,...
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Thanksgiving 2011: Hoppin’ John’s® Celebrates 25 Years!!! Can it really be twenty-five years ago that I opened Hoppin’ John’s® in downtown Charleston? Edna Lewis was cooking at Middleton Place, so my sister Sue and her son Duke and I went there for Thanksgiving dinner, then we came back and got ready for the opening. Many people had told me not to open on Thanksgiving Day, that no one would come. But...
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October 18, 2011 A busy month ending in a small village in northwestern BulgariaI have been traveling a lot lately — to Transylvania for a week, exploring the Saxon and Rroma villages, to the wine regions of southwestern Bulgaria with my wine guru, Debbie Marlowe, who was visiting for a week (stories and recipes on those trips to come), and now I’m staying with a retired couple who are my age and who live in the village of...
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Traveling through the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria For several weeks in the summer of 2011, I traveled with Mikel throughout Bulgaria visiting Peace Corps Volunteers. Here are some of my photos, with captions. I have not yet proofread this, so let me know if you find something before I do! In many of the Peace Corps sites, the volunteers work with Bulgarian Muslims, or Pomatsi. Their villages tend to be in the higher, more remote locations....
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