This TRAVEL category is not by any means all of my travel-related writing posted on the blog. Use the Google Internal Search Engine on the right to look for other countries I may have visited in this peripatetic life I’ve had. (Not the dumb internal search engine that this blog platform includes, above the Google one.) Since I’ve been living in Bulgaria for over a year and will be here another, I’ve added a category for...
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June 27, 2013 I bragged while I was in Morocco that while I was eating street food and drinking tap water, many of the Peace Corps conference attendees became ill with a lower GI bug that was rampant in Rabat, the nation’s capital (an outbreak confirmed by the US Ambassador there). I should have known better: I got home and it’s begun! At least I know it wasn’t something I ate. Not these grilled fish that I had in the fishing...
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Mikel and I went househunting in Puglia (Apulia in English) and took our niece Ayles, who had been volunteering at the English camp at the American University in Blagoevgrad, with us. She turned 21 in the beautiful baroque city of Lecce, often called the Florence of the South. Puglia is a land of seemingly endless olive groves and wheat fields, many of them ancient, and there are delightful villages, beautiful beaches, and fascinating...
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Transylvania (a version of this appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday, March 18, 2012. You can read it here.) At left, the Sighisoara Clock Tower, facing the citadel square. The bright yellow building was the home of Vlad II in the 15th century. His son, Vlad the Impaler, was the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. My husband was going to a conference in Sibiu, Romania, for a week late last summer. Would I care to join him, even...
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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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