Housewives Nude | Bulgarian Tasty Tradition
July 24, 2010 – 12:59 am
“The food here is terrible, and the portions are too small.” In any large city in the world there is at least one restaurant that fits the description given by Woody Allen. But how can we find out in which Bulgarian restaurants we can sit safely at the table and open the menu with hand?
The answer is remarkably simple. Choose a place that offer traditional meals. On the one hand, this is the easiest way to get to know Bulgarian cuisine without having to visit a Bulgarian friend’s home. On the other, plunging into the traditional atmosphere is a multimedia experience. Even when they are in a in the centre of Sofia, traditional restaurants are decorated like a country house. In the Revival Period. The wooden furniture is covered with woven rugs, the walls sport traditional costumes, weapons and ethnographic artifacts and the tables are laid with red cloths. Your dinner is served in plates – and sometimes cups – made of the well-known Troyan ceramic. The music is in keeping with the atmosphere: folk song performed by a live band.
The main reason to go to a restaurant, however, is the food. Start in the traditional way -with a glass of plum, grape or apricot rakiya and one of the salads that even the most ham-handed, emancipated Bulgarian woman can make: Shopska from tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, pepper and white cheese or or the salad from red roasted peppers with garlic, generously topped with finely chopped parsley. In winter, you should order pickles or chopped sauerkraut sprinkled with sunflower oil and pepper.
While choosing the main dish, you can feel as if already travelling around the country. Banska kapama is an emblematic and calorific wintertime meal containing pork, beef, sausages sarmi and sauerkraut stewed in an earthenware pot.Most of the specialties from the Rhodope Mountains are made from vegetables: patatnik ( oven-baked potatoes ), Smilyanski beans or kachamak ( cornmeal with white cheese ). The menus feature at least two types of gyuveche with or without meat; shish kebabs or shashlicks from all sorts of combinations between meats, onions, peppers and mushrooms; grilled kebapcheta and kyufteta ( we recommended their slightly hot versio ); vegetables and minced meat sarmi wrapped in grape of cabbage leaves and so on. Can you feel your mouth watering.
While waiting for your order to arrive, youy can continue with the rakia or wine accompanied by a plate of meze: assorted snacks from white and yellow cheese, sudzhuk from Gorna Oryahovitsa and lukanka from Karlovo, the iconic Elena dried fillet and pastarma, as well as a couple of sausages with weird names – Banski starets (literaly, “old man from Bansko”) and Strandzhansko dyado(“gradpa from Strandzha”). The bread is normally of the kind which generations of Bulgarian housewives used to make at home: small, brown-crusted pitas.
Hard as it may seem, you should leave some room for dessert. Bulgarian suisine is a member of the large Balkan family, so the presence of baklava and halva is understandable. But if you want to go for something more specific, you should opt for tikvenik (dessert made from pumpkin) or drained yogurt with honey or blueberry jam.
The bad news is that you will end up bursting at the seams. In traditional Bulgarian restaurants, the food is tasty and the portions are big.
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