i hate foodie blogs and how eating in is the new going out

a lot of peeps have been asking,"anna, what's the food like there?" well, friends, i have two separate answers for you. one is pre-living alone, and one is post. had you asked me during my celo banitsa life i would have remarked on all of the following:

1. mekitzi: fresh doughnuts, most often found on sunday and most often made by hand by baba herself. if i was lucky enough to barge in on albin's sunday brunch, there were always fresh mekitzi with honey and wine to drink (!).
2. lamb: the sacrificial meat. for any important occaision, count on a nice helping of freshly slaughtered lamb and several days worth of meals to come featuring every organ you can think of in soups and out of them. one day baba insisted "yash! yash!" (eat, eat!) as she handed me cleaned intestines. they were actually tasty.
3. shopska salata/tarator: the first is simply tomato, cucumber, sometimes onion, oil, vinegar, salt, and homemade cirene on top. most often enjoyed with some rakia. tarator: cold yogurt soup with cucumber, garlic and dill. summer at its finest.
4. DUNERS: did partake of the best of these inventions in Byala Slatina. think gyro with french fries INSIDE.
5. mousaka: meat, potatoes, egg bake on top. only slightly improved my dislike of cassarole dishes. not bad though.

highly recommendable cuisine. but here we come to the part where i am forced out into the cold world alone and must somehow nourish myself. no more lamb, because i don't have lambs, no more mekitzi, because i never woke up early enough to learn how to make them. at first i was discouraged, but as if by divine intervention, babas in my new village started showing up at my
door with bags of produce: tomatoes, cucmbers, peppers, eggs, onions, garlic, watermelons. "zimi-si, yash!" (take it, eat!) harkening back to those years of the benediction during mass: take this, eat, this my body which has been given up for you....

suddenly the question wasn't what am i going to eat, it was what am i going to cook to use all this food? as ideas came to me so did the recipes (by the miracle of epicurious.com and the like), and meal after meal became more and more delicious, and day after day i became more and more proud of my cooking abilities.

YET, i have tried to avoid writing about it until now because i just despise those blogs all about cooking because: 1. you can't actually taste the food. 2. the food looks really good and when you make it it never tastes like the picture. 3. the blog is about all the mistakes the blogger made during baking, which only serves to worry me more about screwing up what i'm baking. 4. i hate to catalog what i've eaten because, if no one knows you ate the cookie then maybe you just really didn't eat it.

BUT, i cannot deprive you of description any longer. the following are all homemade and were constructed of almost entirely homegrown (free) things (which were given to me). and THEY WERE DELICIOUS.

1. stuffed peppers: keep for several days, easy peasy, and deliver a great protein/veggie 1-2 punch.
2. gazpacho/ good-spacho: what else can you make when you have 4 kilos of tomatoes? labor intensive but WORTH IT. with every batch i buy a fresh loaf of bread and eat to my heart's content.

1. Quiche: for the times your neighbor gives you 14 eggs. homemade crust, the only thing i bought for it was ham (even the cheese was homemade and given to me!!)