What I Eat with My BABA in the BALKANS 🥘 aka What I Eat with My Grandma

Hello everybody and welcome to what I eat with my baba in the Balkans. Specifically we're in Bulgaria but I think this is going to apply to a lot of people living out here in the Balkans. To get started I'll give you just a little bit of background about myself. My name is Lori, I'm Bulgarian but I lived in New York Manhattan basically all my life. I would go to Bulgaria over the summers to see my family but one day I just woke up and decided I had enough of city life I dropped everything and I just moved with a tiny little luggage to a small farm in Bulgaria. To begin our day we're going to wake up and go foraging for fresh berries. Berries back in New York have absolutely no flavor so this is one of my favorite things to do on the farm. You can find blackberries, blueberries, raspberries and strawberries in abundance and you don't have to live on a farm to do so. You can drive over to a nearby forest even from the city. I'm gonna win, I'm gonna win. We were also lucky enough to come across a tree full of janki or in English translates to green plums. I'll show you guys later what my baba's gonna do with these beauties. Now let's get to these delicious things that you guys saw in the beginning. These are called mikički and buchtički, my grandma's specialty. Good morning everyone. It's a new day and today we're going to be having mikički for breakfast which is like a zeppole type of thing I guess you could say. I guess I'll show you her kitchen while the oil is heating up. This is her outdoor section. Here's the inside. Here she's just heating up some oil. Hopes to fatten me up a little bit now. I guess grandmas always think that. Yeah how many of you guys have grandmas who always think you're too skinny no matter how much you eat but it's a good thing. It means they're always going to be cooking for us and meanwhile I'm gonna make Bulgarian ayran. This is something that we have in the morning. Here we go. Let me choose the rawest one. Remember those green plums or janki that we collected earlier? Well this was their fate. My baba loves to make jams out of pretty much everything but we did make one more thing out of them which I will show you guys a bit later. We enjoyed it for dinner. So you can take a look. This is where you go if you don't grow your own food. It's not bad. It's all still pretty fresh. Here's the mushrooms. Nothing like growing your own food but not bad. This is just one of the many and everything changes seasonally. So now we're June so you're having a lot of strawberries, cherries, tomatoes. During the winter you're gonna have a lot of onions, cabbages, things like that, potatoes and this is a wonderful little store that just sells spices, herbs, walnuts, everything and everything is hand-picked, grown. Well they're grown in the wild but this is a really great tea. We have it. It's very similar to something that we have on the farm. Maybe that's why I like it. Here we've got peppers. Different types. Maybe we'll pick. Let's pick one or two. A green and a red. There we go for the salad. After that long walk at the bazaar we're gonna have to make lunch quickly because we are starving. What you're seeing here is kyopulo and it's essentially eggplant, those peppers that you saw us picking and onions. You roast all three. You put a lot of garlic and parsley. That's our recipe. There's many ways to make it but that's one thing we're going to be enjoying for lunch. And on the side we're also going to be making some pickled vegetables. In Bulgaria we call this thrushia and those who know me you know that I'm really big on thrushia because it's just a really easy salad that you can enjoy all year round and essentially what it was is back in the day people had no other way to preserve their vegetables and fruits by the way those junky or green plums you saw earlier can also be made into thrushia. I have a whole video on how to make cabbage thrushia which I'll include in the description. I would suggest trying it. It's not hard to make at all. Stuff chicken with potatoes and this is what she's going to stuff the chicken with rice and vegetables. Carrots, onions, peppers, Bulgarian chubritsa. It's like oregano, raisins, black pepper and two mushrooms and that's gonna be the stuffing. Oh and she made chicken soup. It looks like a mess but it's really good. Now you guys can see she's stuffing the bird, the chicken. Bird sounds weird. The chicken. So she rubbed it with butter, oil and red pepper. Now we're gonna cut the potatoes. I think we're gonna need a little more potatoes but we're gonna stuff them on the side and in the oven she does. Keep some meowing. What do you need? You're hungry? Okay one second. Only downside is I can't send you anything through the screen. I want you guys to taste this. Homemade cheese. Bulgarian cheese. Don't call it feta. It's Bulgarian cheese. We put it in our salad. And may the feast begin. Just in case my sister and I start losing weight says my grandma. So this is moussaka which is basically potatoes and ground beef or ground pork actually. Beef and pork with egg on top and a couple of other vegetables and spices my grandma puts inside. Okay oh sorry. There it is. And then you eat it with how do you say it yogurt yogurt. Why am I forgetting English? In this case it's goat yogurt. Good morning everybody. We just woke up from our daily siesta. Yes in Bulgaria we follow that tradition. We sleep in the afternoons. How does everyone go to work and find a way to sleep in the afternoons? I honestly don't know but there somehow is a way to balance the two. What you're seeing here is my grandma making her special pitka. She's a dough person. She loves everything that has to do with dough and she has magic hands when it comes to dough. It's like fresh bread. Let's see what we have here. Some fresh spinach from the garden. Well we froze it yeah. We froze it so that it can survive the road. Here are some of our For those of you who have watched my meat videos you'll know. A lot of cucumbers from the garden. Some more spinach. This is from the lamb that we celebrated with the other day. It's something called drop sarma which is rice and internal organs. It's a very traditional Bulgarian thing. Some homemade from our own pig ground pork. Some more cucumbers. To give you guys some background my two grandmas live in cities in Bulgaria. This baba that you're seeing here is Baba Nina and she lives in the capital Sofia. My other grandma Baba Vera lives in Pazrcik and whenever I can I always bring some provisions from the farm because even though they have those beautiful pazari I think that there's nothing that can beat fresh farm food and they always get really excited about everything that I bring. While we were at the pazar today with Baba we were lucky enough to find some chestnuts and this was a big deal because they're usually only available around October, November. Everything on the pazar is very seasonal so we kind of eat what's based on the season. Here we got lucky so we were sure to grab them. If you guys haven't tried chestnuts please do so they are so good. Actually to give you guys an idea of how different the pazar is throughout the year at the different seasons here is from December and you guys can see the vegetables and fruits are completely different than what you saw from the summer. It's actually giving me the idea I think I'm going to make videos like this except for the different seasons. Pretty amazing actually how everything is based on seasons here. You don't really have that back in New York. Everything is available all the time. Just another difference between New York and Bulgaria. And finally time for dinner and no we can't eat the same thing twice in one day. My grandma just does not allow that. So what you're seeing here is sach and it's basically a clay pot where you cook meat and vegetables all together and the result is just something out of this world delicious. And this is just one of the many reasons I love my baba so much. They do so much. They're like superheroes and yet they're so humble. That's okay. A little rakika went inside the sach. That's a good thing. And finally back to what I promised you guys from the beginning and no I didn't forget are janki or green plums. What my baba made out of them is this. An absolutely delicious Michelin star status tart. I have no idea honestly how she made this or when she made this. I'm telling you superhero status because she made like six manjas today but it was the perfect end to a perfect day. Thank you guys so much for watching and happy eating.