Glorious Food

Peace Corps has three goals.  Goal one is about service, and goals two and three are about cultural exchange.  I do have goal one activities going on.  The nurse I work with and I just finished revisiting the schools to check on the dental calendars we gave the students to track their teeth-brushing.  Today at about 1:30, we finished designing a health gazette that we've been working on for weeks, and the nurse I work with did most of the work, which is exceptional for someone who learned how to use the shift key just over a month ago.  Next week, I hope to be telling you about another project, but today, it's cultural exchange.  The first cultural exchange is here in Albania.  The second will occur if you choose to read this.  There we have it, goals two and three.

So here's the project.  My site mate, Mon, has recruited me, and I think it's a fabulous idea.  We are documenting some of our favorite Albanian dishes.  (Well, more she documents, and I help.  She has this amazing SLR camera, and my little point and shoot doesn't compare at all, so mostly I watch and try to estimate amounts of the ingredients for the recipes.)  I'm usually ambivalent towards Albanian cuisine.  It's similar to cuisine of other countries in the region but not.  I think byrek (thin dough layered with fillings like spinach or onion), speca te mbushura (stuffed peppers), and fasule (beans) can be absolutely delicious, but I wouldn't even eat djathe i bardhe or "white cheese" when I came here because I was expecting feta, and despite it's resemblance, feta it is not.  In spite of this, my tastes have changed as I've lived here.  I eat djathe i bardhe.  I even drink dhalle, a salty yogurt drink, without flinching, so while I won't be learning to make dhalle for all my American friends, I'm excited to dive into some Albanian cooking.

This isn't my first venture into an Albanian kitchen.  My host mother made a variety of foods, and I ate almost all of them.  I enjoyed her homemade byrek so much that she made it three times in the last week I was there, and she always served it to me for breakfast the next morning when she made it.  She even taught me how to roll out byrek dough, though I still need to perfect the fillings.  That may be a project for a different time.  Mon and I did out first official joint session last week.  We learned how to make hashure, one of her favorites, and qollopite, one of mine.  We went to the kitchen of the family of two of her students and our mutual friends.  So here it goes.  

First up was hashure.  I won't give you the recipe or take you through it step by step.  If you want some, ask me when I come back to the US.  Hashure is a regional dish that's essentially wheat berries, boiled in water, thickened with cornstarch, sweetened with sugar, and seasoned with cinnamon.  The result is a jello-like consistency dessert.  I like picking the wheat berries out and eating the raisins on top.  Mon is a little more traditional and eats the whole thing.

Next, we made qollopite, which reminds me of Southern biscuits a little.  It's bread with the ever-changing and quite versatile djathe i bardhe inside.  I could eat this all the time.  It reminds me of cornbread, although it's made with wheat flour, and really, it's just delicious.  Mon and I both went home with a serving of both dishes.  I ate my qollopite and gave the hashure to a friend.  Mon ate the hashure and gave the qollopite to a friend.  It would have made the perfect exchange, but no, we didn't switch with each other.

Saturday, we're going at it again in a recipe exchange.  We are showing the family how to make brownies (a sweet chocolate cake-like dessert), and they are showing us how to make qifqi (seasoned rice balls).  In the future I hope to re-learn how to make byrek and speca te mbushura.  I'd also like to learn how to make brushel (green onion bread), turshi (pickled veggies), and baklava, despite the fact that I haven't quite been able to enjoy it since the great forced eating of baklava on my first new year here.  I wish I could share the results of these cooking ventures, but that will have to wait about 10 weeks, and maybe I can reproduce some of them then.  Until then, Ju befte mire! (Bon appetit!)