Thank you
@SonilaZ - tell us about Albanian cuisine please . . . I love learning about other nations foods although I understand many cultures cook the same type of dishes with minor seasoning changes.
Hi Mike, I've lived my life half in Albania and the later half in USA, Florida to be more exact. I didn't realize until I lived in US how similar Albanian food was to Greek food. There are no Albanian restaurants down here and anytime I craved food from back home, I ended up in Mediterranean themed restaurants and especially Greek or Turkish ones since they have dishes that are very similar to Albanian food.
Albania has a Mediterranean cuisine, seasonal food, lots of stuffed veggies (stuffed peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini ets etc), lots of phyllo dishes that are similar to the Greek ones but we call them differently (the savory ones are called byrek than add what they are filled with like spinach and feta, ground beef and onions with tomatoes, yogurt feta and eggs etc etc). Then we have lots of soups usually with some homemade broth and rice, orzo or little pasta. Lots of seasonal salads too and our entertainments dinners have mezes as well, lots of family style sharing plates that people spoon a little over their plates. Each of them might be simple but the combination of flavors makes the dish (feta, cucumbers, olives, little bites of meat or sausages, grilled kebabs etc etc). I have so much more to say about Albanian cuisines (like regional differences between North and South or coastal and mountain areas).
I am slowly trying to recreate some of the recipes I learned from my grandparents (one set of my grandparents lived on the border of Albanian/Greece and another set on the border Albania/Serbia) so I feel I have to put in writing some of their cooking techniques and recipes.
Fun fact, my grandparents used to make orzo at home from scratch, they'd make the dough, then separate it in small rolls and we'd all roll orzo pieces with our fingers, the smaller the better. Then we'd dry them for days and store in flour sacks for winter time. It made me so proud when we'd cook anything with orzo because I had contributed to making it.
