Food!

My favorite subject – food!  Food in Albania is…wonderful. 

     As I mentioned in the “Visit” post, for the first five days, we were met with some of the most wonderful-tasting food I’ve ever sampled.  At every meal, there’s salad (lettuce with oil, salt and vinegar of balsamic), cucumbers and tomatoes with oil and feta, some sort of cheese, maybe a feta or a parmesan or a ricotta (with spices or olives), possibly a sour cream with oil and spices, bread, plus soup, and that’s just to start.  For the main meal there are usually vegetables, and a meat (cooked to within an inch of its life.  Seriously, I don’t know why, but Albanians like dry meat! Well-seasoned, but not one bit of juice left in), sometimes a fish (eyes staring back at you and all), byrek (phyllo dough with cheese or spinach or onion or ham inside) and maybe something else that the host likes to cook. 

After, there’s always an Italian dessert (sometimes two kinds!) and of course, fruit.  My mother-in-law always said to me “The fruits in Albania are all organic, and they are much fresher than here [in the US].”  I believed her, but thought there was quite a bit of nostalgia mixed into that statement.  Turns out, it was completely true!

Does this sound like a lot of food to you? Yeah, me too.  I was stuffed to the gills at each visit.  (Weight Watchers? What’s that?)  Albanians take it as a personal insult if you don’t eat their food, even if you say “No, Thank You” several times.  Five minutes later, they’re offering it to you again.  The matriarchs of the family would pile food onto your plate, encouraging you to try this dish or that one.  Woe to you if they saw it empty at any point – they would simply reach over and pile on more.  The men were no better, they would admonish you to eat like it was your duty to their country.  I looked helplessly towards my husband several times, only to discover he was engrossed in conversation and of no help (thank you, honey!).  I would meekly say “Faleminderit” and eye the food on my plate, wondering what the point value of byrek was.  9? ...12? That’s more than half my calories for one day in one slice... For survival, I quickly learned another word, “mjaft,” which is “enough”. Of course, these meals lasted four or five hours, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it seems…but still, 12 hours a day of eating? I always thought that would be heaven for me.  Turns out, it’s only good for a few days…

One thing I noticed in particular was the lack of diversity in food when eating out – are were no Mexican or Indian or Ethiopian or French restaurants (ok, I saw like two Chinese food restaurants).  Moreover, the menus everywhere are the same; some restaurants might have specialties or a slightly different version of a dish, but I was the only one looking at a menu to decide what I wanted-the Albanians all knew before they walked in the door what they were going to order.  By the third restaurant, I had this figured out, but I still liked to look.  Most things were quite familiar, just seasoned or served differently.  Probably the most “different” food I encountered was the different parts of the cow-tongue, intestines, brain, etc.  But that wasn’t even that frequent, just not unusual.  There was always lots of seafood, risotto, pasta (penne, spaghetti, or linguine) or “pica” (pizza).  I noted quickly that Albanians love fish - bones, skin, eyes and all, and I…well, I like my fish skinned, square and de-boned, thankyouverymuch. 

Traditional Albanian dishes - the look funky, but taste delicious!

It sounds like a lot things were “off” or not tasty/familiar when I write it all out like this, or show the picture like the one above.  But that’s not the case at all – Albanian food is quite tasty and familiar.  At least, the stuff I was served was quite good (the dish pictured above was delish - eggplant, a ground beef, spices, oils, tomatoes and cheese..  There was *always* something at the table that I loved, and quite often I would take just a bit of every dish (that’s the foodie inside me!).  Most of the ingredients were Mediterranean, just mixed and seasoned in different ways.  I keep telling Zamira that I have to sit down with her and cook one day, and I think this trip to Albania has inspired me to do just that. 

Mmmm....dessert.... I asked exactly what these were, and Dritan answered "Some sort of dough baked in a sweet sugar glaze."  My eyes lit up.  I asked him "Seriously, is there anything better than that in this world?" His aunt corrected him at that moment, and he passed her words on to me: "Apparently, it's actually fried dough, dipped and baked in the sweet sugar glaze."  My eyes went vacant for a moment absorbing that info..."Mmmm," I said, "I guess there is something better in this world."

Yeah...I'm a little obsessed with food.  :)