Prompt 2: Cooking Skillz

Prompt 2: How do you best demonstrate your cooking skillz? If you literally have zero skillz, then what is your best food-related story?

I would not say that I have no skillz. In fact, I can cook, and I can cook pretty well when I actually put my mind to it. As it turns out, I best showcase my cooking skillz when making a Bulgarian dish that we will humbly call "the clay pot". Bulgarian cuisine, and by extension Balkan cuisine, is delicious and amazing. It is comprised mainly of your essentials, like chicken, pork, ground up meat, fresh vegetables like cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes, crispy, flaky, hearty white bread, and feta cheese. They also dig yogurt in a big way. And much, much more of course that I don't have time or expertise to list here. They also have a wide selection of salty, delicious cured meats.

  Sokka loves his cured meats. (Via Avatar: The Last Airbender)

So the clay pot. What goes into it, and why is it the best demonstration of my cooking prowess? Well, I've made it for a bunch of people and they consistently tell me it's delicious. My family members have all entered it into their own personal cookbooks as well. The clay pot is actually not essential (you could do it in a casserole pan or something), but it certainly adds a piece of flair to the whole thing.

Mine looks exactly like this. Image via.

I got into the clay pot meal thing on my LDS/Mormon mission to Bulgaria. In some missions, missionaries get fed on the regular by church members, but not in Bulgaria for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with not wanting to be a burden on the less affluent members. As a result, I had to learn to feed myself. Now, you'd think that I would have learned to do this my freshman year at college, and in a manner of speaking, I did. I subsisted my first semester on Spaghettio's, (poorly) baked potatoes, and nasty little lettuce salads. There may or may not have been some ramen involved, and the same, tired old turkey sandwich between slices of Wonderbread. The second semester was dominated by nachos and quesadillas. So yes, in a manner of speaking, I could take care of myself, but I was also trying to do it on a very tight budget of $30 a week for food. I digress. The point is that on my mission I got to Bulgaria, which has very different things on its store shelves, and early on mostly just went for the candy aisle, and Nutella and bread. This nearly killed me until a couple months in I stopped eating chocolate cold turkey and then started going the hot dog route, which also turned out to be a bad way to go, because cheap Bulgarian hot dogs... just. Cheap Bulgarian hot dogs. Enough said.

Besides attempting to feed ourselves for the first six months or so, my companions and I often took advantage of the cheap restaurants with really good food. Bulgarian pizza is some of the best I've had in this entire world. And I started appreciating the more traditional, regional food, like stuffed peppers, musaka, kyuftes, Shopska salads, tarator, kebabs, dyuners, and of course French fries with grated feta. But I also found the clay pot meal on the menus, too, called gyuvecheta in Bulgarian, and they were amazing. They're basically like a little personal stew with an egg cracked on top, cooked in your own personal little pot.

In all its glory. This one even has a cool little handle. Image via.

I reached some point about halfway through my mission -- a year out -- when I decided I needed to actually cook good food for myself so I could raise my overall physical and spiritual welfare. But the trick was using the tools that I had available to me. Like I said, Bulgarian markets don't sell corn chips and salsa. It's tragic, but it's true. You can find pale imitations of the real thing, but they're just shadows on the wall of the cave. Not worth it. So I decided to figure out how to cook Bulgarian style, and the result has changed my life. I did stuffed peppers a few times, and they were delicious but too much work. Thing is, missionaries are always sort of on a time crunch, and the less time it took to make my meals, the better. I figured out how to make tarator, Shopska salads, and the clay pot meal, and these became my bread and butter. Normally the clay pot meal would take a very long time to bake in the oven, but microwaves are magical things.

The trick with the clay pots is fresh ingredients and, most importantly, the sauce. There's this red pepper sauce called lyutenitsa in Bulgaria akin to spaghetti/marinara sauce, and it's delicious. You just gotta slather everything in the pot with it. So why not leave you with my own recipe? The best part about the clay pot is that you can really put in whatever you want. And if you don't have a snazzy clay pot to cook it in, just use a casserole dish. Oh yeah, almost forgot the second most important part: buy delicious white bread (like French or Italian) and scoop out the clay pot stuff with the bread. That's how it's done.

Caveat on the recipe: I'm doing it per (small) clay pot. You'd want to add a whole bunch more of everything for a big casserole. Also, basic marinara sauce works pretty well if you don't want to go to the trouble or ordering or making lyutenitsa yourself. Just Google "homemade lyutenitsa recipes" if you're interested. I actually have some legit Bulgarian lyutenitsa that I ordered from malincho.com, I suggest Olineza as a good brand but Deroni is pretty good too.

Bulgarian Clay Pot Meal

Per pot, i.e. per serving:

• Half of one of those monster big tomatoes 
• about one quarter of a big green bell pepper
• as much onion as you want. If you're big on onions, put more in. Not so big, you know what to do.
• a big old square chunk of feta cheese near the bottom w/olive oil or sunflower seed oil
• a handful or however much you want of good summer sausage, the more flavorful (and less hammy) the better
• plenty of lyutenitsa, make sure you mix it in well, it keeps the pot from going dry and gives it most of its flavor
• more feta on top
• you can choose to salt and pepper the tomatoes if you want
• put an egg on the top of it all, pepper it well

If you want to put each pot in the microwave, they're normally done in like seven or eight minutes. You can add the egg at the beginning, too. If you do it in the oven, I suggest like 375/400 for at least 45 minutes, maybe an hour, depends on how soft you want the vegetables to be. Also, if doing it in the oven, you can choose to add the eggs on top later if you want, like 15 minutes before you want to take the pots out. If you really like the eggs, I suggest adding two per pot. They're delicious.

Remember, you can get crazy with what you put in the pot. I just had this meal over at my sister's house a few days ago and she put mushrooms and red peppers in too. All of it was delicious.