Winter Salad

It might also be called ‘Royal Salad’. This is a mixture of raw vegetables, generally cauliflower, peppers, garlic and carrot (although this will vary) floating in pickling vinegar mixed with a little salt and sugar. Like lutenitsa, this is usually made in the autumn and stored in jars for use in the winter months when fresh produce isn’t so readily available. It’s nice with a little paprika sprinkled on the top and goes very well with rakia. In fact, I suspect that eating winter salad is an excuse to drink rakia the whole year round – it is for me, anyway.

Spokoino (спокойно)

An instruction: ‘calm down’ or ‘relax’ or ‘take it easy’. I’m a teacher so I tend to use this a lot – it can also be shortened into slang: spoko, which is generally good for an easy laugh in the classroom, much like k’vo? I’m sure that the amusement here, however, comes from my pronunciation which I know isn’t quite right. This is due to my system of learning vocabulary which is almost entirely based on word association. As an example, for this word, I imagine a cockney Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise shouting: ‘Spock! Oi! No!’

Lutenitsa

A sauce made primarily from roasted peppers. It goes with almost everything, especially red meat, but you can also eat it on its own on toast or as a dip. Every supermarket will have several long shelves devoted to different brands but the best, of course, is homemade and you generally make it at the start of autumn. To do this, you’ll need an afternoon sweating over your chushkopek roasting several kilograms of peppers one by one, as well as a few aubergines, some carrots, garlic, cumin, salt and tomato puree. Then you peel everything and blend it all together.

Chushkopek

With characteristic self-depreciating humour, the chushkopek is touted as being Bulgaria’s proudest invention. It’s a device for roasting peppers. If you cut a howitzer shell in half, the bottom half would look like a chushkopek and it weighs about the same, thick metal with a well in the centre that’s wide enough for a single pepper. You might get a handful of chilis in there or a narrow aubergine, but peppers are its primary concern. When you start using it, you realise why it’s so industrial looking – if was built from anything less than military grade armour, it would melt.