A recipe for self-made sour cream butter is at the same time a recipe for butter, crème fraîche and for buttermilk. I am a big fan of ice-cold buttermilk in summer and I love to cook with crème fraîche. Unfortunately, both products are hard to get in Sofia. Only the German supermarkt Hit sells them, and they are often sold out. Making butter at home makes that shortage a little bit easier to live with.
Ketchup is one of the industrial products from the supermarket that can be prepared at home with amost zero effort. And you can re-invent home-made ketchup every time you cook it. It invites to experiments with spices and ingredients and is, by the way, a handy method for saving tomatoes that are no longer shiny and flawless, from being thrown away.
The only real waste from brewing beer is draff, that is what is left off from cooking the malt. You can feed it to animals or compost it but I replaced the sunflower seeds from my favorite bread recipe with the draff from the last brewing day.
Olive paste is spread on every second sandwich in Bulgaria. On a recent visit home in Cologne I desparately needed some olive paste (for a vegetarian burger) and could not find any in shops around. I didn't search for a long time though because I was pretty sure that it is dead easy to do yourself. That way want of something can become a stroke of luck.
Chard was mostly missing until recently at Bulgarian greengrocers. But now it is available every now and then. Considering the rareness of the trove, picking the right recipe was a challenge. I opted for the most simple one, the classical variant with boiled potatoes and egg.
Lentils are high in plant proteins and as such an important constituent of a low-meat or meat-free diet. In traditional German cuisine they normally appeared in stews with lumps of bacon and wurst. Nowadays they experience a much more creative treatment and also come in many different kinds.
