This will not be a blog about cooking machboos.
I’ve already written about machboos, and I did not much change the recipe from when I made it for Qatar last August. The only real change I made was to use chicken thighs, which somehow made an excellent dish even better.
On paper, Albania has the potential to be home to one of the world’s great cuisines.
It’s at that cultural crossroads sweet spot occupied by precious few other places, a meeting point between Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, the Christian and Muslim worlds, Italy and Greece.
As I’ve said before, I didn’t start this project to create culinary masterpieces.
Sometime about a year ago, I was just getting bored with dinner. We were caught in a rut, and it felt like in this big, wide world of ours, we could do better than a rotation of Italian, Mexican, Thai, Chinese and Indian inspired dinners.
The last dish on Round One was kind of like the boss level of a video game: Something I knew I had to overcome, but wasn’t necessarily happy about it. Continue reading
Nation Plates 