About us

Hello, my dear friends,

My name is Anna, but all my friends call me Annie. I can not say that I cook since birth, but for sure I have been enjoying delicious meals and sweets prepared by the women in our family – mom, my two grandmothers, aunts, cousins, etc. As a child, my grandmother Anastasia, whose name I care, taught me how to pull the dough layers for banitsa (traditional Bulgarian cheese pie with very thin dough layers and cheese). My mom used to allow me to beat the batter for the cake with a mixer (a sponge cake, with no baking powder). And maybe for this reason culinary stuff and engagements are not something far and unknown to me.

My work in real life has nothing to do with culinary art. I have graduated in international economic relations in an academic Bulgarian town at the Danube river, Svishtov (this spring I even took my doctor’s degree) and I almost my whole life I have been practicing insurance (a more specific one – covering financial risks). During the recent years I have noticed that mixing some ingredients and preparing something to eat helps me to escape from reality, and even though the preparation process is sometimes quite time- and labour-intensive, I don’t feel tired. And in order not to bother my friends on Facebook, where I used to publish photos of my “work”, I created my page – Home cooking with Annie.

I met Jeff shortly before he married my best friend, Maya, and before getting a Bulgarian visa. When we were visiting each other, one of us was always prepared something – Jeff was glad to serve a barbecue or a meat roll, and I often kneaded a different type of bread or prepared something sweet. And this is the way the idea for the site came – on its own. We decided to share pictures and recipes of the tasty experiments we were constantly preparing. Since Jeff does not speak Bulgarian (yet), we made the page bilingual. We believe that our recipes will also be useful for culinary enthusiasts outside Bulgaria.

Let me introduce to you the other chef in our little virtual kitchen, Jeff. He is an American, a real American from an unknown for us small town called Weems in Virginia. If he has to write an introduction for himself, I have no doubt that he would rather write something of the sort “Hi! My name is Jeff. I am a killer and fief (i.e., thief). Yes, now I have to explain what is behind this. We often joke with him that the Americans killed the Indians to steal the recipe for corn bread, and and also Mexicans to get their chili recipe… A “fief” is his way to make fun of our foreign pronunciation, since the “thief” coming out of our mouths often sounds like “fief”. So … since we would not want in our nice, cozy, charming, friendly, culinary site, with so much positive energy and love to have killers and thieves, please allow me to say a few words about Jeff.

He is good, responsible, not speaking Bulgarian, air soft fan (checl Google, don’t worry, that’s what I did when I first heard about it), extremely loving his wife and my friend Maya and a totally fresh American immigrant in Bulgaria. We will not be going into details in this almost yearlong saga for acquiring his residence permit (thank you, European Union!), but in between all those meetings, conversations and visiting we had many pleasant moments and we did a lot of cooking, which you will see documented here.

 

Of course, we must also present our “guest” chefs – our partners Maya and Theo. They do not cook often, but when they do, something really delicious comes out!

 

Maya, in fact Dr. Maya, is a dental doctor, a real doctor, not like me 🙂 She makes miracles with people’s smiles, turning them wider and beautiful. Besides, she is also an incredible photographer, writer, editor, polyglot, and so many other great things, but mainly she is a very good person and a real friend. Ah, and she does not eat meat! So her recipes will mainly include potatoes and something green, in the best scenario – tuna! 🙂

Theo is an engineer, or as our 9-year-old daughter said when she was in kindergarten: “Daddy works as a master.” And he is really a master – there is nothing he can not repair. He seldom enters the kitchen, but he definitely possesses the gift to combine flavours and his culinary experiments are worth trying.

Welcome to our culinary place!

Our cuisine is homemade and delicious. It makes you lick your fingers. Try our recipes and you will see for yourselves!

Enjoy your meal! Bon appetit!

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