Simple Albanian Lunch

When our cruise ship stopped for the day in Durres, we hired a local Albanian guide to take us around to Kruje and Tirana, the capital.  He took us to a family-run restaurant near downtown Tirana so we were treated to a home-cooked meal.  It was a simple Albanian lunch, well, lunch is the main Albanian meal so there is really nothing simple about it if you have to cook it.

What we had:

Simple salad of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and onions

Simple bread - but memorable because it was dense and crispy with great texture

Simple appetizer dip of tomatoes, eggplant and cheese but it's rather complex in taste and texture - I  love it, especially with the bread.  They gave us five bowls of these for eleven of us  - if we'd finished this, we probably wouldn't need anything else for lunch.

Simple vegetable soup with lots of veggies

Spinach and cheese phyllo - I know, it's Greek, it's Turkish, but it's also Albanian - it's a very common dish for this area of the world but hardly simple

  

And finally the meat dish - simply grilled.  I love the lamb but everybody else voted for the very tender chicken breast

The name of the restaurant, in case you are ever in Tirana...

Seafood in Croatia

We tried squid in three different Croatian towns, Hvar, Split and Dubrovnik - Hvar came out on top with the sweetest tasting.  We did not have an actual meal in Hvar, it was more like an afternoon snack, so it could have some bearing on our tastebuds.  The squid was grilled with very little oil and the tentacles were very crispy.  

Squid and risotto in Hvar

The lunch in Split was very interesting.  We were browsing menus along the waterfront tourist strip when we were approached by the waiter at one of the restaurants.  He proposed a custom menu for us and negotiated a price for the two fishes and squid that the four of us would like to try.  The emphasis was on "fresh" fish versus "frozen" - they were both on the menu and differently priced.  I have to give bonus points to the Croatian restauranteurs for their honesty.   Obviously we went for the "fresh" although these days with the expert fresh freeze techniques on fishing boats, could one really tell the difference?  It was also difficult to tell whether we got a good deal or not but we rather liked the waiter's personality, we were tired and hungry, so we sat down.   The fish and squid both turned out to be excellent.  

"Fresh" fish and squid in Split

In Dubrovnik, we were even more tired and hungry and practically sat down at the first place that we could - a narrow alley in the tourist strip.  Dubrovnik is so crowded with tourists these days that I'm sure anyone with a hole in the wall could make some money cooking fish for hungry tourists.  This particular hole seemed to be a family-run business but it didn't charge any less than the hotel-run restaurant in Split.  The food had a little more grease but still fresh and quite tasty.  I guess the proximity to the sea really helped.  While the food on board our cruise ship Azamara was excellent, you could count on anything we had to be frozen, well, "fresh" frozen.  We most certainly didn't have fish like this.

A week later in a Tuscany street market, the fishmonger identified for us the difference between the squid, calamari and octopus.  From that lesson, I would say that we had squid at all three Croatian towns.  We also had small fried fish in Dubrovnik - when we got to Cinque Terre in Tuscany, we found that they were anchovies - clearly quite different and tasted much better than the anchovies I tasted here in Canada, usually of the soggy variety and usually on pizza!