„Fake“ fast-food

I'm currently in Tirana  and made an observation that I thought might be interesting for the food related topics we dealt with in class. Walking the streets of the city one will soon realize the fast-food restaurants here are not like the ones we know in western Europe or America.. but then they still sort of are, they are just made the Albanian way.

By this I mean that although there are no Western Fast-Food chains like McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken Tirana has it's own version of them. For instance they have a place called “Albania Fried Chicken” in lieu of “Kentucky Fried Chicken”. The logo is the same but just with an A instead of a K and the whole restaurant is practically built to look like the original KFC

The closest thing to McDonalds is “Kolonat”, and well it comes pretty close. Basically Kolonat offers the same Burgers as McDonalds but additionally also serves Pasta, Pizza and Souvlaki. The biggest difference might be the prices as restaurants in Albania tend to be pretty cheap compared to the ones in Austria ( A big

Pizza at Kolonat costs 290 Leke which is about 2,90$).

The for me best Fast-Food restaurant chain there was “Goody's” a Greek restaurant chain with burgers, Souvlakis, sandwiches etc--

Although Albania and it's Capital might be the last European place to come to ones mind for traveling I say it's worth a visit. Tirana is an exciting lively city with lots of young people that offers a big number of shops and places to have coffee, lunch or dinner.

Travel the world from your kitchen

This semester food is gonna be one of the major topics in English class, so I guess I will be posting about that topic a couple more times, but as for now I'm starting out with this one. First of all I like to cook in general, but the thing I like best about it is that it's also another way of getting an insight on other cultures. So my

Khoresht-e fesenjān

favorite things to cook are dishes from foreign countries as it allows at least your taste buds to travel there. A week ago I read a great book called "Prisoner of Tehran" by Marina Nemat (I might review it in a later post) which arose my curiosity to learn more about Iran and Persian culture. After reading another book about Iranian politics and people's everyday life there i decided to try out a Persian recipe. The Persian cuisine uses pomegranate a lot which is one of my favorite fruits so I decided to make Khoresht-e fesenjān. It's some kind of stew with a sauce made from pomegranate syrup and walnuts. The dish was easy to prepare and turned out to have a great taste. While the first bite may be a little strange because it tastes nothing like familiar to anything else (at least to me) the combination of the sweet fruit , chicken and nuts with Persian rice is great.

As I said the thing I enjoy most about cooking is getting to know dishes and eating habits of other cultures and there are some good blogs out there related to that topic. I once read one where a woman was alphabetically going through all the countries of the world and prepared a typical desert. Sadly I didn't find it anymore but this one is quite interesting too: http://globalcookies.blogspot.co.at/ . In this blog you can find a variety of cookie recipes from all over the world.

If someone is interested in the fesenjan recipe here is the link to the recipe i used. It's in Ferman but if you google you can sure fnd an English one too

http://www.chefkoch.de/rezepte/993901204707395/Huhn-in-Granatapfel-Walnuss-Sauce.html