Cooking LSL

Every time we’re in Greece — most often Halkidiki — I find the nearest bakery and order bougatsa. Warm phyllo, creamy semolina custard, a snowfall of powdered sugar and cinnamon on top. It’s the one thing I never skip there, and since nobody sells it where I live, I learned to make it at home.

This bougatsa recipe is the closest I’ve gotten to the bakery version, a...

Juicy mini meatloaf baked in a muffin tin with a sticky BBQ glaze. Ready in about 20 minutes and perfect for meal prep, lunchboxes, and busy weeknights.

I started making meatloaf in a muffin tin the night I didn’t have an hour to wait on dinner. A full loaf takes almost that long to cook through, and then it still has to rest.

Split into muffin cups, ...

Village salad is the one I make on repeat from July through September, whenever my counter fills up with ripe tomatoes and I don’t want to turn on the stove.

It’s a real Bulgarian salad — tomatoes, cucumbers, fire-roasted peppers, and white beans — not a lettuce salad with feta thrown on top. The beans turn it from a side dish into an actual meal, and it’s on the t...

This is the coffee ice cream I make when I want something that actually tastes like coffee — not a vague, sweetened flavor, but real espresso, slightly bitter, deeply rich, the kind that keeps you going back for one more scoop.

I make it in my KitchenAid with the frozen bowl attachment, and it comes together faster than most people expect.

The thing I...

A no bake yogurt cake the way we make it in Bulgaria — airy gelatin-set yogurt cream, no crust, no oven, with an easy low carb swap.

My mom is not a baker, but parfe she made. In Bulgaria in the ’90s the store shelves didn’t offer much in the way of sweets, so this airy, gelatin-set yogurt cream — hers was with strawberries — was dessert at our house, and I love...