Guus Bosman

Surmichki means "small stuffed leaves", and they are delicious packages of rice wrapped in grape or cabbage leaves. In Cyrillic, сърмички.

There are endless ways to prepare the stuffing for surmichki. This is a family recipe; it's vegetarian and can thus be used for a Bulgarian Christmas Eve dinner (Бъдни Вечер).

Where to find the ingredients

Grape leaves are pretty easy to find in United States; many grocery stores carry them. Cabbage leaves are harder to locate. The cabbage leaves have undergone a sauer-kraut like process to make them tender and sauer. We found them in Food World in Durham, NC, and this was actually the first time we saw them outside Bulgaria. This stuffing works equally well for both types.

One other thing to keep in mind: one of the herbs in the stuffing is very hard to find in the States. It's called гьозум or джоджен, and is related to what's known as spearmint in the United States. However, spearmint is more minty in taste. If you like minty, then you can use spearmint. Otherwise I recommend to experiment and use your own herbs. In order of descending Bulgarian-ess: thyme, tarragon, or oregano.

Ingredients

- A can of grape leaves, or a can of cabbage leaves
- Half an onion
- 2 tablespoons oil
- 1,5 cup of rice
- Джоджен (see note above)
- Parsley (fresh parsley is of course the best, dried works okay too).
- Paprika powder
- Pinch of salt

For the first time in years we celebrated Christmas at home. It was great to cook budni vecher, a tradition we started in Haarlem many years ago. It's a Bulgarian Christmas Eve dinner, made without any animals products like meat, milk or butter.

The main dishes we had were stuffed grape and cabbage leaves, various beans and a home made bread. The latter with a coin for luck, which fell to Sasha. Dessert was baklava from a Turkish store in Chapel Hill.

It was delicious and a lot of fun to prepare together.

Yesterday was an easy and relaxing day. This morning we woke up to a snowy world, around 4 to 5 inches of snow.

I had planned to work from home today, since many co-workers are out of office and it's very quiet, work-wise. Yesterday evening I decided to come in to assist a customer with their pre-holiday shutdown of their lab. It's a power savings initiative and using our product they automatically shutdown a large number of servers, which is pretty cool.

The phone call with them this morning went smoothly and I left the office around 2.00 pm.

At home the postman delivered a package, with a big smile:

"A package for Mr. Bosman?"

"Eh, yeah, that would be me" -- I was expecting a package from our headquarters, to replace my laptop screen.

"So, are you going to sign it as 'The Man'?" he said with a grin.

Today I'm hoping to go to Somerset. It snowed here overnight, and while there's not a lot of snow on the ground it might mean a lot of delays. Let's hope our 9.00 am flight is still going!