motodraconis | May contain nuts...

Churchkhela! Otherwise known as scary brown Georgian nut-sticks. These are strings of hazelnuts or walnuts dipped in grape juice thickened with flour. They originate in Georgia (you'll see them for sale everywhere) though you can get them in Russia, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey (though I've not seen them in any of those places personally.) More on them later...possibly.

Nuts (hazels and walnuts) are something of a theme in Azerbaijan and Georgian food, a bit of a bummer if you are allergic.

venta you may want to turn away now, or anyone else of a sensitive disposition, as the next pics are of Piti.

Azerbaijan Food.

Getting traditional food in Baku proved difficult, we had no local guide in Azerbaijan, and the tour was fairly new so had not built up experience in good restaurants. We went to one cafe in Baku and had kebabs and side dishes such as cheese, bread and aubergine dip. This cafe, like pretty much all Azerbaijan cafes and tea houses, was patronized only by men, which made you perpetually feel as if you had stumbled into a gay bar. However, Baku was expensive and the guides and fellow travellers were not especially adventurous (one of whom would not eat any vegetables or salad.) On arriving in Baku, they went straight to McDogshit...

...I left in disgust, but being in a rush, was unable to find anywhere to eat by myself in a main square that seemed to have only pizza and Kentucky Fried chicken on offer. :(

However, things improved muchly when we got to Sheki - considered the gastronomic capital of Azerbaijan. One thing I wanted to try was the piti - a speciality of Sheki, but a variant you can find in Iran, Tajikstan ad Armenia. It is mutton cooked in a sealed crock, with an important ingredient of tail fat (warning, links to a photo of sheep bums.) That white blob you can see floating at the top of the crock is a big blob of tail fat...

First of all, you pour the juice from the crock onto bread to make a starter soup and sprinkle with sumac, pots of which are provided with the salt and pepper.

Having drunk the soup, you pour out the rest and smush it all together into a paste, being careful to mix in all the tail fat. (The wobbly white stuff you can see in the photo - a fair bit o' fat!) Sprinkle more sumac to taste.

It's actually not bad! While the guide removed her fat, I ended up mixing all of my fat portion in, so as not to miss out on the authenticity of the dish - including the dollop you can see on the side plate on the left, that I'd siphoned off in some sort of spirit of healthy-eating, but later re-added to my plate in the spirit of tasty eating. Like duck, fat is something that tends to add flavour, and while I was nervous that I might end up with crippling stomach-ache later (a common penalty I experience whenever I eat fatty foods) I escaped unscathed with no fat-ache! Here's an interesting blog on the properties of fat tail, and why it is considered such an essential ingredient in certain parts of the world.

For those wanting something more mainstream, this huge chicken and veg dish served on a charcoal brazier went down very well...

I fancied a pudding, but the waiter reeled off so many names in Azeri that I didn't understand and couldn't decide. Seeing my confusion, he returned with a tray of everything on offer so I could choose...

Nuts, local cakes and sweets and a selection of candied (jammy) fruits (which I tried) - grapes, apricots, strawberries, red currents, raspberries, plums and cherries - though I have no idea what those black balls are, they appeared to have no stones or space where a stone might have been removed and tasted like nothing I could identify.

On more familiar ground, tea-drinking (men-only generally) is a big thing in Azerbaijan, and in Sheki, is usually accompanied by their famous local cakes...

The thin cake below is the famous Sheki Halva, a honey laden paste of ground up nuts sandwiched between thin wafers. The link calls this wafer "mesh-like guinea worm" but I suspect something has been lost in translation here. The other (fatter) cake is a hazelnut and honey confection and really nom. I tried both on the spot in the shop (to the amusement of the shopkeepers, who ended up giving me the second cake portion for free) but the hazelnut one was my fave.

Cake-makers...

The other classic Sheki sweet was these... candied hazelnuts on the left and peanuts on the right. I ADORE hazelnuts so I was in heaven with the candied ones. Alas that hazelnuts are generally so buggeringly expensive in the UK.

The Blow-up was a bubble-gum sweet given to me in Baku in lieu of small change. I've no idea where I put it so it is as yet, unsampled.

Now for the Georgian food! Of which there was a lot. But on first crossing the border, I tasted my first "Georgian soft drink" - lemonade made with tarragon instead of lemons. Tarragonade.

If you can get past the radioactive (and possibly actually toxic) colour, this stuff really ~~glows~~ grows on you, despite its slightly medicinal flavour.

Our local guide... with the Tarragonade...

The lads had been ogling the menu, which included pickled pig cheek and foot, and any alcohol you like so long as it's vodka... but he took their interest to mean they wanted to taste the pig bits...

...seizing the moment of confusion when they were presented with this plate, I dived for a bit of the cheek, which was meaty and good, (even though it was cold and suffused with vinegar) but the remaining trotters were just skin and bone and no fun, unlike Khinkali (famous Georgian dumplings) which are great fun to eat, and taste delicious.

You're expected to sprinkle them with pepper and pick them up by the knobbly "handles" at the top. Then you nibble a small hole in the dumpling and suck out the juice (the meat is cooked raw in the dumpling, sealing in the juices.) Once sucked, you can tuck into the rest of the dumpling, but you should not eat the handles - which is considered very rude and a sign of poverty.

The cafe was still using an abacus!

Breakfast at the homestay...

Now the Georgians are really into their wine, (their beer's not bad either) but the act of making and drinking wine is deeply woven into the culture. As a result of many invasions by Turks, Mongols and Iranians, drinking wine became a symbol of being Christian - distinctively marking you out as a native Georgian rather than a non-native, non-alcohol imbibing Muslim. Indeed, the local guide's first act on meeting up with us was to gift us this huge cannister of vino...

Since only myself and Hannah (one of the Dragoman guides) drank wine, we hadn't a hope in hell of finishing that bottle. Georgian wine is stronger than usual to boot. Their traditional method involves throwing all of the grape - skins, stalks and pips together to ferment in giant underground amphora lined in beeswax (standard wine-making strains the bits out for the main ferment.) This we saw when we visited a small, local winemaker...

Who then invited us to sample his homebrew...this is Georgian "white" wine, a deep orange colour from the intensive all-bits-included process...

Likewise, Georgian "red" wine is much darker than usual and generally called Black Wine.

Both were bloody good, and served up with cheese on bread and walnuts on the wine-makers veranda, shortly before a vast and seemingly endless feast of local dishes was served up.

Preparing the salad...

Preparing the kebabs...

Starters: Devilled eggs, aubergines spread with walnut paste, pickled cucumber, cheese, salad and flat bread.

Mushroom salad and bean salad...

Meat and potatoes!

Naturally, the winemaker continuously topped up our glasses with an endless supply of his wine. Eventually I had to leave my glass full and untouched in order to avoid ending up under the table. (Too much alcohol sends me to sleep.)

Toasts, drinking wine from horns - called Kantsi ყანწი. (Another major Georgian thing.)

Pork kebabs...

More booze! Chacha this time... Georgian brandy!

The cook.

So stuffed afterwards! A proper სუფრა! (Supra or feast.) Gotta admit, the wine was bloody good (did I mention that already?) When I returned home and took my first sip of ordinary red wine (not an expensive red, but not a bad one) I couldn't help grimacing. The sooner Georgia joins the EU and starts shipping its wine to us the better!

Ooof! Now another big thing is honey. I have never been anywhere that dished up honeycombs - these are from the hotel breakfast in Tbilisi...

One of the monasteries we visited made its own honey, here are the hives outside of the monastery walls...

Bees!

We were shown the little workshop where the honey was jarred up, and given a taste. I swear... I have NEVER tasted honey this good. It was like essence of apricots, not the usual sugary, treacley taste I associate with honey. I had to buy a huge jar. Which sadly mean't I didn't have any room in my luggage for wine. :(