Good morning foodie

A few dining out suggestions when breakfast in bed is not an option

Mommy diaries: Neat Freak

Outsized polyester contraptions – car seats, feeding chairs, chaise longues – clutter our small apartment.

Mommy Diaries: Dirt is good

My daughter is omnivorous - truly. She might crunch up her nose at the first taste of potato-zucchini puree, but keys, newspapers, crushed rock...mmm, yummy!

Mommy Diaries: Small wonders

This morning, when re-reading past Mommy Diaries (my particular form of mild writer's block), I was struck by the distance in my voice. While the column’s title suggests a kind of intimacy, I've often adopted a less emotional and more educational tone. It occurred to me that behind all that reason is a woman on guard.

Mommy Diaries: Sleep solution

For the first three months of her life, Rada fell asleep easily at night. Then she had a fever, followed by a nursing strike.

Mommy Diaries: Swimming lesson

Yesterday, four-month-old Rada swam for the first time. Contrary to what many people imagine, newborn-swimming is different from adult-swimming. No, you can’t throw a baby in a pool and expect that she will stay afloat for 10 minutes or swim a couple of laps before getting tired.

Mommy Diaries: Always a mother

My friend Katherine remembers taking her daughter, Anabel, camping in Lake Tahoe, California, years ago, when she was a few months old. She went with a girlfriend. They got there late; it was already dark and they put up the tent in the black of night. It got bitter cold and Katherine was convinced that Anabel might be freezing to death, so she hovered over her, checking her fat little arms and legs. Katherine didn't sleep a wink.

Month2Come - out on Friday January 30

February's Month2Come invites you on a gastronomic odyssey as we tell you everything you'll ever need to know about food and drink in Sofia and beyond. Rakiya, meat, wine, tea, coffee, online ordering, cheese, organic food, bakers, supermarket shopping - even mineral water - this is a themed issue brimming with practical information to cater to your every whim.

Weekend blog: A message to taxi drivers - put out the cig, turn off the chalga

I approach cab drivers with some trepidation, especially if I'm not crossing town from Lyulin to Mladost. Shorter distances can be greeted with an impenetrable look of boredom, followed by the silent wagging of a finger in decline. On several occasions, I've wondered whether I shouldn't apologise for assuming a local cabbie would be inconvenienced driving for a mere three leva. A couple of times, when the stakes were high, I simply barged in, pleaded and offered double what I knew it would cost, just so the driver would deign to deliver me more or less on time to an important appointment. And I still felt the driver thought he was doing me a favour.

Mommy Diaries: New gadget

For my 30th birthday, I got an Amazon Kindle, a device that allows me to carry around hundreds of e-books in what looks like a small leather-bound notebook. At first I was underwhelmed. There is no way, I thought, I'd deprive myself of the feel and smell of a printed book in favour of this electronic item that doesn't even show me the cover art. I like books and I like being surrounded by many of them, and this not-too-sleek thing in my lap (the Kindle team clearly judged ergonomics superior to design) was not what I called a book.

SkaraBar/СкараБар

It was about time someone restored the gourmet dignity of the word "skara", the Bulgarian word for "grill" and the most common way of preparing meat on the Balkan peninsula, in Sofia. In a city where the claim to culinary excellence has increasingly become the domain of fancy fusion cuisine, "skara" sometimes seemed an inferior concept, suited only to second-rate `hood joints. But just when grilled meatballs were beginning to seem endangered species in the world of Bulgarian fine dining, a couple of people spoke to me with true passion about the kyufte at SkaraBar. This was good-enough reason to book a table (making a reservation, it turned out, was a smart idea) in the small restaurant in Park Zaimov.

MOMMY DIARIES: Good-enough mother

Pssst, the boss is sleeping, so let me tell you this: I've failed. Which I am beginning to understand is precisely my job. Turns out that one-month-old Rada is a better teacher than I am. I've gotten her as far as "agu," but she's pushed me into proficiency in her language, so I am now able to understand "I'm hungry," "Burp me," "I'm uncomfortable," "Help me go to sleep," "I want to be entertained," "Are you here?" and so on, though to others all of these may sound like mild variations of crying.

Weekend blog: Obama's victory helped me get it, at last

When baby boomers would talk of their life in the 60s, we, generation X-ers, would teeter between envy (life was exciting then, you could do something for a change), eye-rolling boredom (with all due respect, but will you ever let John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. go?) and utter incomprehension (could you honestly believe that you've had to have lived those times to understand anything at all?).

Mommy Diaries: Breastfeeding sucks

Let me begin by reassuring you, the reader who might be put off by the title, that I support breastfeeding wholeheartedly. I am convinced of its benefits and pleased to see public awareness of them on the rise. I even hold the belief that sometime soon, it will become the pleasurable experience it is said to be. The very fact I no longer let out a yelp every time my daughter latches on is encouraging. Plus, she is beginning to focus further and for longer, so we may be approaching that fabled moment of eyes locking while she's on my breast. It's a good thing it's taken her a while, so she can be spared the sight of horror in her mother's eyes.

Calling the shots

I woke up thinking of Tillie Olsen. She was an American writer, associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists, best known for her collection of four short stories Tell Me a Riddle, a staple of college and university literature curricula in the United States. But it's not exactly Olsen's career that haunts me this morning. Someone once told me she wrote with one hand, holding her

Kushtata s Chasovnika

I could not ignore the fact that too many of the items in the salad bed came from a can

Once upon a time, Kushtata s Chasovnika (Clock House) was famed as one of Sofia's creme de la creme restaurants. I had noticed that the place is hardly the talk of the town these days, and yet, just like the stately mansion that houses the restaurant stands up proudly to the tests of time and taste, the restaurant's fabled reputation stood engraved in my imagination. I sought further reassurance on its

Weekend blog: Who's for change now?

McCain-Palin seize Obama's theme of change, but can they back it?

There has been so much fact-stretching and insufficient fact-checking accompanying the latest developments in the dramatic saga of the US presidential elections, that some confusion is inevitable. Maybe it is worth re-establishing the basics here, such as the fact that the president of the United States and the people in key federal leadership positions for the last eight years are members of the Republican Party. If you've only tuned into US politics lately, you may have gotten that wrong, for the incumbent candidate, John McCain often sounds like a speaker at a Barack Obama (his Democratic opponent) rally these days.

Weekend Blog: The Big Mac has gone petite sophisticate

Once I found myself starving on a dusty road somewhere in upstate New York. There was hardly any evidence of life in sight, save for the looming golden arches. It was the first - and last - time I ate at McDonalds. Don't get me wrong - I was living on a tight budget in a small town with a choice of two decent restaurants, so I ate ate plenty of pepperoni pizza and Buffallo chicken wings in the wee hours of the night, sucking hot chilly sauce off my fingers, so I woudn't stain my keyboard while writing some paper on the evils of capitalism, globalisation and The Third World. A greasy hamburger should have fit well into my diet of those days, except I couldn't take the smell of industrial refrigerators and fried-out oil.

Foreign media quotes EC's leaked draft report on Bulgaria

The European Commission report on the administration of EU funds in Bulgaria, which is due to come out on Wednesday, July 23, and is expected to offer caustic criticism and suggest harsh sanctions, has been front-page news in Bulgaria and drawn the attention of foreign media as well.

Red Cafe

There's much more to Mediterranean cuisine than olive oil and pasta, but a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant that charges for olive oil and bungles on its pasta is a broken promise. And yet, how often do we forgive loved ones their failure to fully deliver on their promises? Just as often, perhaps, as I'm likely to return to Red Cafe, despite some major faux pas in an otherwise impressive act.

Weekend Blog: On gay friends and those bloody faggots

Two years ago, friends and family accepted my decision to return to live in Bulgaria with mixed feelings. There was the fear of inevitable frustrations and disappointments mixed with a semi-hopeful search for any sign of them. But I wasn't going to take any i-told-you-so's. Still, some second-string personae - The Bleeding Liberal, the Bourgeois Bohemian - kept muscling their way from the wings, threatening to spoil my act of strength, grace and deftness. Common concerns proved unfounded - I found a job easily, I endured the bureaucracy of government institutions and patiently waited on long queues so that when I finally reached the clerk's desk I could be directed to a different queue, I got used to information lines ringing into eternity.

Bulgarian theatre moves to Varna

The beginning of the summer usually means that the cultural events are shifting from Sofia to the major cities to the seaside. Such is the case with theatre and the 16th International Theatre Festival Varna Summer, which starts on June 2 and will last until June 12. More than 30 performances will be staged during the festival, with half of the plays produced abroad.

Weekend Blog: Hey, Sex and the City, Sex and the Ivy is where it's at.

When Sex and the City premiered a decade ago, unprecedented frank talk about vibrators, orgasms and blow jobs instantly turned the HBO sitcom into an emblem of the emancipated, sexually liberated 21st century woman. Or at least that's what they said.

Sunday blog: My rap on wraps

My grandmother was fastidious about her canvas shopping bags. She washed and ironed them regularly and demanded their prompt return from borrowers. In those pre-1989 days, milk was sold in pre-sealed plastic bags, which we dutifully washed and reused for storing food in the freezer. There were hardly any other plastic bags in those days. Even in the first post-totalitarian years, plastic bags were a luxury of the West, coming mostly from duty-free stores, and especially precious when branded with Marlboro or Camel. Back then, it was even fashionable to carry your schoolbooks in such plastic bags. Except, it wasn't hip to carry them using the handles; one had to roll the top and carry the bag like a plastic clutch, even if it meant having one's nails permanently stained in Marlboro red.

Saturday Blog: All is Quiet on the Democratic Front; what are Clinton and Obama up to?

The campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama seem to have called a truce. It's a relief to be temporarily spared the view of the Democratic presidential nominee candidates' dirty laundry, though it makes my daily visits to the Politics section of The New York Times slightly less thrilling. It's been almost a week, an eon in media time, since either of the candidates was caught misspeaking, misjudging, misleading. After Obama fell short of disowning his (now former) pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright's following the reverend's incendiary statements and after Hillary Clinton reminisced about ducking sniper fire at a Bosnia airport in the face of documentary footage of a perfectly peaceful greeting ceremony, the lightning rod supply has ran out.

GreenCat Gallery presents International Modern and Contemporary Art Auction on April 14

The Third International Modern and Contemporary Art Auction will be held on April 14 2008, starting at 7pm, at the Institut Francais, co-organiser of the event together with GreenCat Gallery. Participants will have the opportunity to bid on 115 works of art, including a section dedicated to books, engravings and documents from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Bulgarian documentary wins Peabody award

Venelin Petkov's TV documentary A Journey Across Afghanistan: Opium and Roses won the George Foster Peabody award for broadcasting excellence in news and entertainment, the oldest and possibly most prestigious honour in electronic media in the United States. In April 2007, the crew of Bulgaria's Balkan News Corporation (bTV) took off to a mountain valley in eastern Afghanistan, where poppies are usually grown for opium. Their Afghan driver spoke Bulgarian.

The Sofia Echo launches weekend blogs

The coming weekend sees more than just the newest Friday issue of Bulgaria's national English-language newspaper, The Sofia Echo: on April 5 and 6, sofiaecho.com launches The Sofia Echo Weekend Blogs. Every weekend, two writers will post blogs on topical issues from Bulgaria and around the world. This Saturday and Sunday, read what Vanya Rainova and Clive Leviev-Sawyer have to say. Weekends to come will feature a rotating selection of our bloggers.

Five of the world's greatest DJs to spin at Yalta Club in April

Yalta Club's new initiative, The Masters of Sound, will gather some of the most renowned spinners of the world house scene in a single month. In April, the stage of the veritable Sofia clubbing institution will host Antoine Clamaran, official resident DJ of the world's leading fashion channel, FTV,(April 4); the godfather of New York house music, Danny Tenaglia (April 9); Dimitri From Paris, resident of Playboy Mansion and the most respected French DJ of all times (April 12); Bulgarian clubbers' favourite, Hernan Cattaneo (April 18); and the British DJ legend Pete Tong (April 26).

INSIGHT: Why I am a woman for Obama

I'm tired of pseudo-feminist interpretations suggesting that contempt for Senator Hillary Clinton is rooted in misogyny. I'm disheartened by sisters guilt-tripping sisters for not supporting the first woman to run for president of the United States. So, even though I'm not eligible to vote, I'm a woman supporting Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.