Recipe: Ljutenitsa or Pinjur... though not exactly ;)

Yesterday I gave a jar of Ajvar as a gift to a baba I know while describing Day-3 of our Ajvar-making weekend. I said we'd made another local specialty called Љутеница but she said that we didn't add hot (lute) peppers so it couldn't really be called lutenitsa. She suggested that it was more like Пинџур (pinjer) but since we didn't add tomatoes it wasn't exactly that either. Oh the dilema! So I teasingly suggest that we call it a combo of the two, something like, pinjenitsa (пинџеница). ;) No matter what name it goes by, the end product spread on bread with some creamy feta was delish!

From the 75 kilos of peppers we set aside about 15 that we cut up instead of ground. Same goes for a couple eggplant. Together with several cloves of garlic, fresh chopped parsley, 1 liter-ish oil, 1/4th-ish liter vinegar, and decent helpings of salt and sugar to taste made up our pinjenitsa.

Throw it all in a tanjer (голем танџер) and put on the stove over a roaring fire. Cook for about 2 hours stirring constantly with a big wooden spoon until broken down and flavor-filled but not completely smooshy like Ajvar. Or you can do what we did and ask a neighbor-lady if it was done yet. :)

Our batch yielded about 12 small jars of this delectible spread... there were a few more but we (7 of us) ate it for lunch while it was still warm. ;)