Burek and Palachinke, or why going on a diet in Serbia is a lost cause

After six months of breaking every healthy eating rule in Russia (not hard in a country where there is no such thing as skim milk and fruit is what you get inside sour cherry cheesecake) James and I decided to kick the sugar habit and start our Serbian sojourn as paragons of nutrition. We live just five minute's walk from the best fresh produce market in Belgrade, and some of my best experiences in the city so far have been chatting to the vendors in my broken Serbian, trying to explain sweet potato (sladkii potato? potato with sugar? Ne, young girl, not possible!) or being dragged by one seller to his competitor's stall to get better avocados than the ones he was offering.

As a result, we have done a great job of filling our new apartment with pomegranites and oranges from Turkey, fresh nuts, dried figs, and a huge mound of carrots and potatos we buy from a woman who brings them from her farm every day, having dug them up herself. Lack of healthy options is therefore not what is stopping me becoming a zen temple of healthy eating. The real problem, and one around which I can see no way, is our local 'pekara', or insidious purveyor of delicious, melt-in-you-mouth baked goods, smells from which waft in the apartment if I step out onto our balcony in the morning.

The pekara sells what I'm fast learning are the usual suspects of Serbian heart-attack-on-a-plate food. These include burek, something which can essentially be found all over the Mediterranean (in Greece its spanakopita, for everyone back home in Australia), but on which the Serbians have their own twist. Thick layers of buttery pastry encase a gooey mixture of goats cheese, vegetables and (if you want) meat. They cut it like a huge pie and give you an enermous wedge which, if you are a proper Balkanite, you are meant to eat with sour yoghurt as an accompaniment (this may sound strange, but in Russia I got into the habit of having deliciously tart sour cream or smetana as an accompaniment to everything, from soup to a bowl of porridge, and find I can't eat anything decadent without that wonderful sour taste any more). Along with this, they sell freshly baked 'kifla', crescent shaped serbian bread rolls, and the best croissant and pain au chocolat I've had outside Paris.

As if this temptation wasn't enough of a stress confronting me everyday when I walk out the door of our building, each time I go into the city centre I am faced with endless palachinke stalls - thats bliny, or crepes, or pancakes, depending on where you are from. Palachinke are most like the bliny we had in Russia than anything else I've had - huge, and typically filled with sour cream and vegetables, or jam, caramel, chocalate, whatever will give you a coronary basically. I had one on Sunday that was nutella, vanilla icecream and peanut caramel, nearly fainted half way through from the sugar rush and had to throw the rest dramatically away. Wasting sugary rich food is something I never do, so this is testament to the diabetes-in-solid-form nature of Serbian delicacies.

To be fair, Belgraders need something in their lives to cheer them up - they've had bombs, sanctions, and dictators in the last eight years, so I can't really begrudge them a (chocolate covered) pancake or five. It just doesn't really help my new year's resolution to be fabulously healthy. Funnily enough, Serbians all seem very svelte. I have no idea how the palachinke stalls stay in business because no one looks like they've been eating that many of them. Perhaps its some fabulous Balkans diet secret I can make money writing a book about and selling back home. Or perhaps they just have more self-discipline than a two week old puppy. Which is more than I can say for myself.