But one dish I remember people prepare is baked eggplant, zapekaný baklažán. Eggplant is a relative new comer to Slovak cooking, but it’s quite frequently found in modern recipes. There are several ways of preparing it. In making this recipe, I followed a recipe from mimibazar. This is an extremely easy and fast recipe. You can get everything ready in about 15 minutes, and have dinner ready an hour later.

Ingredients: 2 eggplants, 4 or 5 tomatoes, 3 cloves garlic, Brie/Camembert soft cheese, sliced mushrooms, grated hard cheese
Prep Time: 15 minutes plus 50 minutes for baking

Start by washing the eggplant (baklažán) and slicing it into slices about half inch thick. Sprinkle lemon juice and salt all over. This supposedly helps take some of the bitter taste of eggplant away, however, according to Wikipedia, this is no longer necessary with the modern varieties. Let sit for few minutes.

In the meantime, lightly grease a baking pan with oil and cover with bread crumbs. These will help absorb some of the moisture released during baking. Slice the remaining “vegetables” (zelenina). Preheat your oven to 375F.

Place half of the eggplant on bottom, follow by another layer of half the tomatoes, and then all of garlic. Finally add all of the soft cheese.

Then make another layer of eggplant, tomatoes, and mushrooms. Stick uncovered in the oven for 45 minutes.

Take out once the vegetables soften. Top with grated cheese (I used Monterey Jack). Stick back in the oven for additional 10 minutes or so until the cheese browns. I increased the oven temperature to 400F for this step.

And that’s it. Quite simple. Serve with hrianka. This dish looks very nice, although I am not yet fully sold on the taste. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve eaten an eggplant before this week. It’s definitely quite interesting, especially with the Brie cheese. Bit of an acquired taste, I suppose, perhaps the way some folks don’t like the lettuce soup (it is one of my favorites!). Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think.

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Ingredients: 4 potatoes, 2/3 cups of flour, 1 cup milk, small onion, bacon bits
Prep Time: 30 minutes

Peel and cube several potatoes (zemiaky). While they are cooking, chop one small onion (cibuľa) and few strips of bacon (slanina).

Once the potatoes get soft, strain most of the liquid out into a cup. Add flour and mash everything together. Then add the liquid back. Also add salt to taste.

If the porridge is too thick, add another cup of water or milk. You could also use less flour but then you end up with less porridge…

Bring the porridge (kaša) back to boil while stirring so the potatoes don’t burn your pan. At the same time, fry the onion on small heat. I started by first frying the bacon on small heat to render the fat. After about 5 minutes, I added the onion and also a bit of butter. Cook the porridge until skin forms on top and the porridge starts “puffing” all over the place. Fry the onions until they are crunchy.

Top with the onions and bacon and serve with a glass of milk or kefir. There you have it, Slovakia’s second national dish!

Fučka is one of those foods that surely originated during the times when the pantries were less plentiful than today. It’s a super rich and filling dish (sýte jedlo). You won’t be hungry again for half a day after one bowl like this. If you want to put your family on a little financial diet, try serving this porridge few times a week. You could save some real money!

This porridge doesn’t have to be topped with bacon, or even onions. There are other popular toppings, including bryndza or fried cabbage. Feel free to experiment with whatever you like. And if you don’t know what the number one national dish of Slovakia is, it’s bryndzové halušky. Another popular traditional dishes are bryndza pierogi, and strapačky.

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Ingredients: frozen spinach, egg, potatoes, butter, salt, pepper
Prep Time: about 20 minutes

You will need a cube of frozen spinach (špenát). Melt butter in a skillet and add the defrosted spinach. Or optionally defrosted. I added it in frozen (I was hungry) and let it defrost in the pan, keeping it covered and scraping the melted spinach off the ice cube.

In the mean-time, boil potatoes and fry an egg. Also prepare zátrepka, which is a mixture of cream and flour. Basically add about a spoonful of flour into a bowl of cream, and blend in.

Stir the cream mixture into the spinach once the spinach is hot and much of the liquid has evaporated. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with mashed potatoes by placing the fried egg over the bed of spinach. Enjoy!

For another delicious vegetarian recipe, check out lečo.

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Ingredients: 6 tomatoes (I used cherry tomatoes from my garden, but you can buy whatever kind you like), 2 peppers (no dark green) yellow or red, 2 onions, 4 gloves of garlic (I used small heads of garlic grown in my garden), 2 eggs, 1 big sausage, polska kielbasa or some type of hot dog (i usually use what I have left over in fridge; also cooked ground beef or ham is fine too), 5 table spoon oil, sour cream, salt, vegeta, bread

Cut up all ingredients based on the pictures below. In pan, saute the onion and after 7 min add minced garlic, sausage and peppers. Cook about 10 min and add tomatoes. Cook until tomatoes are soft (I like them a little crunchy and not cooked all the way through). Taste for seasoning as the amount of salt depends on the saltiness of your meat. Use salt and vegeta to taste. Then add 2 mixed eggs and cook an additional 5 min. Now you are done!

I put sour cream on top of plate, mix it up, and eat with good bread. My American husband doesn’t like sour cream, so you skip the last step. However, I sneak a little bit sour cream in the finished dish…just don’t tell him. He thinks there is not sour cream in his plate.

The ingredients for lečo, Slovak vegetable stew.

Saute the onion (cibuľa) and garlic (cesnak). Add sausages (klobásy).

Also add the peppers (papriky) and tomatoes (paradajky). Stir in the eggs (vajcia) once the vegetables soften.

Enjoy with good bread (chlieb). Dobrú chuť!

Visit SlovakMama.com to see the original recipe. For another simple breakfast dish, check out hemendex.

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In this recipe, I show you how to make vyprážaný karfiol, meaning fried cauliflower. This is one of the most popular Slovak vegetarian dishes. It’s totally delicious and super easy to make! Just as with any dish involving frying, be careful when dealing with hot oil so you don’t burn yourself.

Start off by peeling potatoes and slicing them into cubes. Let them boil in salted water while you go about making the main dish. It’s so hard to believe that potatoes are relative newcomers to European cuisine. It seems that just about every Slovak dish starts with peeling potatoes…

Wash the cauliflower (karfiol) and separate into individual florets (ružičky). Bring a pot of salted water to boil and cook the pieces for about 2 minutes.

Then drain the water and let the cauliflower cool for few minutes. In the mean-time, prepare your “breading station”: a bowl of flour, a bowl of salted beaten eggs, and another bowl of bread crumbs. Heat up oil. A neat trick to check if the oil is hot enough is to drop a bread crumb into it. If the bread crumb starts sizzling, the oil is good to go. Coat each floret in the flour, in eggs and finally in the bread crumbs, and fry on each side for some 5 minutes.

Serve with mashed potatoes and side vegetables (obloha). To get that traditional home-cooked taste, top the mashed potatoes with little bit of oil from the frying pan. Yummie!

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