Here is a recipe for a simple meet dish. It’s called čevabčiči, word which doesn’t mean anything at all in Slovak. This dish surely came to Slovakia from overseas, probably somewhere near the Balkans. The day after I made it I went with a friend for lunch to an Iranian kabob restaurant Moby Dick’s, where I ordered “kabob-e-kubideh”. Although it came with rice, these two meals shared much in common! So I asked the owner if he knew anything about the origin of word “chevabchichi”, but he didn’t: it did not sound Iranian. Hence I next got on Google, and it appears that this dish originated in the former Yugoslavia. Here is a link to a short article about it on Chicago’s SunTimes.

There are several variations of this food dish, with some including grated onion in the mix. I did not use that, but I did use garlic. Use a tiny handful of breadcrumbs to stiffen the meat mixture.

Mix all the ingredients together and form about a handful first into a ball, and then into a sausage link an inch in diameter. Grill these on all sides in a hot frying pan. They should be dark and crunchy on the outside.

Serve with boiled potatoes, mustard and few slices of raw onion. Enjoy!

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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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