Here is a recipe for a really awesome and simple dish called živánska. There is really no way to translate the name, since it doesn’t mean anything, so I decided to go with meal in a foil. Because foil (alobal) is a crucial part of this dish. It is often baked in the fire pit during camping trips. The wrapped meal is placed in the hot coals and left there for an hour to cook. You can see great photos of this here.

In that Slovak recipe above (for those of you who don’t speak Slovak), the folks used tomatoes and a whole hunk of meat smeared in mustard. My mom makes this dish bit differently. This is her recipe. We actually made it, along with the soup from bones, while baking Christmas cookies few weeks ago.

We baked this dish at home, so we used a casserole pan lined with the aluminum foil. When you do this, make sure to use much more foil than the pan is wide, since you will need to cover up the top.

Peel and slice potatoes and place them in a layer on the bottom. Season heavily with salt, pepper, paprika, marjoram, and whatever else you like. Then add a layer of meat, cubed. Season heavily again.

Then add cut up onions. Season heavily. Then add more vegetables. We used celery, carrots and green peppers. Season heavily. Add bacon. Season heavily.

Fold the foil over, and then cover with another layer of foil, which you tuck under. Bake for a while, at least an hour. It’s best to avoid checking on the dish too often, so the juices don’t leak out. You may need to season the dish more when ready – despite all this heavy seasoning, it may need more. Serve just the way it is. Enjoy!

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Here is a recipe for a simple soup you can make from bones (kosti) left over from other dishes, such as the baked meat. Turning the left overs into soup is a great way to reduce waste and stretch your meal dollar further.

Put the bones in a pot of water. If you have any other left over meat pieces, add those too. Cook on low heat – the soup should not be steaming, but not actually boiling. This way you’ll end up with a clear soup, otherwise it would get murky. Cook like this for an hour.

Then add various root vegetables and also a whole onion. We used carrots (mrkva), celery (zeler) stalks and root, and turnips. The turnips were put in instead of kohlrabi (kaleráb), popular root vegetable in Slovakia. Also add parsley root if you have any. Salt and pepper to taste and also add other herbs you like.

Continue cooking until the vegetables soften. Then strain the soup to remove the “stuff”. Bring the liquid to boil again. Then reduce the heat and slowly ease-in an egg or two. This is how my mom serves this soup. Of course, you don’t have to make it with poached eggs, you can add in noodles, dumplings, or rajbanička (grated dough). Cook the eggs for about 5 minutes.

To serve, scoop out the vegetables into a bowl. Pour the liquid broth (with the egg) over it. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving in West Virginia

I actually made this soup about a week before Thanksgiving, but only got to posting it today since I was really busy with school. I spent my Thanksgiving in West Virginia. My friend Sandra and I rented a rustic wilderness cabin from Wildernestinn.com. The cabin we stayed in was called Wildwood and it was absolutely awesome. It’s a two story log cabin from the 1800s, but it’s been upgraded with a hot shower, small kitchen, and electric heaters. It even has a fireplace and a porch with grills (it was too cold to use these). The cabin is located not too far away from Seneca Rocks, 5 minutes down a forest road off a 2 lane road in a small village by a lake. The view from the kitchen is amazing – nothing but trees. I was hoping to see some bears (there is plenty of bear photos on the Wildernest Inn Facebook page), but all we saw was deer.

The second day we drove up to the top of Spruce Knob, West Virginia’s Highpoint, and also visited Seneca Rocks. On the way back, we stopped for dinner at Yokum’s Restaurant. I asked the waiter if he happened to have any bones, and he and possibly his mom came out with a big bag of leftovers from Thanksgiving. It was awesome. So the bones went into the soup, this second time, it was turkey flavored.

Making this bone soup again at the Wildwood wilderness cabin in West Virginia.

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Wait, what? A RABBIT? Yes, a rabbit. These cuddly critters make for common meal in much of Europe. Or at least used to, before supermarkets popped up all over the land and people got used to purchasing their meats shrink-wrapped. Rabbits used to be (and in places still are) commonly raised in villages. They are easy to take care of – just give them some hay (and a bit of alfalfa) and change their straw bed few times a week. The bed makes great natural compost. And yes, they breed like, well, rabbits.

So where do you find a rabbit? I found mine in Grand Mart, chain of Asian grocery stores here in the Washington, D.C. area. Or you can order it online, from places such as Ardeng Rabbit. Rabbit tastes much like chicken except that it’s leaner and has slightly sweeter taste. You can substitute chicken, if you can’t find a rabbit or have little queasiness about eating it, but that would be cheating a little. You will also need mushrooms. This recipe is made with the common button mushroom, called šampiňón in Slovak.

Ingredients: (these are from the original recipe) 1.7lbs of rabbit meat from front half, 2 larger onions, 150g (5oz) sliced mushrooms, 80g (3 oz) root vegetables, 4 tablespoons butter, ground nutmeg, one yolk, 1.5dl (0.6 cups) heavy cream, 2 tablespoons flour, parsley leaves, salt
Prep Time: 3 hours

Here is what you’ll need to make rabbit on mushrooms: one rabbit, carrots, onions, mushrooms, etc…

Start by washing and dressing the rabbit (králik). The recipe called for 0.8kg (1.7lbs) of meat from the front half of the animal cut into medium sized cubes. This particular rabbit (the biggest I could find) was not much more than skin and bones! It was nothing like the chubby silver fox rabbits I saw the day before at the National Zoo here in Washington, D.C. Even after cutting all the meat from front and back, I had only one measly pound… Save the bones for later, you can use them to make rabbit soup.

Peel two carrots, little bit of parsnip (should use parsley root instead, but those are hard to find), plus the onion. Cut them up, and along with the rabbit, put in a pot of boiling salted water.

Cook covered for about an hour, until the veggies and the meat softens. Then carefully (it will be hot), remove the meat and set aside. Strain the vegetables, but save the broth.

Place the vegetables in a blender and add equal amount of broth. Blend to make thick sauce. The traditional way is to use a metal strainer and push the veggies through. This is how I did it when making tenderloin on cream. Never again! Although I am very much fond of following traditional methods, this is one time I’ll gladly reach for a modern gadget. You will get much smoother sauce by using the blender, and it’s much faster and whole lot less messy.

Also while the veggies are cooking, stew mushrooms on butter. I used about 3/4 of the container and about half a stick of butter. Add the mushrooms once the butter is hot, reduce the heat, and cook covered until they get tender. This will take some 15-20 minutes.

Remove the mushrooms, and add the flour and crushed nutmeg. Whisk to make roux.

Top off with the creamy sauce. Add the mushrooms.

And the rabbit.

Then break an egg, separate the yolk from the egg white by tossing the yolk back and forth between the two halves. Add the yolk to the cream, whisk well, and pour in to thin the sauce.

And that’s it! Very easy, right? Add more salt, if needed.

This dish should be served with the steamed dumpling. But after cooking all day, I didn’t feel like making it, and we had macaroni instead. Garnish with few parsley leaves. Also serve with a side of fruit cocktail (kompót). The dish went great with the pea soup. My mom and few other friends joined in for dinner. The dish got really good reviews – the best one was that there were not leftovers. The cook (that’s me) had to make by with scrubbing the pot clean with a slice of bread…

Looking for similar recipes? Then take a look at chicken paprikash.

Like this recipe? Please share it with your friends, or post on Facebook or Twitter.

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You may have noticed that there are not too many meaty dishes on this site. This is not because Slovaks don’t eat meat. On the contrary, meaty foods are actually quite popular. The reason is instead different. It is I who is not a big meat eater. And because of this, I don’t actually know much about cooking meat.

I figured it was time to change that. So I decided to learn how to make a really popular Slovak dish called sviečková na smotane, meaning tenderloin on cream. This is one dish you definitely must try on your travels to Slovakia. It is offered in just about every restaurant. Sviečková is also the single most complicated dish I have prepared to date. OK, perhaps complicated is not the right word. The most involved. Turns out, making this dish is actually pretty simple, but it requires quite a few steps.

In preparing this dinner, I followed a recipe from minibazar.sk, a strange combination of craigslist and a cooking site. But I love the recipes on minibazar. They are always completely authentic (submitted by regular people) and many have pictures – which I clearly find very useful in cooking. This particular recipe called for marinading the meat over the course of few days. Another recipe, one in the classic Czechoslovak Cookbook, tells instead to bake the meat while basting for some hour and a half in a 325F oven. Whatever you choose, this dish will not disappoint.

Instead of tenderloin (or sirloin), I used eye round, since that’s what my supermarket had already packed up in a large enough quantity. Eye round is somewhat dryer than tenderloin, but since I marinated it, I figured it won’t matter much. Having said that, let’s start cooking!

The left photo shows many, but not all, of the ingredients you’ll need. The beer is not an ingredient, but I like to have a glass of a cold one while cooking. You should use a parsley root (petržlen) but those are pretty much impossible to find in America. So I used a parsnip instead. I figured that although it is not the same vegetable, it at least looks very much alike. Peel and cut the root vegetables. Also cut the celery (zeler) but keep the onion (cibuľa) whole. Cook, along with black pepper (čierne korenie), caraway (rasca), bay leaf (bobkový list) and a slice of lemon (koliesko citrónu), in 2 cups of water. Cook for about 2 minutes after the water comes to boil.

While the vegetable “soup” is cooling down, take the cut of meat (mäso) and rinse it off. Dry it off with paper towels and then use a sharp knife to cut slits in it all around. Place about inch wide cuts of bacon (slanina) into the slots. Really shove them in there. Doing this reminded me of my friend Patricia’s visit to Slovakia in 2010. She is a vegetarian and commented that in Slovakia all vegetable dishes seem to have bacon in them. Turns out, in Slovakia even meat has bacon!

Place the meat in the vegetable mixture after it has cooled off completely. Add more water if needed so that at least half of the meat is underwater. Cover and place in the fridge at least overnight. Turn the meat periodically to get it marinated from both sides.

2 days later…

Take the marinated meat out and dry it off. This next step is pretty tricky so be careful. Heat up oil (olej) in a large pot (I used the same that had the vegetables in it, which I transferred to a different pot). Then lightly brown the meat on all sides. The tricky part is placing the meat in the oil and then flipping it. I used a large fork to pick it up and a knife to support it from the bottom. Chop up the onion (cibuľa) and fry in the oil until it starts turning yellow. Then add the rest of the vegetables and about a cup of the marinade water.

Also, start working on the knedľa.

Cover and let steam for about hour and a half. Add more water as needed. You are done when the meat feels soft. Take the meat out and slice it. It will have this beautiful dark purple color on the inside. This was the first time I have ever prepared such a large hunk of meat and I was really pleased with the outcome!

The next step involves liquefying the veggies. This would have been so much easier if had a hand-held mixer like the one shown in the original recipe. But since I didn’t, I used the traditional method – a metal strainer. This worked, but boy, next time I am getting a blender! Make sure to scrape off the mushed up veggies from the bottom.

Use heavy whipping cream (smotana) to make the sauce (omáčka). I used about equal amounts of water and cream, and kept adding until I got something of fairly creamy consistency. Add salt and little bit of lemon, to taste. Cook for a minute or two and then add the meat to heat it up.

This dish is traditionally served with a side of whole-berry cranberry (brusnice) sauce, whipped cream (slahačka) and a slice of cooked lemon (citrón). To make the whipped cream, simply take the unused cream from making the sauce and beat it until it turns solid. This was the first time I had whipped cream like this. It’s so much better than the spray kind. Serve with knedľa. Enjoy and dobrú chuť! That husk figurine in the picture on right is typical of traditional Slovak folk art. I wanted to put something Slovak in the picture, but the only thing I could find was this figurine from a larger advent set.

If you compare my sauce to the one served in Slovak restaurants (for instance, as shown here) you will see mine is much “chunkier”. I guess this is that home-made, metal strainer, touch.

For other great meaty Slovak dishes, check out Segedin goulash, chicken baked on salt and stuffed peppers.

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My grandma makes, hands-down, the best ever chicken noodle soup. Part of her secret are her hand-made noodles. The other part is the recipe, which is posted here. As you will see it’s quite simple.

The Slovak version of chicken [noodle] soup (kuracia or slepačia polievka) is bit different from the American kind. First, it is always clear and “brothy”. Second, Slovaks use slightly different ingredients. While celery is an integral part of the American version (or at least the canned version I buy in the supermarket), celery is not used in the Slovak chicken soup. Instead, we use parsley (petržlen). The root that is. While in America parsley is used almost exclusively for its leaves, in Slovakia it is used predominantly as a root vegetable. For those unfamiliar with parsley, it looks like a small carrot, but is white.

Besides parsley, you will also need carrots (mrkva). My cooking started on a bit interesting note. I prepared this soup at my grandma’s. She is now living in a house built in 1886 in which my great-grandmother (from the other side of the family) grew up. I spent many summers there as a kid. It’s customary for Czechs and Slovaks living in a city to keep a small cottage (chalupa) in a near-by village to escape to on the weekends. This house was our chalupa. I thought I knew the house inside-out, and hence I was quite surprised when grandma asked me to go to the cellar (komora) and bring the veggies. I did not think this house has a cellar. To my surprise, it does.

The cellar is located underneath the living room. It is a small dugout accessed by lifting up the carpets and then pulling on one of the wooden boards making the floor. Even more surprising was finding out that this hole was used by the partisans (guerrilla fighters) during World War II. During the War, Czechoslovakia was split up into two parts. The Czech Republic was annexed into the Third Reich but Slovakia became an independent state under a puppet government installed by Berlin. Local population opposed this, and a large homegrown opposition to the Nazi presence sprang up. These guerrilla fighters were known as partisans or partizáni. The center of the Slovak national uprising (Slovenské Národné Povstanie) was my hometown of Banská Bystrica, which now houses a large memorial dedicated to this historical event. Anyway, turns out that, just like in the movies, Nazis came by the house to look for partisans. It’s good they did not find them, as I am sure my great-grandparents (and thus my predecessors) would have been dealt with quite fast on the spot!

In the cellar, I found the largest carrot (mrkva) I have ever seen. Besides the carrot, you will need parsley (petržlen) and onion (cibuľa). You can also use parsley leaves (petržlenová vnať) and kohlrabi (kaleráb). Peel the root vegetables and the onion and fry for about 2 minutes on oil (olej).

Add a small chicken (kura) and top off the pot with water (voda)

Cover and let cook for a while. Once the soup starts boiling, lower the heat, otherwise the soup will end up muddy. Once the soup is done, i.e., the vegetables are getting soft, take a small strainer and scoop out the brown muck that formed on the surface. Also add salt (soľ) to taste. We used two of these small spoons.

Let the soup go through few more bubbles, so the salt has a chance to dissolve. Serve by placing cooked noodles in the bowl and then topping off with the soup. Enjoy! It goes great with the home baked flat bread and rolls.

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