Ingredients: one head of cabbage, 2 tbsp of oil or lard, 1 onion, 3 tsp flour, 1 small container of sour cream, paprika
Filling: 0.5lb ground beef, 1tsp oil, rice (half a cup to a cup), water (twice as much as rice), 1 small onion, 1 egg, black pepper, one clove of garlic
Prep Time: 40 minutes

Make the filling and prepare the leaves

Start by cutting out the core from the cabbage (kapusta). Also take an onion (cibuľa), and grate it using a hand grater or a food processor. You will need two onions, one for the filling, and one for the sauce.

Stir the onion on a bit of oil until it foams. Add the rice (ryža). Next add water (twice as much as rice), cover, and cook until the rice is almost done. The recipe called for 1 cup of rice for the half pound of meat, but this made for a mixture bit heavy on the rice. Use less rice if you prefer more meat.

In the meantime, put the cabbage in a pot of hot water and bring to a slow boil. The leaves will start to fall off. Carefully remove the leaves as they come off with a knife. Next cut off the bottom stiffer part so you get a flexible leave that can be rolled. Save all pieces.

Chop the stiffer cut-off pieces into small strips. Fry for few seconds on oil along with a grated onion and paprika. Cover with water and bring to a boil.

Stir in 3 teaspoons of flour (I used Wondra) into the sour cream. Take a small amount of the liquid from the sauce pan, and stir into the sour cream mixture to dilute it. This is better than directly putting the cream in the sauce, as it will keep the cream from lumping up. Stir the diluted cream into the sauce.

Mix the meat, the egg, ground black pepper, salt, and a crushed clove of garlic. Add the cooked rice, and mix together.

Filling cabbage leaves

Start filling the cabbage leaves. Take about a teaspoon of the filling and place it to one side of the leaf. Flip one side over. Ideally, do this diagonally, as if you were making a funnel. This is not shown too well in this set of pictures.

Complete the roll, and finally tuck the end pieces in.

Cook the Holubky

Place the holubky in the sauce and cover with a lid to keep them from coming apart. This may not be really required, since I cooked some separately and they stayed together.

Cook until done, the best way to check is to take one and try it. It cooked mine for about 30 minutes, until the cabbage leaves were nice and soft. By the way, you can also cook the holubky separately. This will give them a cleaner appearance. Enjoy!

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Ingredients: 1lb chicken breast, 1 large onion, 1 packet (4oz) mushrooms, rice, oil, paprika, crushed red pepper
Prep Time: 45 minutes

The ingredients: chicken breast, mushrooms, oil, paprika, rice, crushed red pepper, and onion. I used shiitake mushrooms just to try something different. In Slovakia, we love mushrooms (you’ll even find on them on Christmas trees)! Unfortunately, here in the US you are pretty much limited to the white button mushrooms and their older sibling, portabellas. Shiitake are the only other variety available in my grocery store, so I figured I’ll use, for a bit of variety.

Start by cooking the rice. Bring 2 cups of salted water to boil. Also add a tablespoon of oil or butter into the water. Then add one cup rice, reduce the heat, and cook covered for 15 to 20 minutes. Cube the chicken, slice the mushrooms, and dice the onion. To cut the onion, first peel it and slice off the top and bottom ends. Then cut it in half. Next slice it in direction parallel to the end cuts. Assemble the slices together and then slice them in the perpendicular direction. This method is quick and takes advantage of the natural orientation of the layers.

Heat up two tablespoons of oil in a pot and add the chicken. Fry it on all sides until no pink meat remains. Then carefully spoon the chicken out onto a plate. Add the onion and mushrooms into the pot and fry, stirring, until the onion turns golden.

Add the chicken back into the pot, and add 3 cups of water. Also add a tablespoon of paprika and a teaspoon of crushed red pepper. The paprika will give the stew nice brown color.

Cover and stew for about 20 minutes (until the chicken and the mushrooms are done). If you want, you can serve the dish like this. This is actually how it was served at the embassy, I think. But I decided to go one step further and blend the onion stew for sauce. To do this, first take out the meat and the mushrooms. This is bit tricky, the easiest way is to remove the pieces using a spatula, and then return onions that also got scooped out back into the pot using your hands once the meat cools off a bit.

Next transfer the onion stew into a blender and blend for few minutes. Transfer back into the pot and add two heaping tablespoons of cornstarch (or flour).

Bring to boil and stir to dissolve the starch. Add the chicken and mushrooms back into the sauce to let them warm up. Serve with rice – fluff up the rice with fork before serving. And that’s it. It may not look like it, but this is a super easy and fast recipe for a tasty dinner. Dobrú chuť!

And here are few photos from the reception. On the left, in the middle, is the minister with a couple of Slovak students attending the Georgetown University summer program thanks to a scholarship from Friends of Slovakia, along with my friend Martina. Martina (in white) is from my hometown of Banská Bystrica, and Veronika, the student all the way to the left in gray, is from Zvolen, the town right next door. And the second picture is of me and my girlfriend, Sandra. Sandra is from Colombia and this September will be her first trip to Slovakia.

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Here is a recipe for the one meal that to me symbolizes childhood more than any other dish out there. This sweet rice and fruit concoction was on the list of foods rotated in Slovak elementary school lunch cafeterias. Boy, how much did I look forward to the day when ryžový nákyp was one the menu! The rich taste of the sweet rice blends so well with the fruit. This dish, just like žemlovka or plum dumplings, is served as the main course, typically following chicken noodle soup (or some other soup). Despite the fact it is sweet, it is not considered a desert. Instead, it is one of several Slovak sweet main courses, something not found in the American cuisine.

Of course, every classroom had to have few of those strange kids who were nowhere to be found when this great dish was being served. Follow the recipe below, and be the judge for yourself.

Here is what you will need: milk, rice (regular, not instant), 3 eggs, powdered sugar, canned fruit, vanilla extract, and some butter.

Start off by giving the rice (ryža) a little bath. Seeing how murky the water got, it really needed it! You can also wash the rise in a strainer, but I like to start off by putting it in a pot of water. I feel that gives the rice a better all around rinse. Strain the water and put the rice in a fairly large cooking pot.

Then add the milk (mlieko) and also a pinch of salt if you so desire. Watch the pot as you bring the milk to boil. Milk has a bad habit of liking to spill over – and leaving a smelly burning mess behind. Decrease the heat and simmer until all the liquid is gone. This will take about 30 minutes. Stir to keep the rice from burning.

Now comes the really fun part – making the egg white foam, called snow (sneh) in Slovak. I’ve read various comments online of people asking how to make the foam. It’s really quite easy. Now, perhaps getting the really stiff foam needed for meringue may be tricky, but we don’t need anything like that. Simply place the egg whites (bielka) in a bowl and start whisking.

Wait, how do you get egg whites? This is also easy. Break an egg in the middle and pour out the white into a bowl. Some of it will remain attached to the yolk. Now, holding each half of the egg shell in each hand, start tossing the yolk from one half to the other. This will help separate the white from the yolk. Sometime, you may get a sticky egg “finger” dripping from the yolk, not wanting to let go. If this happens, just grab it between your two fingers and pull off away from the yolk. Save the yolks.

You can whip the egg whites using a hand whisk. But, it’s so much easier to use a small handy electric mixer, like this one! Also, sprinkle a small pinch of salt into the whites. Whisking is a mechanical process and the salt granules help to add little extra drag force to the process. French supposedly insist on using copper bowls, as the chemical reaction of copper with the egg helps stiffen the foam. My grandma does her whisking in a plastic bowl, so for most practical purposes, just use whatever container you have handy.

You should find the rice just about cooked once the milk is gone. Stir in the 3 yolks, 3/4 cups of powdered sugar (práškový cukor), about a teaspoon of vanilla extract (vanilka) and about a fifth of a stick of unsalted butter (maslo). Then stir in about two thirds of the whipped egg white foam (sneh). Place the rest in the fridge.

Here is a picture of what NOT to do next. Before cooking this dish, I did bit of research on the recipes. One recipe said to make a layer of rice, add a layer of fruit, and top it off with another layer of rice. This is what I did. Instead, I should have followed Martina’s recipe, and mixed the fruit into the rice. My resulting dish, although still tasty, was a mess to take out! The thick layer of fruit prevented the two halves from fusing together. Anyway, drain the juice (but save for later) from your favorite canned fruit. Cherries (čerešne) work great. Mix the fruit with the rice, and put everything into a baking pan. Bake in an oven preheated to 375F for about 40 minutes. It’s ready for the next step when the top and edges starts showing brown spots.

After about 40 minutes of baking, take the pan out, but leave the oven on. Take the remaining one third of the beaten egg whites and give them quick fresh whipping. Spread the foam on top and stick back in the oven. Bake for about 15 more minutes, until the top starts getting brown.

And that’s it. It’s quite easy, really. Wait for the cake to cool off a bit, before serving cut into square sections. Pour few spoon fulls of the fruit juice over the cake. Enjoy!

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Jaternica (also known as hurka) is a special pork sausage prepared during zabíjačka, the traditional annual slaughter of a pig. It’s made out of pork meat mixed with rice. Although it is commonly prepared in the sausage form, this is not necessary. Hurka, in my opinion, is even tastier when prepared as porridge (kaša). The porridge is fried for few minutes on a frying pan and then served with a side of baked potatoes and perhaps beets. In this recipe I show you how to prepare this specialty. You will need pork liver and hearts and some way to grind the meat. We used a “mill for meat“, mlynček na mäso. These are not very common in America but you can probably find one online. Or perhaps you could use a food processor. But as a word of warning, I have never tried putting meat in a food processor.

Start by washing and cooking 2lbs of rice. Cook the rice in twice the volume of water (voda). We used my grandma’s coffee mugs for measuring. We had 4.5 mugs of rice and thus we used 9 mugs of water. Add about a tablespoon of salt (soľ) and a bit of oil (olej). Cook until all the water is gone. Then turn the heat off, but leave the rice on the stove covered. It will continue to cook in the steam. Also dice 2 small onions and fry them until golden colored. My grandma fried these along with few pieces of bacon (slanina).

At the same time, cook the meat (mäso) in salted water. Cook it until it is soft, which will take about 45 minutes. Make sure you have enough water to cover all the meat. Then take the cooked meat, cut it into strips which will fit in your meat grinder, and get grinding. Save the broth if you want to prepare another zabíjačka specialty, tlačenka (pressed meat).

Combine with rice and also add 2 teaspoons of ground black pepper (čierne korenie), 2 table spoons of salt and another teaspoon of marjoram (majorán). You want to go light on the marjoram since it can spoil the meat. Also mix in the fried onion. Mix together.

And that’s it. To serve, fry the porridge in a frying pan for about 5 minutes. Serve with your choice of sides, but I highly recommend thinly sliced baked potatoes (with caraway) and beets.

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Risotto (rizoto) is another Italian dish like spaghetti carbonara that is tremendously popular in Slovakia. This dish is best prepared with cooked meat, so it’s best made after making soup. We used the chicken used in preparing the chicken noodle soup. But other types of meat work as well. And if you don’t have cooked meat to begin with, simply start off by browning fresh meat with the onions, and then cooking it along with the rice. Follow the easy recipe below to make risotto at home.

Dice two small onions (cibuľa) and cook on oil until the onion starts getting brown. In the mean time, wash about 1.5 cups of rice (ryža).

Add the rice and fry for about a minute. Then add about twice the amount (3 cups) of water (voda). This ratio may vary depending on the rice you use, so check your bag for the correct rice-to-water ratio.

Add about tablespoon of marjoram (majorán) and the same amount of ground black pepper (mleté čierne korenie).

Also add salt (soľ). Cook covered until most of the water is absorbed and the rice is done.

In the mean time, take the cooked chicken (kura), and cut it into pieces some half-inch thick. Mix into the rice, and cook covered for about 5 more minutes.

Scoop out onto a plate and enjoy. To prevent the rice from sticking to the ladle, grease the ladle lightly with oil or water. Sometimes this dish is also served with baked or mashed potatoes.

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