Ingredients: half a fresh green cabbage (~1.7 lb), oil, 1tsp caraway, 1tsp nutmeg, 2/3 cups flour, 10 cups water, 6oz can of tomato paste, 5 tbsp salt, 3 tbsp sugar, 3 tbsp vinegar
Prep Time: about one hour

Here are the ingredients you’ll need: cabbage (I used half of it),tomato paste (not sauce, sauce has spices and such), vinegar, sugar, caraway, nutmeg, and butter or oil.

Remove the inner hard core from the cabbage, and also remove the outer green leaves. You can save them for later to make the popular stuffed cabbage (holubky). Cut the cabbage into thin “noodles”. At least that’s how I started. Soon I lost patience and I cut the rest into all sorts of random shapes.

Place the cabbage strips into a pot along with oil (I used half a cup). Fry the cabbage for 5 minutes while continuously stirring. Then add caraway (rasca) and nutmeg (muškátový oriešok). They both should be ground, but I didn’t have ground caraway, so I used it whole. Top this with flour and pour in a cup of water.

Stir and cover with the lid. Steam covered on low heat for about 30 minutes until the cabbage is almost fully cooked (soft). But keep an eye on it and stir every few minutes to make sure it doesn’t burn. Also add more water as needed.

Pour in the rest of the water and also a small 6oz can of tomato paste. Then finish seasoning with salt, sugar, and vinegar. I used 5 tablespoons of salt, 3 of sugar, and another 3 of vinegar. Feel free to adjust these to your taste.

And that’s it. By the way, I don’t think there is any food in the world more delicious than soup (any kind) with a slice of toasted home-baked bread with garlic scraped on top. Yum!

Of course, there is another kind of cabbage soup which is even more famous: the famous Christmas sauerkraut kapustnica.

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Ingredients 2 beef pork round steaks (about 0.6lbs), half an onion, hot peppes, salt, black pepper, 50g mushrooms, lečo (or one bell pepper and one tomato), 1 teaspoon mustard, 1 teaspoon ketchup
Prep Time: 30 minutes

Start by cutting the meat into thin noodle strips. Do the same with the onion. Then sear it on hot oil from both sides for a minute or two.

Add the onions and cook until they start turning golden (another few minutes). Then add the remaining veggies: hot peppers, mushrooms, and lečo. If you don’t have lečo handy, you can substitute diced bell peppers and tomato.

But not having that either (the tomato, that is), I put in some four tablespoons of tomato paste. And to give it more color, I used half of a green pepper and half of a red one. Also mix in one teaspoon of mustard (I used the horseradish, chreň, kind), and the same amount of ketchup.

Season to taste with salt and pepper and continue braising until the veggies soften. I added about a cup of water to thin the tomato paste. Also, the peppers were not hot at all. So I added about a teaspoon of ground cayenne pepper. I chose those peppers as they looked very much like the kind that’s used in Slovakia, called ram’s horn, baraní roh. If I remember right, they are much hotter overseas. Serve with rice, potatoes, or potato pancakes. Or, even IN a potato pancake… Dobrú chuť.

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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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I love Hungarian goulash! Goulash, the traditional dish of Hungary, refers to a beef stew cooked with the sweet powdered red pepper. At least, that’s how it’s now known. This spice, paprika, did not enter Hungarian cuisine until the 16th century. Goulash, on the other hand, was prepared by Hungarian shepherds as far back as the 9th century (these facts come from foodtimeline.org). Goulash is a great dish to prepare while going about other business, such as herding sheep – or mowing the lawn. It takes only some 20 minutes to get the brew going. It can then be left on its own to stew for hours.

Goulash can be either soupy or saucy. In Slovakia, the word guláš or gulášová polievka refers to the goulash soup made with potatoes and eaten with a spoon. Hungarian goulash (maďarský guláš), on the other hand, is the name for a thick stew eaten as the main course with a fork and knife, and served with a helping of the steamed dumpling. What a great combination! You cut off little pieces of this dumpling and use them to soak up the sauce – and “lick-clean” the plate.

Hungarian goulash is a spicy dish. In fact, it is one of only two spicy dishes common in Slovakia I can think off, with the other one being something called Detvianska nátura (recipe to be added later). It is often prepared with canned pepper and tomato combo called lečo. However, this is done just out of convenience, and you can just as easily prepare it using fresh veggies. In making this dish, I followed a recipe posted on a Slovak website. This resulted in a very authentic taste. But there are many variations on this recipe. For few others options, check out Sandy’s recipe, recipe from Hungary Guide or another one from Budapest Tourist Guide. With all this said, let’s get cooking!

Here is what you’ll need, but once again, I forgot a crucial item: cayenne pepper. Hungarian goulash is a spicy dish and this is a must!

Heat up oil (olej) in a large frying pan. Then slowly add the meat (mäso). The oil may splatter so be careful. Brown on all sides. This will take 5 to 10 minutes. Meat is browned before cooking to create a hard shell to keep the juices in. I am not sure why meat is also browned before stewing. Perhaps it helps keep the chunks together.

Next remove the meat, leaving behind the brewing sauce. In the next step, you will add various seasonings, including garlic (cesnak). One trick I learned from my grandma is that there is no need to peel garlic. Simply take an unpeeled clove, and mince it using a food grater. The hard shell will stay behind!

Now add your chopped up veggies (zelenina) and brown them for a bit. Don’t forget to add the spices: minced garlic, caraway (rasca, ground is better, but I used whole), salt (soľ), ground black pepper (mleté čierne korenie), paprika (Hungarian dish without paprika? Impossible!) and a spoonful of tomato paste (paradajkový pretlak).

Then the final spice: hot pepper (štiplavá paprika). When adding red pepper, remember that the concentration will increase as the water content evaporates. Put the meat back in and add enough water (voda) to cover it. Feel free to move everything to a bigger pot if you need to, as I did. Reduce the heat once the water starts to boil.

Cover and wait. And wait. It will take about 3 hours for the meat to soften. I spent this time watching Julie & Julia. Great movie, just to bad Julia Powell decided to write her follow up book outlining (in gory detail according to reviews on Amazon) her various affairs and infidelities. Quite a different image of her marriage than the movie portrayed. In the last hour or so, I moved the lid slightly to a side to allow the steam escape. This helped thicken the sauce. The resulting sauce should be pretty thick – about one second gap thick. This means that if you run a wooden spoon through it, it will take at least a second for the gap to close up. Just as the sauce is starting to get ready and the meat is nice and tender, add some marjoram (majorám).

Serve on a dinner plate with 3 or 4 slices of the steamed dumpling (knedla). It was delicious! I offered a plate to my roommate and he pretty much licked the plate clean. This dish is almost always topped with a dried cayenne pepper, known in Slovak as baraní roh, meaning ram’s horn. Not having any, I chopped up some onions. Note, this photo was taken the following day (the first batch was eaten at 1am) and the sauce thickened overnight. So I added water to thin it, but slightly too much. Hence the slightly watery look to the sauce. Enjoy and dobrú chuť!

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Chicken paprikash is a dish that is not only truly delicious, but is also really cheap to make. I spent 11 dollars (tax included) at my local grocery store for all the ingredients. This total include potatoes for halušky. Flour and paprika were not included in this tally, since I already had these at home. But, these two items added at most another dollar to the total. We ended up with enough food for at least six hearty plates. That’s just two dollars per person! I don’t know about you, but I think this beats any deal you will find on a McDonald’s Dollar menu. Here you have a great home-cooked dinner that will feed a family of four for under ten bucks!

Take a chicken (sliepka) and cut off / pull off all the skin and fat you can. Don’t throw it out, you will need it!

Cut the skin and fat into inch-by-inch (or smaller) pieces. Fry them for about 10 minutes until the skin starts getting crispy.

Dice half a small onion (cibuľa) and add to the pot.

Cube the meat (mäso) and add to the pot.

Add one tablespoon of paprika and enough hot water to cover the concoction.

Let simmer for about an hour, adding more water as needed.

Chop up two small Roma tomatoes (paradajky) and quarter of a green pepper (zelená paprika). Add to the pot. Let simmer for another 20 minutes or so until everything is nice and tender. While the vegetables are simmering, start preparing halušky.

Combine 2 cups of flour (múka) and 1 cup of sour cream (kyslá smotana). Mix well until you get a mixture resembling yogurt.

Add the cream to the pot, one wooden spoon at a time. Cook until everything dissolves. The resulting mixture should not be too watery. Just like any other sauce.

Serve with halušky. Stir together before eating. Dobrú chuť!

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