Slovenian Recipes

Menu Stuffed Cabbage Makeover: Beef-Cauliflower Filling Green Salad Stuffed cabbage was the first dish I tackled, back in January of 2012 , when I launched my year of Slovenian cooking.  I was happy with the result. The next time, I planned to make the filling more highly seasoned—and to cook the cabbage rolls on a bed of sauerkraut. Suddenly, it was December. My year of ethnic cooking was in the home stretch, and I still hadn’t gotten around to trying stuffed cabbage again.  But now I had another agenda:  how to do healthy makeovers. For a healthy version of stuffed cabbage, I figured on skipping the pork and using just beef. But what to do about the added starch in the filling?  I could substitute buckwheat for the rice, as I’d done with my stuffed peppers makeover. But this time I wanted to go even lower carb. So I did an Internet search and discovered a fascinating alternative to rice: finely diced cauliflower.  I found plenty of examples, ...

Menu Meat Polenta II: Polenta Meatballs with Tomato Mushroom Sauce Whole Wheat Spaghetti Green Salad The last Tuesday in November was shaping up to be a busy day.  An appointment in the morning, volunteer tutoring in the afternoon.  And I was in the final stretch of a month-long writing project. So I needed to find a dinner entree that was easy and, if possible, make-ahead. Once again, I figured that the best solution was a makeover of a dish I had tried earlier in the year. Meatballs seemed like the perfect choice. I had three candidates.  The most successful were the caraway meatballs I had made back in June.  In July, I had tried an odd one, called uštipci, from The Yugoslav Cookbook , that I didn't feel like repeating.  Those solid, fatty squares of uncooked bacon mixed in with the ground beef never did cook properly. Then there was an intriguing dish called meat polenta, from the Progressive Slovene Women, one of my most trustworthy...

Menu Sauerkraut with Potatoes and Smoked Turkey Bits Green Salad That is the beauty of sauerkraut, a staple in so many Eastern European cuisines. Served fresh, cabbage is a healthy food.  But it is easily preserved through simple fermentation, rather than canning.  More and more, we are coming to recognize the health benefits of fermented foods. But there is no denying it: Many elements of traditional Slovenian cooking make a contemporary health conscious cook cringe.  It is heavy on meat, primarily pork. The fats aren’t the healthiest: lard, cracklings, bacon fat, and butter.  And so many of the famous delicacies (potica,  homemade noodles, struklji,  zlikrofi, dumplings) are based on white flour. But I knew that it was possible to do healthy makeovers.  I had been doing it myself.  From the beginning of my cooking project, I used olive oil in place of other fats, except for baking.  I was pretty sure that contemporary Slovenian ...