Slovenian Recipes

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 Ljubljana Egg Dish (Ljubljanska Jajena Jed), or Mushroom-Asparagus Souffle Green Salad with Asparagus, Tomatoes, and Radishes I found this unusual mushroom-asparagus souffle in a contemporary source:   The Food and Cooking of Slovenia (2009), by Slovenian professor and cooking expert Janez Bogataj, Ph.D. This beautifully produced book has received much attention, at least in Slovenian American circles. So I was excited to discover that I could browse through the online preview.  But I promised myself :  I wouldn't add it to my cookbook collection just yet.  For now, I wanted to retain my focus on vintage Slovenian American cooking.  I assumed this glossy book was a modern take on Slovenian food.  But I was wrong. Take this egg dish.  It definitely qualifies as vintage.  It first appeared in 1868, in a book by Magdalena Pleiweis.  This was one of the earliest Slovenian cookbooks, and the first one to be copyrighted.  It...