Slovenian Recipes

Menu Mlinci (Baked Noodles) Roast Duck Red Cabbage with Apples Red Pepper and Tomato Salad This was another dinner where the side dish became the main event. Mlinci (m'LEEN-tsee), also known as baked noodles, seemed like an intriguing but improbable dish.  I had to give it a try. I first heard about mlinci when The Professor, a Facebook friend who lives in Slovenia, posted a photo of a festive St. Martin's Day dinner he'd just prepared: A roast duck, accompanied by a strange sort of dumpling or noodle called mlinci. Months later, I came across a recipe for mlinci/baked noodles in the Progressive Slovene Women's cookbook.  I found a few other recipes through an Internet search.  It's a simple dish.  A noodle dough, rolled into thin rounds and baked, then cooled and broken into bits. To serve, the bits are moistened with boiling water or dropped into soup. Presto! Instant noodles.  Or dumplings.  Or something.  Often mixed or fried ...

Kreplach or Zlikrofi? So what is kreplach, a traditional Jewish dumpling, doing in a Slovenian food blog? The two dishes are so similar that you could easily mistake one for the other. In fact, my mother often referred to her meat-filled dumplings as kreplach. She probably figured it sounded more American than zlikrofi! There is another reason for sharing this. Murray's Kreplach is also a family recipe. But it's from my husband's side of the family. Murray Tabak is my father-in-law. As a boy, he used to watch his Polish-born mother hard at work in the kitchen. He went on to become a fine cook himself. Luckily, he had the foresight to preserve some of his mother's prized dishes. He watched her, asked questions, and made notes. The result was a handful of traditional Jewish recipes. This is one of them. Every fall, Grandma Rose used to make a big batch of kreplach and then deliver them, a couple dozen to each household, to her five children and their famil...

As a special treat, my mother used to make a tasty dish she called wonton dumplings. They were large, meat-filled triangles made of noodle dough, boiled and then served in soup or topped with browned bread crumbs.  Sometimes she called them kreplach, like our Jewish friends. But she never suggested they were Slovenian.  I wasn't sure she even knew what I had just discovered:  Filled, boiled dumplings are considered a Slovenian specialty, highly touted on all the tourist websites. "So Mom," I asked her, "did Grandma ever make something like wontons?  Called, maybe, zlin-krow-fee?" I hesitated over the pronunciation, since I'd seen a few different variants of the Slovenian name in my cookbooks: zlinkrofi, zlikrofi, zinkrofi. But my mother didn't hesitate at all. "Oh, sure.  Only we called them zhleee'-kro-feh." Amazing.  Not only did she know all about them, but she had come up with the proper Slovenian pronunciation, right dow...