Slovenian Recipes

Menu Bograč (Slovenian Goulash Soup) Crostini Green Salad (dandelion greens with cabbage, tomatoes, and zucchini) Goulash soup was the very first thing I tasted on my trip to Eastern Europe. My husband and I, along with my in-laws, had just arrived in Vienna, after seventeen hours of flying. Our guide pointed us in the direction of an airport café, where we had an hour to pass while she waited for a few more members of the tour group to arrive. We had departed from San Francisco at seven in the morning, changed planes in New York and Paris, and arrived in Vienna at what felt like midnight. It was just past ten in the morning, local time. I was excited, disoriented, exhausted. And hungry. But what to eat? The waiter was a young guy with a shaved head and a forbidding stare. He took one look at us, slapped an English language menu down on the table, and stalked off. It turned out we were in a genuine little bistro, a sort of all-hours workingman...

A confession:  I have never used rosemary much in cooking.  The pungent herb just wasn't on my radar screen.   But now I have discovered that rosemary is right up my alley.  You could even say it's in my own backyard.   Literally.  My husband laughed at me when I brought back a few sprigs of fresh rosemary from the market.  He led me out the door and pointed to a big thicket of piney-looking shrubs. Rosemary. Enough for a small army.  So now I have set myself a new challenge: How it use this assertive, savory herb in my Slovenian cooking adventures. In Slovenian cooking, rosemary ("rosmarin")  is most often used to enhance meat dishes, like the tasty bograč, or goulash soup, I made recently. It is also used in a variety of natural herbal preparations. In fact, a Slovenian company is the largest producer of rosemary extract in Europe. These rosemary biscotti are not a traditional ethnic dish.  But I would c...

Menu Polenta with Crimini Mushrooms Smoked Paprika Chicken Breasts Dandelion Salad with Marinated Mushrooms       I built this dinner around a layered polenta-and-mushroom recipe I found in one of my vintage cookbooks, Woman's Glory: The Kitchen.  I just needed a simple entree that would complement this rich but slightly heavy side dish.  I discovered the perfect solution: An easy chicken breast dish with a paprika flavor that would fit in well. To round out the meal, I created a green salad in the Slovenian spirit. So the dinner was a real mixed bag: traditional, contemporary, and Slovenian-inspired. And I also rediscovered an old-fashioned cooking technique I first learned from my mother, pounding meat into thin cutlets. Polenta with Crimini Mushrooms 1 c. corn grits or polenta, cooked in boiling salted water as directed 1 c. brown crimini mushrooms, sliced 6 T. nonfat Greek yogurt  (or cream) 4 T (or more)  grated smoked gouda...

My grandma used to make us a sweet, beignet-like treat we called by their American name: Angel Wings.  Slovenians call them flancati (flan-tsa-tee) or sometimes pohanje. She twisted strips of dough into fanciful knots and shapes and plunged them into a simmering pot of oil. (Back then, it might have been Crisco, perish the thought!) They emerged brown and crispy, ready to be mounded on a plate, buried in a snowstorm of powdered sugar, and inhaled by a tribe of hungry grandchildren. I don't do deep-frying.  So I figured angel wings would remain a distant childhood memory. Then I spotted a recipe for baked flancati.  I figured it couldn't possibly be legitimate.  But it turns out the recipe came from  More Pots and Pans,  another cookbook put out by the Slovenian Women's Union of America.  So I figured it was worth a try. The recipe, I realized, was simply a variant of the rich pastry dough, made with either sour cream or cream cheese, that i...

Menu Cevapcici III with Lamb and Pork Pita Chopped Red Peppers Greek Yogurt Green Salad (Almost) Kasha Mediterranean Salad This was another dinner for a sad time. We were on the East Coast for a memorial gathering to honor a dear old friend.  He had died six weeks earlier, after months of declining health.  We were staying in the home he had shared with his wife, also a close friend of ours. Once again, cevapcici seemed like a good choice.  To accompany it, I decided to make kasha Mediterranean salad, an unusual dish that was the creation of a Slovenian-American Facebook friend named Josef. It seemed like an ideal warm weather dinner.  Everything could be made in advance, and the cevapcici could be prepared on the outdoor grill our friend often used. We went to the modest grocery store in her small New England town and had a few challenges. There was no ground lamb available, but the store's butcher eventually agreed to grind up a package of ...

Menu   Chicken Paprikash II Latkes (Jewish Potato Pancakes) Applesauce and Sour Cream Green Salad My husband had invited a co-worker and her spouse to join us for dinner.  The date happened to fall on a Tuesday.  “Don't worry, “ he assured me, “I already told them to expect a Slovenian dinner.”  In his mind, it wasn't even a question.  If it was Tuesday, it had to be Slovenian. There was just one stipulation. His young colleague had a food request: Potato pancakes—or latkes, in the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition she and my husband share.  He had mentioned preparing them, a few months back, and she had been impressed, or maybe just nostalgic.  So all I had to figure out was a main course that would go well with potato pancakes.  It shouldn't be too difficult.  I had come to realize that Slovenian and Ashkenazi Jewish cooking styles have a lot in common.   So this would be my first official attempt at a Slovenian-Jewish fusion dinner....

Menu Meatballs with Cheese (Uštipci) Ajvar Pita Coleslaw Crispy Kale Cevapcici would have been an ideal choice, but I wanted to branch out.  So I turned to a new source I had just added to my cooking library:   The Yugoslav Cookbook by Olga Novak-Markovic, issued in 1985 by a publisher in Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia. This once-glossy cookbook wasn't quite as “vintage” as my trio of Slovenian American cookbooks from the 1950s.  But it was an historical document in another way: it was an artifact from the final  years of Yugoslavia's existence.  That multi-ethnic country began to unravel just a few years later.  The first of the constituent republics to break away was Slovenia, during a ten day war for independence in June and July of 1991. Months earlier, I had borrowed the book from the library of the Slovenian Hall in San Francisco.  A few weeks ago, I had located a copy of the hard-to-find volume for sale through an online bo...