While walking around the Gourmet Gallery at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, our guide told us that food and tourism are more closely entwined these days than ever before. As the hunger for new holiday destinations is growing, so is the interest in local cuisines and traditional recipes. If you're planning to travel around Central … Continue reading Searching for A Taste of Slovakia
Butternut Squash Soup
With October coming to a close the cold, wet weather has sneaked in, and shops have filled with pumpkins of all shapes and sizes. Very few of them will end up as jack-o'-lanterns here in Slovakia, only perhaps in Bratislava, Košice and a couple of more cities with small expat communities from the West. The … Continue reading Butternut Squash Soup
Slow Food Slovakia
The Slow Food movement started in 1989 as a response to the opening of McDonald's restaurant in Rome. Carlo Petrini, the Italian journalist who launched the movement, thought it was unfortunate that a city with high-quality local cuisine had opened its doors to mass-produced food. Since then, the Slow Food movement has spread to more … Continue reading Slow Food Slovakia
Quick-and-easy Bilberry Cake
The Slovak word for a bilberry is one of those funny words we like to teach foreigners when they're curious about our language. Why? Because Slovak is ranked among the most difficult languages in the world, and if we wanted to assess your linguistic calibre, then čučoriedka would be one of the testing words. Čučoriedky (tchou-tcho-ryiedki) … Continue reading Quick-and-easy Bilberry Cake
Fluted Zucchini Cake
This recipe was inspired by an overload of zucchini a few weeks ago, and a newsletter from Once upon a chef that landed in my inbox at about the same time. The zucchini came together with hand-picked black and red currants from my friend parents' garden, so I picked this recipe from Jenn's zucchini menu to put … Continue reading Fluted Zucchini Cake
What Slovak and Italian cuisine have in common
It was a week of exploration and discoveries, sublime food and new friendships. At the beginning of September last year my daughter Monika was married to a wonderful man, and they had chosen Villa Medicea di Lilliano in beautiful Tuscany as a location for their wedding. For me and some others from our family it … Continue reading What Slovak and Italian cuisine have in common
A Taste of the High Tatras
The High Tatras - our most spectacular mountains - were bathing in the warm August sunshine when we sat in a cable car taking us to Skalnaté pleso, a mountain lake at the altitude of 1751 metres. Skalnaté pleso (or Rocky Lake) was the starting point for our walking trip that day. We expected it to be a walk - not … Continue reading A Taste of the High Tatras
Letcho
When I was doing research on lečo - a dish that landed in our cuisine while we were under Hungarian rule between 1000 and 1918 - I came across various recipes ranging from a meatless option to an eggy one to a letcho with a spicy, Hungarian-style sausage. What all these recipes had in common was green … Continue reading Letcho
Home-made Ketchup
It was during one of my pregnancies when I fell out of love with shop-bought ketchup. My taste became sharper and more sensitive to artificial flavourings and chemical preservatives, so I naturally avoided them in all foods. On one occasion though, I tried my mum's homemade ketchup, and it felt like a discovery. As a … Continue reading Home-made Ketchup
Yellow Runner Bean Soufflé
Inspired by a visitor to Cookslovak Facebook page who asked about 'a baked green bean egg dish that my mother used to make', I thought back to my time as a university student. I remember eating something similar at my aunt's house in the south of Slovakia, where they still grow their own yellow runner beans … Continue reading Yellow Runner Bean Soufflé
