Slovakia: "Okuliare na nos!"*

Let's get one thing straight. We are not Foodies. We're novice cooks that like good food and drink and are trapped in the United States by our own financial folly. (Or the economy...whatever). So, when the idea came about one cold night in South Charlotte, we chose our first country that felt in line with our B-rated worldly education. Slovakia. It wasn't as predictable as Italy yet not as obscure as Eritrea. It had a tumultuous past with a bright future. It had shaken the Mongols, the Nazis and the Commies. The country now has one of the fastest growing economies in the European Union and is called the Tatra Tiger due to its economic explosion. Andy Warhol is of direct Slovak descent. Basically, Slovakia is awesome.

Equally awesome is their second national dish: Fučka. Not only because of the name, but because it's also simple and delicious. We didn't do the first national dish: Bryndzové halušky, because we couldn't get the Bryndza, Slovak sheep's cheese, to NC in time. So we did the Fučka instead. As I mentioned before, we are novice cooks. Therefore, we had to improvise when the recipe didn't go quite as planned.

6 white potatoes

2+ cups of milk

1 vidalia onion

4 pieces of bacon, crumbled

1 tbsp. butter

salt & pepper to taste

Peel and cube potatoes and boil. As they're cooking, chop onion and bacon. Instead of straining the potatoes when they got soft, we just neglected them and danced to Slovak Rap Music. Fantastic. As they cooked down, we remembered to stir them. And added milk to make it more porridge-like. Fry bacon in pan on low heat. After half-way done, stir in onions. Cook on low until caramelized. Don't forget to stir the potatoes. Add more milk and some butter if they get too thick. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve in low bowls with the carmelized onion and bacon on top. Slurp and say in your best Oliver Twist voice, "Please sir, can I have some more". Yum.
We chose Huby so Salinou as one of our side dishes. It also uses one of our favorite items in all the world: Bacon. Due to a miscommunication, (hey, we're new at this!) we used large portobello caps instead of baby portobellos. Because of the size difference, we saved the inner scrapings of the caps and stir-fried them with chopped onion instead of just using the bacon as the filler. We then restuffed the mushrooms with all three ingredients. After stuffing, we baked on 350 until they looked like the picture in the recipe.

As our healthy veggie, we made Uhorkový Šalát, or Cucumber Salad. This is extremely easy and refreshing. It reminds us of the sliced cucumber and onions that our mothers make during the spring and summer.

For this trip and for all future ones, we say Cheers to you and your's. From Slovakia...Na Zdravie!

The great folks at SlovakCooking.com provided all recipes that we used for our Tuesday Trip.

Music was provided by the following sites: You Tube, and Slovak Radio. (Note: When searching from streaming radio stations, be aware that your current browser may not support the script. We all hate IE, but it works well for most sites.)

References:

http://www.eupedia.com/slovakia/trivia.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovakia

* Okuliare na nos!

Spectacles on the nose! (pay attention).