Eastern European food?

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nicklord1

Senior Cook
Joined
Jun 9, 2007
Messages
352
Eastern European Food is prob the least understood food in my opinion . I wanted to create a thread where we could exchange recipes and discuss the different types of food in eastern europe.

This is a recipe provided to me by mudbug in my polish thread to start things of.


Hiya, Nick, and bienvenue to DiscussCooking.

Here's one you might like. Unfortunately when I copied it from our wonderful site here, I forgot to add the name of the original poster so I can't give the proper credit to someone who actually made me like sauerkraut (in this dish only!)


Czech Chicken and Sauerkraut

8 Chicken thighs
1 Tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. margarine (or butter)

1/2 cup chopped onion
1 lb sauerkraut (try to find Polish or German kraut in a jar.)
1/2 cup water
2 Tbsp. caraway seeds
dash of pepper
1/4 cup brown sugar
several parboiled/steamed potato chunks, drained
2 cooking apples, cored and cut into thin wedges

Sprinkle chicken with salt and brown on both sides in margarine/butter in a large skillet. Add onion and cook until tender. Sprinkle some caraway seeds over the chicken as it browns. Mix together the kraut, water, caraway, pepper, brown sugar and potatoes. Add to chicken and onion and mix well. Cover skillet and cook 10-12 minutes or until chicken is tender.

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Nick, I kina started something similar with the paprika thread.Will post recipes there (HU ones) and other things here maybe?
 
CharlieD said:
Oh, you beat me to it, and thank you for the kind words.

It took a little work as the title is a bit "off" from what I was looking for - and I was looking for a thread started by YOU, not me! :ROFLMAO:
 
As a 100% Czech all-round (both sides of the family going back all the way to the "old country") I grew up with a lot of authentic Czech cooking, & make a lot of it myself. In fact, my late great-aunt left me her ancient Bohemian cookbook, which I really relish.

My grandmother used to make a similar recipe to the "Czech Chicken and Sauerkraut" recipe above, but minus the brown sugar & the apples.

Caraway seed, sauerkraut, & poultry figured largely in our Czech dishes, but they were rarely sweet (except for all the wonderful pastries!!!). Also, all the recipes called for whole cut-up chicken pieces, as back then particular chicken parts weren't available in stores unless you went to a specialty butcher. Sadly, the days of the specialty butcher shop have been reduced to almost nothing except in particular very lucky neighborhoods. (Although I obviously think it's great that we can now get specific poultry parts in the local supermarket - lol!!!)

I don't have the recipe in front of me, but by far one of my favorite Czech chicken dishes was chicken in a sour cream/dill sauce with Czech Bread Dumplings, plain buttered carrots, & "maybe" a salad on the side. Typical "Sunday Dinner" Czech fare in our household. I believe, phonetically, the dish was called "Varnitchka". Again - that's just phonetic on my part. If anyone is interested in it further, I can check with both mom & my cookbook tomorrow - lol!!!
 
Please do the varnitchka sounds good so does the unsweet chicken dish. Feel free to send recipes on this thread .
 
kitchenelf thanks for the link! It's great!
Charlie how about more of the recipes?
Breezy you could start a chech thread maybe..?! Please!
 
Any Croatians out there? My Croatian grandparents passed away before I learned that I'm 1/2 Croat, and became interested in learning about where I came from. I don't recall very well what my grandmother used to cook, but I know it was definitely peasant-style food, except for her pastries. Man they were out of this world! She loved to make apple streudel and also these cookie-cakes that I think were made of layers of very thin sponge and chilled, like a petit fours almost.

One thing I remember well is that she started off every meal with a noodle soup. Very thin and tender noodles in what I think was a chicken-based broth. I remember the broth being clear though, so it must have been some sort of consomme? I don't know if this was a traditional dish, but I sure loved it.
 
I'm no Croat but concidering the fact that Croatia and other parts of EU were at some point the Austrian-Hungarian empire (geeeeez, how does that sound today?!), maybe some of the recipes I know would fit the bill.
Let me look.
 
college_cook said:
One thing I remember well is that she started off every meal with a noodle soup. Very thin and tender noodles in what I think was a chicken-based broth. I remember the broth being clear though, so it must have been some sort of consomme? I don't know if this was a traditional dish, but I sure loved it.[/quote

It is a common thing in a lot of EU countries.
You start the meal with a "meat soup".
It could be meat or only bones or both.
That was the traditional Sunday lunch starter.
In most cases it is what they call a broth here.
You cook your meat (bones, both) with veggies like carrots, parsley roots,
some cabbage maybe, celery root, season with s $p and some marjoram, caraway seeds, paprika, add an onion cut into half and dry fried in a skillet with the cut side down (gives wonderful color and taste), in Hu maybe a cut up tomato and a pepper too, and simmer slowly for an hour at least.
You would skim the foam that comes to the surface at the beginning and wait patiently.
Once it is done you would cook some pasta (angel hair kind of stuff, but a bit thinner really, or farina dumplings or liver dumplings or other things) in the broth.
Then you would strain the broth and serve it for a first course with the pasta (or dumplings) in it.
Then you would serve the cookjed meat if that was the case, with the vegetables and some boiled potatoes and horseradish sauce on the side.
You would also serve the bone marrow!
Boy, what a delicasy!!
Just get it out of h bones on some hot toated bread, sprinkle a little salt on it and enjoy!
Geeeeez!!! Brings back memories!!:ROFLMAO:
 
Just generally interesting main courses that you would think deserve to be known about outside the specialised parametres of polish chefs.
 
i don't know anything about polish chefs, to be quite honest, i did not even understend what you just said, sorry, english is still my second lenguage.
 
My husband is paternally Slovene, maternally Slovak. When the iron curtain fell and we were allowed to travel freely, we were among the first to visit Slovenia (at the time, the only former Yugoslavian country that was NOT war torn). It was a wonderful couple of weeks spent in Ljublana, Metlika, Dolena Toplensk, Lake Bled, Koper, and Lipica (for those more in the know than I, please excuse spellings. I could go look it up, but am feeling lazy). We used mostly public transportation and met many wonderful people. The food was to die for. We ate many versions of schnitzel, many forms of goulash, more salads than I can mention, the best fried chicken ever, trout, shellfish. Hubby says, don't forget that great sausage. And now I'm remembering, pizza. (I'm using Amercan words for these dishes). The wonderful thing about Slovenia is that it borders on so many countries, and the cuisine reflects that. At that time Slovenia did not really "get" the idea of tourists, and 90% of their tourism was German.

Being Americans was a real novelty. Very few people we ran into spoke English (except for college and high school kids), and I don't think we met anyone who had ever met an American.

The food was extremely inexpensive and very high-quality.

My favorite wine was cvicek (svee-check) (a very dry, pink wine, served cold) and I came home with the limit.

I'll never understand how picky eaters, vegetarians, and people with strict dietary needs manage to travel, because we lunched at a lot of places where you just eat what they serve, period. It was always delicious, but often a version of roast pork.

I came home and experimented with versions of many meals we had on that trip. It was delicious.
 
nicklord1 said:
good maincourses where are you from originally

I am originally from Kiev. What kind of main course are you interested in? There are so many. And most of them I probably do not have writen recipe, but I am willing to try to put one on paper, if you tell me at least type of meat you want. There is a stew recipe in my thread it is very much a good main coarse, and could be evn the whole diner too, just look it up.
 
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