Slovakia

I am happy to report that the second week of this project turned out much better than the first week. This food was amazingly good, and I know that I'm going to make these recipes over and over again. Also, that inter-library loaned book + frantic googling helped, and the pictures are better. They still need some help, but there is improvement! Take a look:

On the right we have a sour bean and potato soup with bread that has been griddled in bacon grease, and on the left is a light, airy, blueberry cake.

I made this soup using dried beans. It's the first time I've soaked dried beans and cooked them. I don't know if the textural improvements you're supposed to get with dried beans (over canned beans) came through in a soup, but it took a really long time to get them soft. This would be a great weeknight dinner if you used canned beans.

The soup was delicious, but it was nothing compared to the bread. Oh. My. Word. This might be one of the best bread "recipes" I've ever seen. It's so simple, but I would have never thought to do this. And it goes really well with the soup. Rubbing cloves of raw garlic over the bread (as opposed to using minced garlic, or infusing butter with garlic) gave it a bit more of a bite than I'm used to, but it worked really well with the flavors of the soup.

The blueberry cake was also really nice. The texture isn't like a normal, American-style cake at all, but I really liked it. One of the things I really enjoyed was that this cake wasn't super sweet. It would be perfectly appropriate for a brunch or for a dessert.

The verdict: Go make these recipes. All of them. Exactly as they are written. These will definitely find their way into my regular recipe rotation. The blueberry cake keeps well, and the soup gets better as leftovers.