Food of our First Four Countries

As we arrive into the fifth country of our land travel during this adventure, I have collected enough food photos and stories to create a food-specific post. Phillip and I have eaten plenty of good food, some great food, and very few items that we would not eat again. First up, breakfast. At all of our hotels except one, we have had breakfast included.  Most of the hotel breakfasts have been just average, nothing to write about. About half the time, scrambled eggs. A few times, boiled eggs. Usually cold cuts, cheese, bread, yogurt, and machine coffee. Our very first breakfast, at a bed and breakfast, was the best. 

breakfast served in our room, Tivoli, Italy

The host owners went to the bakery early in the morning, so the croissants and pastries were deliciously fresh. Freshly squeezed juice, fruit, meat and cheese, yogurt, and good brewed coffee. 

Our first three cities to visit were in Italy, so pasta was the name of the game. 

My first (of several) dish of cacio e pepe (pasta with cheese and pepper)

Phillip was eating ravioli for his meal. Another pasta dish we ate in Tivoli was pasta with truffles. It was the best pasta dish and the most expensive (30 euros per plate). To have fresh pasta with slices of truffles harvested nearby was an experience we couldn't pass up.

We both savored this pasta with truffles.

During our visit to Bologna, I had to eat pasta with Bolognese sauce. It was quite tasty. What I noticed about it, because of the texture, was that it had been simmered for quite some time with the ground meat in it. Also, and probably because fresh tomatoes were used, it actually resembled my home-canned spaghetti sauce. Mine has a little bit more oregano and basil than this truly original "spaghetti" sauce.

Tagliatelle with Bolognese sauce in Bologna

Another specialty of Bologna is tortellini in broth, so I tried it also while in town. The tortellini were nothing special, but the broth was quite clean flavored, with just the right amount of saltiness.

plenty of tortellini were served in the broth

Our third Italian city was Trieste. It is located closest to the Balkans, so a lot of the dishes there were Balkan. By the time we got to Trieste, we were pasta-ed out, so I had my first sarma, which is stuffed cabbage. 

Big cabbage rolls go well with a really dark beer

Since we were in Europe, I scoured the convenience stores for a snack we ate when we visited Poland a few years ago, bacon-flavored (and shaped) chips. I found them when we got to Slovenia. 

In Ljubljana, Slovenia, we ate our first burek. Basic burek is cooked ground or minced beef baked in a filo pastry dough. It is a staple of the Balkans, found in every country so far. Variations of burek include cheese burek, spinach burek, potato burek, and apple burek. Yes, we've tried the basic and all the variations that we've come across. In Ljubljana, two burek vendors compete for market share: Olympio and Noble. We tried them both and Olympio, served as 1/4 of a large pie-shaped burek, was the clear flavor winner. They also had more meat in each piece. Olympio's burek was our favorite thru our journey... until Sarajevo where another restaurant's burek took the lead for flavor. 

Olympio's cheese burek on left, meat burek on right, served with drinkable yogurt

Although the name may be different in each country, beef stew is quite popular, delicious, and filling. Sometimes, it was served in the pot it may have been cooked in!

Beef stew, usually with potatoes and carrots

Our tour guide to Predjama Castle and Postojna Caves introduced us to Cockta, a truly Balkan beverage. In 1952, a Yugoslav business owner came up with the idea of producing a beverage to compete against soft drinks from abroad (particularly Coca-Cola), which were not yet being sold in Yugoslavia. A chemical engineer created the drink with a new, different taste, derived from a blend of eleven different herbs and spices including rose hips. We tried it and both love it! It's close enough to Coke that Phillip enjoys it. It's different enough (herbal-flavored) from Coke that I enjoy it. 

In addition to burek, another staple food of the Balkans is cevapi. Cevapi is unsmoked, uncased sausage, usually sold in plates of five or ten, eaten with a pita-like bread. It's like our breakfast sausages, but with completely different seasonings. Served with the cevapi and the pita bread are usually chopped onions and ajvar sauce. The red-orange paste seen in the picture below is ajvar, made of roasted red peppers and eggplant. Surpsingingly, Phillip likes ajvar. It is a condiment served with anything. It was at the breakfast buffet at the last three hotels. We both ate ajvar with our scrambled eggs. 

Especially while in Croatia, local strawberries were sold on every street corner. For 2 euro, I bought a pint of the smaller-sized berries from a vendor. They were little bundles of true strawberry flavor, the flavor I remembered from childhood, not the USA's perfect-looking but bland fruits. 

Imperfect in appearance, perfect in flavor

In Split, Croatia, we passed a storefront called Gudin Pigeria a few times before we decided to stop one afternoon. It was a butcher shop that sold pork, but it was also a restaurant that roasted and sold the pork by the kilogram, with sides. Time for us to get 500 grams (about a pound) of roasted pork belly with crispy skin and smashed potatoes with a sour cream/cream cheese like topping. 

More meat than fat on this pork belly

At our next stop, Mostar, Bosnia, our hotel was attached to a mall. Nice hotel, but mall food is not exactly authentic or usually very tasty. We walked a bit and found a small local restaurant called Uglovnica Grill. Using Google translate, I found the name means Corner Grill, not Ugly Grill. The food wasn't ugly at all. I ordered a plate with sausage and got this sausage, cased, but with the same flavor as cevapi. Very nice. French fries have been a relatively common side; however, only once have we gotten ketchup served with them.

Moving on to Sarajevo, where we spent five nights, we really hit the gold mine with traditional Bosnian food. Stuffed peppers at a small restaurant hidden down some stairs called Bosna Bistro, about 300 yards from our hotel. We went back twice more during our Sarajevo visit. Balkan peppers are not usually dark green like our bell peppers, but rather this lighter shade of yellow-green. Slightly different flavor. They were served with mashed potatoes and sour cream (and a local beer).

light tomato sauce, ground meat stuffing

A lot of vegetables are stuffed and served, not just peppers and cabbage. In central Sarajevo, we found a cafeteria-type restaurant. We could see the food and even just point at it since we didn't know the Bosnian name for it. I pointed at several items and gestured "small," so I could taste a couple dishes. I got a bowl containing okra stew with meat, two stuffed cabbages, and three stuffed onions. The stuffings were seasoned differently from each other and different from my previous stuffed peppers.  

The bread was a fluffy pita bread

Phillip got a big bowl of beef stew. I tasted it and it was lightly seasoned to allow the beef and vegetables to flavor the dish. He really enjoyed it. 

Big chunks of meat and potato in his stew

We had been eating burek once or twice in each town and hadn't found one we liked better than our first burek, at Olympio in Slovenia, until we at burek in Sarajevo. I found a burek restaurant in a neighborhood that had a high Google score. All the burek now was coiled burek, but we'd noticed a smaller ratio of meat with the pastry coil versus the pie shape. Until we went to this Sarajevo burek restaurant. Burek was the only food it served and it was great! Whereas Olympio's had a faint onion taste, these had a faint black pepper taste. It was coiled but had so much more meat and potatoes than others we'd eaten. It beat Olympio because this one was not greasy. We didn't find the restaurant until towards the end of our Sarajevo stay, but we did eat there twice. 

Phillip frequently bought gelato. A few times, I would get one, but I'm not big on sweets. One afternoon, however, I could not resist the baklava, so we stopped and got an assortment to take back to the hotel. I think we had enough sweetness to last a week with these!

An almond and two traditional on back row
front row is a chocolate baklava, a nutella one, and an unknown one

And back to snacks... we stopped seeing the bacon-flavored chips when we left Slovenia. We checked the different groceries and convenience stores in each city and haven't found them again. We did, however, find truffle potato chips that are also delicious! Truffles are harvested in the area around Tivoli and Trieste, but we didn't find these until Sarajevo.

very pronounced truffle flavor

A finally for this post, our last visit to Bosna Bistro in Sarajevo did not disappoint. Stew for Phillip and sarma (cabbage rolls) for Pat. 

No potatoes and a different flavor of stew than he ate before

 

A darker and more flavorful cabbage for this sarma

This has been a summary of the delicious foods we have eaten so far on this adventure. We've also eaten hamburgers, only once from an American chain (Burger King) because it was a rainy Sunday evening in Tivoli, all the local restaurants were closed, and we were hungry. Local hamburgers are just like American hamburgers, so no pictures of them. We ate Thai food once (authentic Thai as all the employees appeared to be from Thailand) but it was too spicy for Phillip. One of the best things about the Balkan food is that it is well seasoned but doesn't give Phillip indigestion unless he eats too late, which is our fault. We are looking forward to more delicious food!