A Blessing and a Challenge - Food

I'd like to start a series of sorts, to highlight both blessings and challenges of living cross-culturally, learning a language, and living apart from friends and family. Hopefully it will give you a little window into our lives here. I'm going to start with something rather inconsequential and fairly unimportant, but hopefully interesting.

FOOD!

Definitely one of the highlights of living in another country is the exposure to lots of new foods, new ways of cooking things, new traditional holiday foods, and different restaurants. We have really enjoyed becoming more familiar with Slovak cuisine, which often resembles the cuisine of the countries bordering it, due to their unified history under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and more recently the shared history of the Czech Republic and Slovakia until 1993.

Some of our favorite new foods are:

Bryndzové Halušky - This dish is impossible to completely replicate in America because you need bryndza, which is a type of sheep cheese. And before you turn your nose up at the thought of eating sheep cheese, it really isn't bad. The flavor is a little strong, but not over-powering. Some have likened the dish to tasting like home-made macaroni and cheese, although it is not a pasta dish, but rather a potato-based dish. It is usually topped with pieces of bacon, though often it's more fat and less meat. (I just find the nice, crispy pieces an

enjoy those!) This is considered a national dish and there are cooking competitions surrounding it.

Kapustnica - This soup is very traditional for Christmas Eve dinner, but I'm sure it's eaten other days as well. It normally includes two types of meat - pork neck or shoulder and klobasa (perhaps you know the word kielbasa). The main ingredient though is kapusta or cabbage. It sometimes includes ingredients such as apple, plums, or dried mushrooms, but this depends on the family recipe. And every family has their own, handed-down recipe. It is seasoned with onions, red paprika, pepper, bay leaves, and sometimes garlic and other seasonings. It is normally topped with a dollop of sour cream once served in the bowl and eaten with sliced, often rye, bread. This is something we've added to our Christmas tradition and I'm thankful to say that my attempt this year was better than last!

Pirohy - Thanks to the Polish heritage in Milwaukee and other areas of the U.S., these are somewhat familiar to us as pierogies. These can be topped with sour cream, cabbage, or bacon. They are often filled with bryndza cheese, but may also be filled with cabbage, onions, or even meat. In Krakow, Poland, the boys tried some that were fruit-filled and yogurt-topped. Very yummy! This past summer J's sister tried some filled with goat meat. I took a taste of them because I'm learning it won't kill me to try something once, even though the thought of eating goat didn't really appeal to me greatly! Though the taste was a little strong, it wasn't bad.

Trdelnik - These things are just plain yummy. If you like warm, doughy goodness you will love these! They wrap a strip of dough around wooden cylinders, which they then place above an open fire or in some cases into an enclosed baking machine. The cylinders turn so all the sides get browned evenly. When done, they roll it in your topping of choice - chocolate powder, vanilla sugar, cinnamon sugar, coconut, poppy seeds, or even nuts. These are remarkably cheap when compared to fair-type foods in the States. Normally they are only 2 Euros, though the price was higher at the Christmas market this year. (Photo credit to vanoce-silvestr.cz)

Although Bratislava is not as international as some capital cities are, we have tried a few other ethnic foods as well. There is a good Chinese restaurant in the city and we ate Indian food for the first time. Jason and I got a rare date night in Vienna this summer and we tried a Thai restaurant that was very good. Our local Lidl (similar to Aldi) often has weekly themed specials, which include foods from different countries. As a result, we've started cooking Thai and Indian food for ourselves at home, in addition to Chinese and Mexican.

One of our favorite restaurants because of both the food and the price is one that specializes in Slovak and Czech foods. We enjoy taking visitors to the Bratislava Flagship Restaurant. It is ranked #37 in the city and for good reason. The kids enjoy their buchty - yeast rolls with a fruit or jam filling. G and I usually order their bread bowl filled with garlic soup. Yum! Jason likes to try one of their great cultural meat dishes like pork with sauerkraut or roast beef with knedla. To find out what these dishes are like you'll just have to come visit us!

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As for foods we miss there are three different categories:

1. Available, but lacks variety or range of choices. Some examples of this would be cereal, crackers, salad dressing, spaghetti sauce, instant oatmeal, snacks in general, baking/cake mixes, and cuts of beef. It does make shopping easier when you don't have to wade through so many options, though!

2. Available, but expensive. Examples of this would again be some of the things listed above (particularly cereal and beef) and also cheddar cheese, fruit boxes/cups, seasoning packets like taco seasoning, salsa, taco shells, etc. Even canned fruit and apple sauce is more expensive here. Certain things we are willing pay for, but many things we are not. Sometimes we wait for sales or check the clearance sections for things we normally wouldn't buy or we have learned to go without (like instant oatmeal for quick, occasional lunches).

3. Not available. Some of these foods you can find once in a while or at certain stores, but as a whole they are not generally available. Canned soups, cheddar cheese, cranberry sauce, pudding mixes and jello (as we know them anyway!), some seasoning packets, different spices, seasoning blends (some are making an appearance), whole turkeys, and canned green beans.

This list can change at any moment as sometimes we or our teammates will find an item that hasn't been around before. J once discovered grated mozzarella cheese and around Christmas last year we found Dr. Pepper. A recent discovery was canned tomato soup at our local Lidl. Although it doesn't taste quite like we are used to, it is easier than the concoction I was making before with tomato sauce, water, and dry tomato soup packets mixes together.

Of course there are various treats that we miss as well, though the funny thing is we didn't eat them all that much when we were in the States. It's almost as if once you know you can't get something, you want it. We can't complain though, because we've had friends and churches send us packages and they often include these special treats and some of the items listed above in their gifts.

One type of restaurant we miss would definitely be breakfast type places. There's nothing like that here. There aren't many chains either other than a few American fast-food places, so it can be hit or miss when traveling. Normally restuarants are stand-alone, so you don't know what you're getting into when you try a different place. We miss fast and easy places like Chip*otle or Pan*era or kid-friendly places like Per*kins or Crack*er Bar*rel. Although we never ate out a lot on our own, while traveling on pre-field we often had to stop somewhere or someone would take us out to eat. As a result, we got to know what we liked where and which places had good prices or free kids' meals. :) One of the things I miss at restaurants is salads. It's hard to find a normal leaf salad with grilled chicken here, though we did find a place in northern SK that had a great one.

In the future, I'd like to share more of the blessings and difficulties of cross-cultural living. And I promise I'll choose topics more important than food!