Slovakia

Eastern Europe: Slovakia. Cabbage? Check. Potatoes? Check. Excuse to drink European beer? Czech! (Ha).

So we ate Cabbage Halusky - potato dumplings with cabbage and bacon. From those humble beginnings came a surprisingly tasty dish. A bit of youtubing confirmed the method of making the dumplings of quickly flicking bits of the dough into boiling water.




Put all together it was not too bad with the dumplings ending up quite gnocchi like.



Off south a little bit to Macedonia.

Bolivia

As it was a school night, we decided to stick to one course for Bolivia. We made Silpancho, consisting of a layer of potatoes and rice, topped with a sort of home made schnitzel/rissole, topped with a fried egg and a salsa called llajwa (I imagine, pronounced something like ya-hwa). Everything was super delicious. Big thanks to Ed and Annette who helped to create this most excellent dish.

Tonga

To Tonga after a long break during a busy school term.

We headed down to the farm for an ambitious meal that involved four separate components... with all four including coconut milk/cream.

Being neighbours with Samoa meant we had to work pretty hard to find some different food, having said that we couldn't turn away from the palusami (coconut cream and tinned spam wrapped in leaves) - sounds gross but is very tasty and was even better this second time.



Along with that we baked some fish in coconut milk and papaya, all accompanied with a drink called ’otai - this was made with watermelon, pineapple and more coconut milk. The instructions called for grating the fruit however we'd do it differently next time as you ended up with a drink that could have been eaten with a knife and fork.

Dessert was bananas cooked in (drum roll...) coconut milk! Simple, easy and very tasty end to a nice meal. Next up is Bolivia.

Indonesia

Delicious.

Two fairly complicated dishes with preparation starting last night. First we made Rendang Daging; a beef curry of super tastiness made with lots of chilli, onion and coconut. After about 4 hours on the mortar and pestle (time is tricky to gauge when mortar-and-pestling - Bri tells me it was only 15 minutes) making kerisik and a curry paste that used pretty much every spice in our house, the end result was amazing. The beef had this amazing hint of coconut hidden behind a huge kick (thanks to Dad's home-grown chillies) of spiciness - great stuff.

On the side we had gado-gado, a vegetable salad with a peanut sauce mixed in, again this was good; the sauce and slightly cooked vegetables made this great combination of yum. A very successful meal.

Next up it is Tonga (after drawing one of Peter's joke countries that he has snuck into the hat - 'Wonderland'). First impressions is the food is very similar to Samoa so we'll have to see what we can come up with.

Honduras

Big week for our challenge - straight after a successful North Korea meal we hit up Honduras.

First up some street-food Baleadas, which are freshly made tortillas served with beans and sourcream or salty cheese.

We made our own tortillas and refried beans and both were amazingly tasty. Great food.

Honduras also gave us our second dessert (see Canada) of the challenge. Torrejas is a traditional Christmas food. It is basically french toast soaked for a couple of hours in a cinnamon and cloves syrup. Extremely rich, cinnamony and yummy, especially with some icecream.

Local one next; we're off to Indonesia.

North Korea

Well, it's been a long time between meals, and I have to say, we weren't super inspired by the notion of North Korea. Many a (probably tasteless) (no pun intended) joke was made about empty plates, gruel and the like. On a more practical level, Micky pointed out the severe lack of North Koreans publishing recipes on the internet. Having said all this, the night ended up being very successful.

We made these delicious dumplings (mandu). We made 60 or so all up, and we agreed it was very therapeutic. The boys were asleep, otherwise it may have been a bit less calming.

I think it's fair to say most people wouldn't be objecting to a plate of dumplings, so we weren't too worried about eating that portion of the meal. My trepidation set in when Micky started adding ice to the soup. Actually, in all honesty, it set in much earlier in the day, when it smelled like Micky had popped a bucket of sea water on the stove. I think it was the anchovies. And the seaweed. BUT........the mul-naengmyeon (cold noodles in chilled broth) was delicious. The noodles are topped with some egg, pickled cucumber and pear and it's a very refreshing, delicate dish. So, we had a great night. Next stop - Honduras.

Catch up post #2... St Vincent and the Grenadines

This was an interesting one. Turns out a popular dish over there is `Green pigeon pea soup'. The soup was a little funny in that it called for a bunch of starchy vegetables like tannais (we used potato) and plantain (we used a greenish banana). It also needed green pigeon peas (we used normal green peas). Not our most accurate dish with a lot of the ingredients more readily available in the tropics but the result was really yum. We were a bit worried about having banana in our soup however it gave just a little hint of sweetness without being anywhere near overpowering.

Also included in the recipe were dumplings. Not sure what I got wrong with these but they ended up being little golf-balls of disappointment. Soup = two thumbs up, dumplings = one thumb down.

Now that we've caught up it's time for our next country - tonight we cook some North Korean food.