15-Mar-2023
One of the pleasures of this trip has been trying wines made from grape varieties we'd never heard of...
Slovakia offered a few more:
These are "St Lawrence" grapes
Veltinske zelene or Gruener Veltliner, the most widely planted white grape variety in Slovakia
The result of the crossing of three varieties
Another Slovakian hybrid
I don't know if I've missed this in our previous countries, or whether cheese spread (natierka) is a particularly Slovakian thing, but it's certainly ubiquitous:
You can spread it or dip it, of course, but we also liked it melted over vegetable or egg dishes.
The pic at the top shows a nice plate of Slovak produce: Valerian salad (which I think I know by another name, but "valerian" sounds so much better...); Slovenska bryndza (a really nice sheep milk cheese; and natierka on top of the eggs...
Baked products continue to be as nice here as they have been all through our trip. East Europeans are awesome bakers, and we've not had a dud yet:
Don't know what either of these were called, but they were good
They came from Cafe Grao, a funky but pleasant space
On the subject of coffee, we've had an ongoing farce as a result of buying the wrong capsules for our current coffee machine:
The one on the right is the correct size...
Not wanting to waste the coffee, we've been extracting it from the capsules. But I don't like the straight-in-the-cup-with-water-poured-over method. This is our preferred process at home, where we have no coffee-maker, but the coffee from the capsules is too harsh to work well this way. The internet suggestion to just steep the punctured capsule in hot water was a complete bum steer. All you end up with is mucky water, and a few coffee grounds floating bemusedly on the surface.
So now we make it in a tea pot... This way the liquid stays in contact with the coffee for a shorter period, which takes away the harshness. A bit faffy, but hey -- who wants to waste coffee?
The extract-and-brew method