Bosnia-Herzegovina Cuisine

This month's challenge has definitely been tasty - but also time consuming as each meal we cook a three-course meal using unfamiliar recipes (between planning, buying all the ingredients and cooking the food., etc.).  But the show must go on! Fortunately we have found several recipes that we will incorporate within our own everyday cooking.

We have persevered this week and (with some delays)  experimented with Bosnian cuisine.  We initially thought (naively) that this European cuisine would be less challenging than the African meals during the past two weeks but surprisingly we had some trouble finding Bosnian recipes. We had to "settle" for hummus as the appetizer (tasty but too familiar) but we made a vegetable and beef stew and "poached" apples for dessert. Here's the run-down:

Appetizer: Hummus with Pita Bread

difficulty: 3 out of 5 (would have been easier if we used the food processor, and canned beans)
taste: 4.5 out of 5 (yummmm)

We've made hummus before (tapping into Sarah's Egyptian roots), but this time we tried some new tricks to make it interesting and new.  The new tricks (namely, pressure-cooking the beans and adding some of the liquid from the pressure cooker to the final product to get desired texture) did improve the final product!  All in all this hummus ended up tasting very good and was really smooth....

Main Course: Bosnski Lonac (served with pita bread)

difficulty: 2.5 out of 5
taste: 3.5 out of 5

One thing we learned is that apparently Bosnian cuisine does not incorporate as many spices and herbs as American cuisine. In fact, this dish was only spiced with salt, pepper, and vinegar! Nonetheless the stewed meat and vegetables had a light and sweet taste, but next time we would spice it up.

Dessert: Tufahije

difficulty: 2 out of 5
taste: 2.5 out of 5

This dessert was made with cored apples poached in a simple syrup and filled with fresh whipped cream, walnuts and raisins.  While the pictures and the recipe seemed really promising, the end result was somewhat of a let-down.

Wrap-up:

Overall, the Bosnian meals we created were not particularly mouth-watering - but, we will definitely make the Bosnski Lonac again as it was a great way to incorporate vegetables into a meal. The apples we could live without- but it really could have been an issue with the recipe/preparation as opposed to the dessert itself. I guess we will not know until we visit Bosnia ourselves!

Recipes:


Bosnski Lonac
Ingredients:
1 lb stew beef
2 cups cabbage
2 carrots (sliced)
2 large potatoes (peeled and cut into wedges)
1 can of diced tomatoes (15 oz)
1 onion (diced)
1 garlic clove
1 green bell pepper
1/2 tablespoon vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
water

1) cut meat into 1 inch cubes and brown to seal in juices
2) cut up vegetables
3) layer meat and vegetables into large soup pot
4) add enough water to cover vegetables/meat
5) simmer for 3 hours
6) enjoy with some pita bread!

Tufahije
no link for this one - as we combined several recipes... perhaps that is what went wrong...

Ingredients
2 Fuji apples, peeled and decored
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 cup walnuts
1/8 cup raisins
1/2 cup whipping cream and powdered sugar to taste

1) prepare apples and put in water/sugar/lemon juice mixture (enough to cover apples) in a baking dish
2)bake for 30 minutes on 350F, rotate apples half way
3) make whipped cream and mix with nuts and raisins
4) remove apples from liquid and allow to cool, keep some of the syrup to serve with dessert
5) once cool, stuff apples with whipped filling with extra whipped cream on top. drizzle with syrup.