Class Summary for Monday, 10/22

Like all of our Mondays, we cooked some seriously good food. This week was focused on Eastern European foods, particularly Slavic foods. Because we knew we would be a little rushed for time, we started out by just being introduced to our guests and given brief instructions.

Our guests this week were Tomislav Z. Longinović and Dijana Mitrović, who are both professors in the German, Nordic, and Slavic language department here at UW-Madison. They’re both from Eastern Europe, so the dishes they selected for us are all dishes they had growing up and as such when they tried them when we were done they both said that it tasted like home!

Each table had a different recipe to cook, and some were harder to cook than others. Of the five, I think that the cheese pie took the longest to make but the sausages definitely required the most attention.

My group was in charge of making the cheese pie, which is called pita sirnica. It uses this very thin and wafery dough to add many layers to it, and we chose to layer it with cheese. Dijana told us that you can add almost anything to be the filling, but the way how we make it stays the same throughout.

We made the cheese stuffing first, which consisted of 3 separate types of cheese; cottage cheese, mozzarella cheese, and feta cheese. We combined this with a few other spices and whisked it all together to get this creamy filling. Now it’s on to the layers- we did two layers of cheese per roll, but there were 2 very thin layers of the filo dough for each cheese layer.

This is the cheese pie after we had finished our second layer of stuffing, and right before we start to roll it up. We were making two pies for the whole class, and each pan had 4 pie rolls in it. After we had rolled all 4 of them up, we set them in the pan and put them straight in the oven at 350 degrees and waited for them to look done! (Dijana helped us with figuring out when it had finished cooking)

Our cheese dish ended up being the last dish out, which meant that we didn’t start eating until our dish was done, but everyone else was already sitting down and ready. The four other dishes were Proja (cornbread), Ćevapi (Sausage), Prebranac (beans), and last but not least the Bajadera cake, which was a Nutella-ish Graham Cracker cake.

From the pictures above, those were of the final products, with the last one being my plate (after I’ve eaten the cornbread). And while we ate, Tomislav and Dijana gave a short presentation about other common Eastern European foods that we could eat, and then class was over!