Slovenian Dinner Week 19: Roast Sauerkraut to Knock Your Socks Off

Menu
Roast Sauerkraut
Grilled Kielbasa (a klobase substitute, in a pinch!)
Coleslaw

My husband had picked up a jar of organic sauerkraut at a local market.  So I decided to make it the centerpiece of this week's dinner.

I had enjoyed the sauerkraut many times at the Slovenian Hall in San Francisco.  I'd even been the official sauerkraut server in the buffet line at a recent dinner.  It was always rich and brown, and it appeared to be oven-baked.  I wondered if there was a special trick to it.

My vintage cookbooks had plenty of references to sausage and pork dishes served with sauerkraut, boiled or roasted.  But not one of them bothered to give a recipe.  It was probably one of those things a Slovenian cook just knew.

The Slovenian government's tourist website had a recipe for roast sauerkraut that looked intriguing.  The seasonings (caraway seeds, juniper berries, and white wine) sounded lovely.  But the recipe seemed pretty heavy on meat and fat. About four ounces each of bacon and ham, plus four tablespoons of zaseka, a bacon-and-lard mix, for less than eight ounces of sauerkraut!

So I skipped the ham and forgot about trying to duplicate the zaseka.  To boost the flavor, I added an onion.  For the seasonings, I had to guess at the quantities.

So here is what I came up with:


1 large onion, diced
4 oz. thick bacon, cut up (I used Applewood)
8 oz 16 oz (2+ cups) good quality sauerkraut, drained
5 juniper berries
1 t. caraway seeds
1/2 t. peppercorns, whole
1/4 c. white wine
olive oil

Brown bacon and onion in heavy frying pan, adding a little olive oil if needed.  Add sauerkraut and continue to brown.  Add remaining ingredients and cook for a few minutes.  Taste and adjust seasonings, adding salt if needed.  Put sauerkraut in an earthenware dish and bake in 350 degree oven for 30-60 minutes, or until sufficiently browned.

While I watched over the sauerkraut, my husband grilled up some sausage on the trusty Le Creuset grill.  We didn't have any Slovenian klobase on hand, so we used the next best thing.  Polish kielbasa.

Since you never can have too much cabbage, at least in a Slovenian meal, we added some coleslaw to round out the dinner:

The verdict:  The best sauerkraut I have ever had, with a robust, complex flavor that you have to taste to appreciate.  And it was plenty rich, even with my trimmed-down approach.  Next time, I might even add a little more sauerkraut.  (And I would probably crack those peppercorns.)

Slovenia might have the world's best take on sauerkraut.  It could even rival potica as the national dish.

2022 UPDATE:  No wonder I noted that the dish was so rich I could have used more sauerkraut! I may have miscalculated and used too little the first time. A one pound container of sauerkraut comes out to 2 cups. The correction is noted above. This time, I topped the sauerkraut with a tasty local garlic chicken sausage and baked it all in the same pan. Still delicious and even easier! 

Slovenian DInner Week 18: Meat Pita and the Politics of Burek

Menu

Meat Pita

Ajvar

Red Cabbage Slaw

Broccoli

It was a happy surprise to come across a dish called Meat Pita, or meat pie, in the American Slovene Club's cookbook Our Favorite Recipes.

This was no American-style beef pot pie.  The foundation was a plain dough, stretched until it was tissue thin,  then layered and buttered.   In other words, homemade phyllo, encasing a savory filling.

This sure sounded like burek, or something close to it. It reminded me of a Serbian dish, cheese gibanica or pita, I'd made the previous December.

In recent times, burek has become a popular street food in Slovenia.  But the dish is usually associated with Balkan communities to the south and east, lands that were once part of the Ottoman Empire.  So I was a little surprised to find it in a Slovenian American cookbook from the 1950s.

In the previous week, I'd had a hankering for burek, maybe because I'd been working on my article for Kosovo 2.0.  But I wasn't sure it qualified as sufficiently Slovenian for my cooking project.

Recently, scholars in Slovenia seem to have been grappling with a similar question.

Some Slovenian academics have argued that "authentic" Slovenian cookbooks shouldn't include burek recipes.  Others point to traditional Slovenian foods, like strudel and gibanica, that also use a paper-thin stretched dough.  So why should burek be considered an "outsider" food, as though there is something inherently un-Slovenian about it?

In some Slovenian circles, the burek has become part of an ugly ethnic stereotype of  "undesirable" immigrant populations from Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania.   One scholar has has even coined a new term for this narrow attitude: Burekalism, modeled on Edward Said's notion of Orientalism.  It refers to an insular Slovenian view of the alien Balkan Other, who comes from the more "primitive" lands to the south and east.

Is this a serious argument, or is it tongue-in-cheek?  I'm not entirely sure.

But I'm not trying to be a food purist.  Politics aside, it seems clear that a burek-like dish was already known to Slovenian American home cooks in the early 1950s.  So that's enough for me!

1 lb. ground meat  (I used half pork and half beef, rather than the original pork/veal mix)
1 large onion, chopped
4 T. fresh parsley, chopped (I increased the amount)
salt and pepper to taste
1 egg, beaten with
3 T. Greek yogurt (my choice) or sour cream

1 package commercially made phyllo dough (my shortcut)
2 T. melted butter
2 T. olive oil


For filling: Brown onion in oil.  Add ground meat and parsley.  Brown, stir and chop to avoid clumping. Cook until browned.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Remove from heat. Add egg and yogurt, beaten together. Cook briefly on heat until egg is cooked.  Cool.

For dough:  Buy a package of commercially prepared phyllo dough and follow package directions to defrost, if frozen.

Or, if you are feeling adventurous (I wasn't!) make your own dough:  Mix 2 c. flour, 1/2 t. salt, 2 T. oil, and  4 T. warm water.  Make dough, knead, let  rest 15 minutes.  Roll out on floured cloth, then brush with butter and "stretch slowly until tissue thin."

To assemble:  Oil a round pan or rectangular pan.  One by one, layer 4 sheets of phyllo, brushing each one with some of the butter/oil mixture.  Arrange layers as in photo below, so sheets are evenly arranged with edges draped over edge of dish.  Add filling.  Add 4 more layers, brushing each with butter/oil mixture and arranging as before.  Tuck in edges.  Brush top layer with butter/oil.

Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour, or until firm and top is browned.

The verdict:  Delicious, no matter where it came from!

Slovenian Dinner Week 17: Bleki Soup at Last

Menu
Bleki Soup (Roman Bean Puree with Bleki and Pancetta)
Waldorf Salad

For months, I had been trying to figure out the thick bean soup my mother recalled from her childhood.  She referred to it as "black-eh."  I had come to think of it as our family Mystery Bean Soup.

Just like our family history, the story about this elusive soup emerged slowly.  I'd had an "ah-ha" moment when I figured out that my mother might be referring to bleki, the square noodles that are a delicacy in Slovenian cooking.  And then it turned out that the beans she recalled were actually Roman beans or borlotti, not the black beans I had imagined.

Put together Roman beans and pasta or noodles and you get pašta fižol, a tasty soup-stew.  For my Week 12 dinner, I had made a version that my husband and I enjoyed. But I suspected that it wasn't quite the soup that grandma used to make.

Finally, I read a single line on a Slovenian website that pulled it all together.  It described a traditional soup of pureed beans, thickened with roux, and accented with bleki.

Bingo! This must be it.

True, it was a concept more than a recipe. But it was enough to go on.

The Tuesday before Mother's Day, I set out to re-create my grandmother's  Bleki Soup.  I planned to follow my own recipe for pasta fizol, with one change: I would puree the beans before I added the bleki.  Assuming it turned out, I would have the perfect gift to present to my mother on Sunday.

You can find my Week 12 pasta fizol recipe here.

In addition to pureeing the beans, I made a few other changes to that earlier recipe.  Some were intentional, and some were unplanned.

Instead of the turkey bacon, this time around I used pancetta, the real thing.

To increase that tangy roux flavor,  I used browned flour instead of plain flour.  This is a trick I learned from our years of Cajun cooking.  You simply brown the flour in a dry pan, stirring constantly to prevent burning, before using it in a recipe.  This can even allow you to make a fat-free roux, if you choose.

preparations: browned flour and pancetta

I also took a couple of short cuts.

Since I was a little leery of kneading with my finger in a splint, I made the bleki dough in a food processor.

I hadn't been able to find Roman beans until the morning of my cooking project, so I had to skip the overnight soaking.  I was forced to adopt the quick method:  bringing the beans to a boil and then covering and soaking for two hours, before cooking.

I did have some anxious moments with the beans.  After a couple of hours of simmering, they were tender enough.  But I was convinced they tasted metallic.  Oh-oh.  Instead of the ceramic pot I used before, I had soaked them in a metal Dutch oven. I started to panic.  My husband thought the beans tasted fine.  But just to be on the safe side, I increased the seasonings in the soup.

Otherwise,  I followed the same steps described in the pašta fižol recipe, until it came time to mix the beans with the sauce.  At that point,  I pureed the cooked beans in the food processor, before combining them with the sauce and then adding the bleki.

We served the bleki soup with a tangy waldorf salad my husband put together.

Our verdict: We thought the soup was very tasty.  (And not at all metallic!)  But the real test was still to come.

I froze a generous portion and presented it as a Mother's Day gift, when we took my mother out for a celebratory brunch on Sunday.

My mother called me up the next day.   She'd had the soup that night for dinner.

The final verdict:  It was a success!  Just what she remembered.

She did mention that her mother had made the noodles a little smaller, probably as 3/4 inch squares.  But otherwise it looked and tasted the same.

There was more to the story.

She told me that she had tried to find Roman beans, early in her marriage, to make the soup.  But just like me, she'd had trouble locating them.  Her mother used to get them at a Slovenian grocery.

I was touched and surprised by this revelation.

Once again, I was reminded that my mother had more interest in preserving her Slovenian heritage, at least in the kitchen, than I had ever realized.

Slovenian Dinner Week 16: Djuveč, or Finger Casserole

Djuveč

Menu

Djuveč (Lamb, Pork and Vegetable Casserole)

Green Salad

Bread

Djuveč ("ju-vech") is found in one form or another throughout the Balkans.  But I had never heard of it until I started poring over my vintage copy of Treasured Slovenian and International Recipes, the cookbook put together by the Progressive Slovene Women of America.

The origins of the dish are probably Turkish. The Romanian version, ghivetch, is often considered a Jewish dish, one I recall seeing on menus in Israel.   It sounded like a mildly spiced version of ratatouille, although djuveč usually adds meat and a little rice to the familiar vegetable mix. 

The Progressive Slovene Women included two versions in their cookbook.  I was surprised to find one of them in the Slovenian section, since the dish probably reached Slovenia by way of Serbia. The second one, called Serbian Djuveč, was included in the International section.  At first glance, neither one struck me as unusual.  Both recipes were plain dishes with minimal seasonings, and easy to make.  

The Slovenian version specified a lamb/pork mix and spiced things up with parsley.  It also involved an initial cooking period on the stove before the casserole went into the oven.  The Serbian version, done completely in the oven, added some eggplant and a cheese topping.   

I combined the two recipes to come up with the following adaptation.

1/2 lb. pork, cubed

1/2 lb. lamb, cubed

2 small eggplants, cubed and salted

1 1/2 onions, sliced

1 green pepper, cut in strips

1 orange pepper, cut in strips

olive oil

2 potatoes, sliced

1/4 c. raw rice

small bunch parsley

salt and pepper to taste

tomatoes sliced, for top (4 small)

bread crumbs or matzo meal, for top (optional!)

parmesan or feta cheese, for top

Cube and salt the eggplants and set aside in colander to drain.

Brown meats in oil.  Add onions and peppers and brown.  Add eggplant, salt and pepper.   Add a little water.  Cook until meat is tender, adding water, a tablespoon at a time, as needed.

Oil a large rectangular glass casserole.  Layer half the meat-vegetable mixture,  half the sliced raw potatoes, salt and pepper, half the rice, and half the parsley.  Repeat layers.  

Top with sliced tomatoes and if desired, crumbs. (Omit, if you desire a gluten-free dish!)  Drizzle with olive oil.  Add some liquid.  Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour or until rice is tender.  Cover for part of the time.  Add liquid if mixture gets too dry.  In last 10 minutes, sprinkle with cheese.  

After I had assembled the djuveč, I paused to admire my handiwork.  This simple dish did look pretty.  I popped it in the oven and figured I had time to take a break from cooking.

Big mistake.

The djuveč was fine.  In fact, it tasted wonderful,  once we got around to eating it.

The problem was the middle finger of my left hand.    I managed to tear the tendon when I was making the bed.

So my long suffering husband arrived home to find a wife with a fingertip that drooped downward at a sickening 90 degree angle.  Or it would have, if I hadn't splinted it with a nail file.

We turned down the oven and made a quick trip to the doctor.  I returned with my finger in a splint.

"Do not remove the splint for 8 weeks, or you'll risk permanent deformity," the physician's assistant had intoned.

But what about my accordion playing, I wailed.  My Slovenian cooking project.  Not to mention the fact that I write with my left hand.

A nice glass of wine and a serving of delicious djuveč helped me set aside my worries, at least for the rest of the evening.

I couldn't resist taking the photo below and posting it on Facebook.

"Oh, oh.  Finger casserole?" one of my Facebook friends asked.

No, not a cooking injury, I explained.

But it would have made for a good story.

Murray's Famous Chicken-Beef Kreplach

Kreplach or Zlikrofi?

So what is kreplach, a traditional Jewish dumpling, doing in a Slovenian food blog?

If you have read my recent posts about Slovenian zlikrofi, especially here, you already know part of the answer.

The two dishes are so similar that you could easily mistake one for the other. In fact, my mother often referred to her meat-filled dumplings as kreplach. She probably figured it sounded more American than zlikrofi!

There is another reason for sharing this. Murray's Kreplach is also a family recipe. But it's from my husband's side of the family.

Murray Tabak is my father-in-law. As a boy, he used to watch his Polish-born mother hard at work in the kitchen. He went on to become a fine cook himself. Luckily, he had the foresight to preserve some of his mother's prized dishes. He watched her, asked questions, and made notes. The result was a handful of traditional Jewish recipes. This is one of them. Every fall, Grandma Rose used to make a big batch of kreplach and then deliver them, a couple dozen to each household, to her five children and their families for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Rose, my husband's grandmother, cooked from memory and feeling. Just like my own grandmother, she lived through hard times and had the knack for doing a lot with very little. Her kreplach, like Slovenian zlikrofi, are labor intensive.

The filling uses two kinds of meat, chicken and beef, each cooked separately and then ground or chopped in a food processor. The shape is also more complicated that my mother's simple wonton triangles. There is a second step here: Pinching two corners of the triangle together, so they resemble tortellini.

During a recent visit, my father-in-law proudly showed us a printed version of his recipe, dubbed Murray's Kreplach, in a 1988 cookbook called "Almost All My Secrets: Recipes from the Bakery." This cookbook, probably self-published, was the creation of Deborah Davidson, who used to own a bakery in New York's Westchester County. The cookbook is out of print, the bakery no longer exists, and Murray moved to Florida and lost touch with the baker-author. So I saw this as one more vintage cookbook that helped preserve a piece of the past.

Except for one small problem. The cookbook got it wrong.

This came to light during a subsequent visit,  just after I had posted the first version of this recipe. When I showed Murray the blog entry, he was pleased and started to read it. Then he took a closer look.

I had the proportions of beef and pork reversed, Murray said. So I went to my original source, the cookbook he'd shown me. She got it wrong too. The filling was supposed to be mostly beef and just a little chicken, in a ratio of about 4:1.

In the recipe below, I have made the correction. I also specify chicken breasts, since Murray's mother used white meat only. And I have substituted fresh herbs for dried.  

Murray also agreed with me: The instructions in the cookbook were too detailed. In fact, his observation was a little more pungent: Anyone who needed every step spelled out had no business even attempting such an ambitious recipe!

For the filling, I have simplified the directions even more and put them into my own language.

When it comes to the dough, I offer only brief instructions.

The cookbook version gives detailed directions for using a pasta machine. I no longer own one of those, and I have happily returned to the old-fashioned hand-rolled approach, at least for making noodles and dumplings. If you would like to find instructions for using a pasta machine, I am sure you can.  For a reminder on how to make noodles by hand, you can look back at my zlikrofi recipe.

I have given the ingredients for the dough, to give an idea of the quantities in this very large recipe. Unlike the Slovenian egg noodle dough,  this recipe includes a little oil, but no salt. Oil is supposed to make pasta dough more supple and elastic. I'm not sure how much difference it makes. The Slovenian recipes, and some kreplach recipes, skip the oil.  So it's up to you.



Murray's Chicken-Beef Kreplach

Ingredients

Filling:

8 oz. boneless chicken breasts
2 lb.  boneless beef chuck
2 T. flour
2 1/2 c. chopped onions
2 T. chicken fat
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1/4 t. paprika
2 T. fresh parsley
salt and pepper to taste
additional chicken fat if needed

Dough:

3 1/2 c. all purpose flour
4 eggs, beaten
2  T. oil


Instructions for filling:

Poach chicken breasts in water seasoned with salt, pepper, and a little minced garlic. Drain. Murray, his mother, and my mother all used hand grinders. If you use a food processor, be careful to chop coarsely. You don't want a paste! Refrigerate.

Murray refers to this next step as "making potted beef." Cut beef in cubes, coat with flour, and brown on all sides. Remove beef from pan. Using the same pan, brown the onion in 2 T. chicken fat. When brown, add beef back to pan. Add 1/2 inch of water, along with salt, pepper, paprika, parsley, and garlic. Cover and simmer on low heat, adding more liquid if needed. When beef is tender, remove from pan and grind or chop coarsely in food processor.

Combine chopped beef, chopped chicken and whatever remains in the pan. If needed, add up to 2 T. additional melted chicken fat, both for flavor and to hold the filling together. Taste and adjust seasoning. Filling should taste somewhat salty.

Murray notes that the texture of the filling should be something like ground meat, as though you were making meat balls. Also, to make a lower fat version, you could omit the chicken fat and use additional browned onions. If the filling seems too soft, add some bread crumbs.


Instructions for dough, shaping, and final preparation:

The original recipe suggests using a a food processor to mix the dough and a pasta machine for rolling it out. If you use a pasta machine, divide into 4 portions. You should end up at the thinnest setting. Or you can follow the old-fashioned approach: mixing and rolling by hand!

Either way, cut the thin sheets of dough into 3 x 3 inch squares. Put a heaping teaspoon of filling in the center. Here is where things change a little: The Murray Method is to moisten the edges of the square before folding into a triangle. The edges are simply pressed together. Then, the final step: Two points of the triangle are joined and pressed together. The finished product should look like tortellini.

Ultimately, the shape doesn't define the dish. I have read about Slovenian zlikrofi that are shaped the very same way, and I have enjoyed kreplach that are simple triangles. Again, it is your choice.

To prepare: Cook in boiling salted water, a few at a time, and "cook until they rise to the top of the water." Remove and drain. The printed recipe suggests that the kreplach should be coated in oil or melted chicken fat to store. They can also be frozen and then simmered for five minutes in soup or broth.

Serve in soup or on their own.

Enjoy!


Update: Two years later, I finally made Murray's kreplach. Even with a few healthy modifications (no salt, oil instead of chicken fat) it was wonderful!  For details, go here.

Slovenian Dinner Week 15: Žlikrofi, My Way

Menu
Žlikrofi (Meat-filled Dumplings) in Soup
Broccoli-Radish Salad


For the full story behind this dish, take a look at my previous post.

I  developed this recipe after considering many sources: Memories of a childhood favorite that my mother called wonton dumplings.   Several versions of zlikrofi, plus a meat pita recipe, that I found in my trio of vintage Slovenian American cookbooks.   Contemporary Slovenian sources I discovered online.  And a touch of my father-in-law's family recipe for kreplach, a traditional Jewish dish.

So is this a fusion dish?  Not exactly.  The flavors certainly aren't Chinese.  And meat kreplach would never include pork or sour cream! The fact is, many cultures have similar versions of meat-filled boiled dumplings.

I think this is Slovenian žlikrofi, the way my mother used to make it, even though she never used that name around us.

As for what my mother thinks, read on!



Filling:

1 medium onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
4 T. fresh parsley, chopped
1 T. oil
1/2 lb. ground beef
1/2 lb. ground pork
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 t. paprika
1 egg, beaten
3 T. sour cream
3 T. matzo meal (or bread crumbs)

Dough:

1 c. flour
1/2 t. salt
1 egg
water as needed



Preparation:

First, make the noodle dough in the usual way.  Mix, knead till smooth.  Form into a ball, cover and let rest for a half hour.  For more detailed instructions, see my recipe for egg noodles.

Now, the filling:  Brown the onion, garlic, and parsley in oil.  Add the ground meats and seasonings and cook until no longer pink.  As the mixture cooks, chop with a spatula to prevent lumps from forming.  Remove from heat and adjust the seasonings. Add egg, sour cream, and enough matzo meal or bread crumbs to hold together.   If you like, you can make the filling in advance and refrigerate

Next, make the dumplings:  Roll out the dough thinly. Cut into  3 x 3 inch squares. I ended up with two dozen. Place a generous spoonful of filling a little off to the side of each square.  I've read about all kinds of fancy shapes for žlikrofi, but I followed the old family method. Fold the square into a triangle and crimp the edges with a fork.

Cook dumplings in boiling salted water for 15 minutes.  Drain and serve.

I served the žlikrofi in a simple but tasty soup I figured out on the fly.  It goes like this: Purchase a good quality, organic chicken broth.   Add some baby carrots, a stalk or two of sliced celery, and  some chopped parsley. Simmer until carrots are tender.  Adjust seasonings.

Alternatively, you can serve žlikrofi on their own, topped with buttered bread crumbs.

The verdict:  Pretty good. Until I compared my žlikrofi to my recollection of my mother's wontons.  Then I started to fret aloud to my long-suffering husband.

My version didn't look like my mother's plump, neat triangles.  Mine were too small, misshapen, and lumpy.  I could have been more generous with the filling. (I did have some left over.)  And that ground meat filling just didn't have the texture of leftover roast beef that passes through a meat grinder.  And why did I decide to use part pork, anyway?

Despite my doubts, I decided to take the plunge.  I gave Mom a serving of žlikrofi a few weeks after Mother's Day.   It was frozen, so maybe she wouldn't get around to it for awhile.

But the final verdict came soon enough.  She called me up one day to deliver it.

I held my breath.

She loved it.  The filling tasted just fine.  No, they didn't seem too small.  And I had even crimped the edges with a fork, just the way my grandmother had taught her, when she was a girl.

Well, naturally.  How else would I do it?

"You do so many things well, Blair," she added.

It felt like a benediction.

                                                        


Here it is in photos, step by step:

Prepare the meat filling

Roll out the dough + cut into squares

Place spoonful of filling on dough

Fold into triangles; crimp edges with fork

Enjoy!

Boil

                                                                              

                                                                                                

Slovenian Dinner Week 15: Zlikrofi, a Wonton by Any Other Name

As a special treat, my mother used to make a tasty dish she called wonton dumplings. They were large, meat-filled triangles made of noodle dough, boiled and then served in soup or topped with browned bread crumbs.  Sometimes she called them kreplach, like our Jewish friends.

But she never suggested they were Slovenian.  I wasn't sure she even knew what I had just discovered:  Filled, boiled dumplings are considered a Slovenian specialty, highly touted on all the tourist websites.

"So Mom," I asked her, "did Grandma ever make something like wontons?  Called, maybe, zlin-krow-fee?"

I hesitated over the pronunciation, since I'd seen a few different variants of the Slovenian name in my cookbooks: zlinkrofi, zlikrofi, zinkrofi.

But my mother didn't hesitate at all.

"Oh, sure.  Only we called them zhleee'-kro-feh."

Amazing.  Not only did she know all about them, but she had come up with the proper Slovenian pronunciation, right down to that tricky little ž!

Now I was determined to make them, whatever they were called.

Both spellings, žlikrofi and žlinkrofi, are used in Slovenia.  The Professor, my translator-linguist friend in Ljubljana, tells me the proper way is the first one, without the "n" in the middle.   According to him, it is probably derived from a German term that means "slippery dumpling."

In Slovenia, you can find zlikrofi in many fanciful shapes that are filled with meat, potato, cottage cheese, millet, and even dried fruit.  The most famous seems to be the potato/bacon version made in Idrija, with the name and the recipe protected by law.  It also seems to be the fashion, at least in these English language translations, to describe žlikrofi as ravioli or pasta.

But my vintage Slovenian American cookbooks were more down-to-earth.  Zlikrofi were dumplings or noodles, filled with meat.  The meat combinations, unfortunately, left me a little cold.  Liver or cooked lungs, put through a meat chopper? Veal pluck?  Ham and sausage?

I decided to come up with a version that would be close to what I recalled of my mother's:  a fairly plain meat filling, probably beef with onion and a little parsley.

As a child, I used to love helping her turn the crank on our old-fashioned cast iron meat grinder.  It was such a mysterious alchemy, to watch those leftover chunks of roast beef emerge as a fluffy bowl of shredded meat.  I had inherited that old grinder from her, some years back.  Sadly,  I no longer had it. It had been the casualty of one too many moves.  I wish I had it now.

I figured cooked ground beef would be a reasonable alternative.  And I did spot a recipe for a meat pie ("Meat Pita") in the American Slovene Club's cookbook, with a filling that looked like it might work.

I also had in mind a traditional Jewish recipe from my husband's side of the family.  We had just been visiting my father-in-law in Florida.  He had proudly shared with me his special recipe, Murray's Kreplach, learned from his Polish-born mother.  It had even been published in a cookbook a friend of his had written.

The secret, my father-in-law had told me, was to use lots of browned onion.  And none of this ground meat business. His very elaborate recipe used poached chicken cutlets and a smaller amount of sauteed beef chuck, cooked separately and then chopped in a food processor.

Well, I still wasn't prepared to cook whole chunks of meat from scratch.  But I agreed with him about the onion.  And I took one important seasoning addition from his recipe: Paprika.  I also used matzo meal instead of the bread crumbs called for in my Slovenian cookbook.

So maybe I had made my family's new version of an old favorite,  a marriage of Slovenian zlikrofi and Jewish kreplach.  That would be fitting!

Recipe follows here.