Today I wish to share traditional Czech and Slovak recipe, although I do not think it is exclusively ours or exclusively slavic. It is called “smaženice” in Czech and “praženica” in Slovak. Both of those names could be translated as a “fry up”, but in our language it is only this one meal and not a generic name. There might be some local variations to the recipe (in fact, I would be suprisede if there wer not), so this is not “the” version.

It  is a very simple meal specific for this season, because it is best made from freshly collected mushrooms. I was personally not mushroom hunting this year, because it was too dry when I had the time. But one of my mothers friends brought us this Tuesday a basket of mushrooms as a payback for tomatoes, plums and walnuts we let her take from our garden.

In my opinion best species for this are blushers (Amanita rubescens), closely followed by various boletes that are not suitable for drying – like suede boletes, larch boletes, birch boletes etc. So I collected all of such species from the basket, cleaned them and cut them into a thumbnail sized chunks and I added then bay boletes and ceps  until I had a overfilled soup-plate of such chunks. It looks like a lot, but it is only one, albeit generous, serving – the mushrooms will lose most of their water during the process. Now is also the time to add salt – sprinkle an “adequate” amount of it on the shrooms, stir and wait a while. You can also add other spices of your liking, I only add shredded cumin and black pepper.

After the chunks are cut and salted, it is time to start frying. That starts with an onion cut into cubes being fried at high temperature – the best fat for this meal is therefore lard, second best is butter, after that are the vegetarian options. I still had a chunk of lard from my dubbin-making experiment, so I have used lard. The onion is fried until it starts to look glassy, and just when some smaller chunks start to turn yellow, it is time to add the mushrooms. After stirring the mushrooms into the fried onion, put a lid on it and let it stew for at least twenty minutes, checking it and stirring every minute or so.

Both of those things are important. The time to make sure that the meal is really edible – even edible mushrooms can be slightly poisonous when raw and all are rather hard to digest when not cooked long enough. And the stirring of course to asses the situation and to mix things up. Sometimes it is necessary to add a bit of water during the process, sometimes even more than once. This time I could do without it and the mushrooms stewed very nicely. Towards the end I had to stir more often and for the last two minutes or so I took the lid off and stirred continuously so the mushrooms do not burn.

Maybe you can see now that the mushrooms have lost more than a half of their volume and they all turned into the same yellowish color. The color depends on used species – the yellowish was brought in by the yellow boletes (similar to larch boletes, but these were different species). Had I used dottet stem bolette, the mass would all be dark grey or even black like a boot polish. Had I used only blushers, it would be whiteish-pink-grey.

The final ingredients are eggs, two in this case, and a generous glass of non-alcoholic beverage of your preference. Why the beverage, you ask? To drink before the meal, during cooking. Do not underestimate this – this meal can lie rather heavy in the stomach and drinking after it a lot is not recommended, because it impedes its digestion. So it is recommended to drink generously before eating it, otherwise bad dreams might ensue. The eggs are simply stirred into the mass and fried until done. The meal is traditionally served with bread, but I had two whole-grain buns so I went with those this time – more photogenic. I enjoyed the meal and slept well afterwards.

No politics today. Giliell¹ got me drooling so I cooked myself really generous lunch today and now, two hours later, I am still barely able to move. And because I did not follow any recipe anywhere and was more “freestyling” I have decided to make pictures just in case. And write-up the recipe and share it, because it turned out very tasty.

The Ingredients. ©Charly, all rights reserved

The ingredients are, as you see, one very big tomato, one lime, two cloves of garlic, about one half of a leek and a very, very small pattypan. The lime and the leek are store-bought, the rest is the courtesy of our garden. Not shown here is rice, because rice is rice and there is nothing interesting about it.

However with rice I started, because I like natural rice and that takes half an hour to cook. So first thing I have done was to start cooking rice, start the timer for half an hour and then proceed to make the next step.

Shrimp Bath. ©Charly, all rights reserved

Next step was prepare the water for cooking shrimp, because those need a bit of time to cook too. For this I have used the lime and I squeezed all the juice out of it into about half a liter of water. I added white pepper, shredded caraway, about a tea-spoon of salt and splashed in some olive oil with garlic essence (If I did not have olive oil with garlic essence, I would have thrown in third clover of garlic). I have set the water to boil and proceeded to cut or otherwise preparing other ingredients.

Preparing the shrimp was easy. Take the bag out of the freezer, take out one serving of shrimp, give shrimp into a mug, give the bag with the rest of the shrimp into the freezer.

Chopped up veggies . ©Charly, all rights reserved

Rest of the ingredients had to be chopped. Well, except the peas. The pattypan into about 20×20 mm bits 5 mm thick, the leek into rings and the garlic into tiny bits, but not too tiny. And the tomatoes into thin crescents, although ring would work just fine too.

I cut all the green stuff out of the tomato and toss it away. It has unpleasant taste and contains unhealthy toxin, so it hardly counts as wasting food.

The pattypan was rather harder than I thought it would be, To cut it and peel of the 1 mm waxy skin I had to use a small knife, because the big one was not a safe option for that task.

At this stage the water for shrimp started to boil, so in they went, still frozen. I had to ramp up the power afterwards for a bit so it starts to boil again quickly, and once it did I have put a lid on it and let it slowly boil for about 15-20 minutes.

Leek Rings. ©Charly, all rights reserved

Frying pattypan. ©Charly, all rights reserved

I put a generous amount of sunflower oil into a frying pan, heated it up to 150°C and fried slightly the leek rings. When they just about started to turn transparent, I have thrown in the pattypan bits and also fried them to the point when they surface started to turn transparent and darkened. As I said, I was freestyling, but I had a reason to do it this way – the darkening signifies the breaking of cell walls and it is the point where the veggies start eventually lose water and suck in the fat. And I did not want too much of that.

Simmering Veggies. ©Charly, all rights reserved

When I judged the leek and pattypan to be at the right stage, I tossed in the tomato with a pinch of salt and the green peas and with occasional stirring gently simmered it under cover for about ten minutes.  The tomato was very juicy, but still I had to add a bit of water twice, because I have kept the temperature relatively high.

Tomatoes actually lose a lot of taste to fat, but this was exactly the reason why I used generous amount of oil at the beginning. Because I have done similar thing before, with different vegetable mixes, but the cooked shrimp were always relatively bland and without much taste – they were not bad, exactly, but they were not delicious either.

Frying Shrimp. ©Charly, all rights reserved

Therefore this time I had another plan for the shrimp than just to cook them. When the veggies were cooked I put them into saucer and I poured as much of the sauce and oil back into the frying pan as I could manage. And after that I have thrown in the shrimp with the finely chopped up garlic and ramped up the powah.

The shrimp simmered with the garlic for a bit in the sauce, and when the water evaporated and only mostly oil remained, they started to fry as well. I was frying them for just a few minutes, until they changed colour from opaque white-pink into just-barely transparent gold-brown, but not as long as to burn the garlic which would have turned bitter. When I considered them finished I took them out of the oil and onto the veggies and rice in the saucer they went.

And here it is. It turned out also to be ever so slightly more than one serving, so if you decide to reproduce my recipe, take that into account when scaling for more people. However I cannot guarantee you will enjoy it as much as I did. This time, the shrimp were juicy and their unique taste was finally brought out with just a touch of garlic and not completely outcompeted by the vegetables.

A very generous serving. ©Charly, all rights reserved

1 –  Not blaming, quite the opposite.