Cooking Lessons

As of Wednesday night, the plane tickets are all booked for Beth to come over here in July, and for Katarina to come back to the U.S. with us on the same flights.  YAY!!!      :-)     We all got seats together, so it will be such fun to travel back and share the journey!!  We can hardly wait to introduce Katarina to friends and family in America and show her as many things as we can pack into her time here!  

It was a normal, busy Thursday, with Pat'ka and Rivi over for Rivi's English lesson with Tim after school, then Marian's lesson with Tim, and my lessons with Eva and Tana after that.  Friday after school, Zuzka took us to a travel agent to begin inquiries into how to negotiate our summer travels.  We were directed to a different agency to handle it, so at least now we know where to go to ask more questions next time.  :-)  

Friday night volleyball was fun, though there were only 8 hardy souls there, perhaps due to how cold and windy it was.  We played 4-on-4 in the warm gym after our COLD 25-minute walk over there.  I stopped to get groceries on my walk home, then Tim came back later, after basketball and the pub visit with the regulars.  

Saturday morning we caught the bus to Vychodná for a day of cooking lessons with Katarina's mother, Jana.  I learned to make two wonderful desserts which I will now hopefully be able to re-create and share back in Iowa someday!!  

Katarina's father, Juraj, had gotten up at 4:30 a.m. to go searching for deer antlers in the woods outside the village.  This is one he found!  

The first thing in our "cooking class" was learning to make úliky, or 'bee hives', which we first had back at Christmas time at Katarina's house.  We all loved them!!  

The first step was to make a no-bake dough from finely ground walnuts,
then use the 'bee -hive' forms (yellow in the background) to create the shapes.  

Next step - filling the 'hives' with the yummy filling, and putting a piškoty (like a mini vanilla wafer) on the bottom.  

And finally, the hives are dipped in chocolate.  (We had lots of extra filling, so we made little nilla wafer 'oreos' with the extra, then drizzled them with the leftover chocolate!)

Tim and Katarina made a great team in giving the hives a shower of chocolate!  

The hives are so pretty!!  They will look great, and taste delicious too, on my Christmas trays back in Iowa someday, now that I've learned how to make them!!   :-)   

For lunch, Jana whipped up some authentic bryndzové halušky, so I learned how to make that delicious dish too!!  I had tried it once at our flat with a box mix, but hers is MUCH better!  The best way to describe it is as Slovak mac and cheese, but with potato dough instead of macaroni, and sheep cheese and bacon.  Soooooo good!!  

There are 10 baby lambs in the barn, so after lunch we went to visit them!  In the summer time, they send the sheep to a salaš, (a village sheep farm where they are cared for and milked all summer), and then all the sheep owners share the cheese which is produced.  

This is Katarina's favorite lamb, "Blackie"    :-)  

The lambs were adorable, jumping and playing!!  :-)  

This little darling was really hungry and kept nibbling at my boot buckles, jeans, and fingers!   :-)  

Then we walked down to the other end of the property to Katarina's Grandma's house.  Katarina's aunt was also there visiting.  They are so sweet!  I loved the beautiful carved wooden plates on the shelf above on the wall.  

The next baking project was another favorite of the kids when they were here - marlenka - (a six-layer cake) which we had for Katie's birthday celebration in Vienna.  But that was a "boughten" cake, which isn't nearly as delicious as homemade!  The dough is very stiff and is  mixed by hand.

After the dough rests, it's divided into 6ths, one for each layer of the cake.  

Then the dough is rolled out into very thin layers to be baked.  Tim was an excellent supervisor all day!   ;-)  

Katarina and her brother Juraj (who had been skiing all day).    :-)  

What a FUN Saturday in Vychodná!!  Katarina and her Dad drove us back to Liptovsky Mikuláš in time to go to a wedding.  In ANKENY!!!  :-)   Thanks to technology, we were set up on a multiple-skype with some of the bride's relatives in Idaho and Ireland.  How crazy is that??!!??  Tim and I got all dressed up just like we were really going to be there, and we watched and heard the whole wedding 'live'.  The bride and groom even came over and talked to us on the computer after they ushered out all the guests.   :-)   It was a beautiful, joyful wedding, and it meant so much that we were able to be a part of it, thanks to a lot of legwork on the Iowa end getting it all set up.  
THANKS, Dawn and Jeremy!!  Congratulations Erin and Chris!!   

And this morning we had church followed by communion - which is not part of the regular service - so we stayed for the extra service afterwards.  Zuzka was there to translate the sermon again.  :-)  After church I got Sunday dinner started before we listened to our online sermon with hot chai tea latte.  We even got to skype again with the mother-of-the-bride to hear about the reception after we 'left' the wedding.   ;-)  I baked a batch of cookies this afternoon, and now we're doing a lot of skyping with family.  Good day!!  Today was nice and sunny, with mountains in full view.  Whenever we walk home from church looking at the snow-capped mountains, we are just in awe of how awesome God is!!  

And now we're ready to see what the next week has in store for us!