Finally, and after almost five years from my first glimpse into the most famous Serbian dish, our cooking thread matured enough to step into the adventure of making the royalty. The well-known, most popular, and most amazing of all BBQs in these parts of the world. And by that, I mean many Balkan countries. If you are a resident here, you probably know what I am talking about. If not and you are just a traveler visiting Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and/or other neighboring countries and stumble to some restaurant with a grill and hesitate what to order, just say "ćevapćići' (pronounced 'chevapchichi') and you will experience one of a kind and one extraordinary dish.
The quote from the beginning was from the sci-fi TV show "Eureka" that aired 2006-2012, and the central gathering in many episodes was in the town's great diner called "Café Diem", and its chef Vincent once selected "Serbian cevapcici" as a daily special. He made it from lamb patties, paprika, and garlic and literally described it as "a little hunk of Balkan heaven". However, and in a nutshell, for a dish so widely prepared, there is not just one recipe out there. Instead, different people and restaurants use their own (secret) ingredients, and little sausages can be very different from one place to another. Yesterday we were in the mood for a BBQ, and this is the resulting new video in our "Little Chef" series.
Viktor and I were a little nervous during the entire filming, as this was the first time we did it in front of the audience (grandparents, relatives, and neighbors) and also outdoors. At least two bloopers ended after the 'post-production' with our not-so-stable table and chair. However, ćevapćići were a great success, and this was also the very first time Viktor's endeavor was tasted by others, and when we saw people 'fighting' for another piece, all the tension evaporated into thin air. All I will say is we should have prepared more. ;-)
Beside five different meats, it's not that obvious what exactly goes into the mixture, so here is our own recipe that originated from my earlier post, Serbian Chevapchichi. Minced meat includes beef, lamb, pork, turkey, and bacon. Together, there was around 1 kg of the mixture, and for spices, we used 1 onion, 3 cloves of garlic, and 1 tbs of all of these: oregano, cornflour, curcuma, paprika, sea salt, black pepper, and brown sugar.
The second dish in our today's cooking thread are tacos and our previous video we made a couple of months ago. Cooking can be hard. Sometimes it's more than art and pure joy, but if you add all the effort and 'sweat' into it, the very result never disappoints. It was just like that in our today's kitchen play. Making tacos only looks easy and cheerful, but if you are doing it for the first time... Well, I will just say there were three hours of preparing, shopping, cooking, and filming that were all intense and on the edge of disaster, but we managed to go all the way through it, and at the end, our Saturday's lunch included these six 'extremely' edible tacos that vanished into tin air in a fraction of just a couple of minutes.
Making tacos includes several parallel tasks, and one of them was watching the tortillas in the oven during their seven minutes of burning, and they should be monitored closely to avoid over-burning. The color of our lunch today might have gone a little more brownish than I was hoping for, but trust me, they were extra crunchy and delicious nonetheless.
Frying beef in onion rings took around half an hour, and the olive oil and spice mixture designed for lasagnas actually was a great hit—the mixture was extra spicy and beautiful. You can also use vegetables according to your taste, but grated cheese and sour cream go extra tasty with fried beef, so try not to avoid them to get full experience of the beef taco recipe we used for this occasion, which you can also watch here: beef taco recipe.
Little Chef series:
http://www.milanzivic.com/2015/01/little-chef.html
http://www.milanzivic.com/2015/03/little-chef-2.html
http://www.milanzivic.com/2016/02/little-chef-3.html