The Mysterious Food Of My Life

 

 

While living in Europe, Southeastern Europe to say in fact, there was a specific dish that has stuck me with my whole life and has a meaning to be and a story to tell. As we all know there are many dishes and entrees all around Europe and its nations, this dish not many people have heard of or even tried. The name of the dish is cevapi. Cevapi are meat and bread with a side of onions and two sauces type of dish. This dish has a big significance to the Yugoslavian countries because it is a dish that everyone tries when they come and visit those countries, or even go to a Yugoslavian restaurant near them. This dish has a story that is a special part of my life and the reason why it is so special to me. When I was little( around the age of five to seven) I would always go outside to play with my friends while I lived in Europe. My friends and I would play outside for hours and hours. Once it got dark(around six or seven in the afternoon) my grandma would always yell out of the window " heyyyyy come on you guys I have food for you all I know you are hungry!" She would always yell this at us and we all would get so excited and run back to my house to go eat, and we knew that she made cevapi for us( sadly she is not with us anymore, she passed away in 2012). While we ate the cevapi my friends and I would sit by the table in our living room and watch TV and talk about our day and who was the best one when we played a game outside. A few years later(2009) my family moved to the United States so I could get a better education and my dad has opened a company here with my aunt. When all settled and I went into school and my family started to work, we really started to miss that sensation of cevapi after we came from school and work from our grandma. There were no Yugoslavian restaurants around us or anything that we could have ordered from. My mom would try her best to make the cevapi as good as my grandma did just so we could get that old feeling back like when we lived back in Europe, but she just could not get the same taste even she asked my grandma for help she just could not the taste or anything to work out. After that, my mom stopped making it until a few years later(around 2013 or so) a Bosnian restaurant opened up and they had the cevapi dish! One day after school and after my parents got off work my mom went to go order the dish and brought it home for us to try, and it was amazing. The dish tasted exactly like my grandma would have made it. That the reason why this dish is the most special to me and the most important to me.

 The ingredients for the dish are simple and it is not a lot, but it is very delicate. Let us start with the meat. The meat is made from mixed meats, from ground beef to lamb. When you fix the meat together you want to also make it into a small sausage while mixing it together. After you want to turn on the grill and the sausages on the grill and make the meat look a little brown on the outside, that is how you will know it is done and ready to go. For the bread, there are two types, you can either have crispy bread or soft bread with your cevapi. The bread has to be circular or if you are

making a small amount of cevapi then you would half a circle of bread. Let us start on how you make the crispy bread first. You will need a pan and make sure you put little oil in the pan, so the bread does not get soggy. Then put the bread in the pan and wait till the outside borders of the bread start turning black, that is how you will
get the crispy bread for your cevapi. For the soft bread, you will also need a pan and oil. Take the pan and oil in it, the more oil the softer your bread will be. Once you have done that, take a spoon and see if you can rip the bread off with little to no force while it is still in the pan. If you can that means that you have made your soft bread to go with your cevapi. After you have done all of that you will need to get an onion and chop it into little pieces so you can eat it with your cevapi. For the two sauces, they are called kajmak and ajvar. kajmak is sour cream and you can get it at any grocery store, you will need this so you can dip your cevapi in it. For the ajvar this will be a little harder to find, you will need to go to a Balkan grocery store and get it from there because they do not sell it in normal stores. Ajvar is a mix of vegetables, vinegar, and oil. If you wanted to make it, you will need to get, red bell peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes. Chop those up into small pieces and pour, cooking oil, and vinegar into them. Then you will need to smash it all together and start to fix it until it turns orange, then you will have your homemade ajvar ready to go. After you got everything you will want to put salt and paper on the cevapi and the bread and some like to put salt into their sour cream as well. Then you are ready to begin to eat your cevapi!

 

You may think once you have made the dish that you can just grab a fork and knife and go eat? NO! For those who have not tried it yet, the traditional way of eating cevapi is to eat it by hand. I know it may not sound professional or you may feel like you are not having manners, but that is the traditional way of eating cevapi. Once you have the dish in front of you, you want to rip apart a small piece of bread enough so you can wrap it around one cevap. Once you have done that you want to dip a little bit of the bread and a little bit of cevap into each sauce, first the kajmak and second the ajvar. Take a bite of it and then grab the onion that you have cut up and put some in your mouth. Once you have done that you will taste all the flavors hit you once from the bread, the meat, sauces, all the way to onions all at once. You might need a second to figure out all the flavors that you have just taste, but right after that go in with another bite and do it the same way you did with your first one, so you can get all the flavors all at once yet again. Once you have finished the dish most people like to drink Coke because it tastes better, but it is only the ones that come from a glass, not the canned ones or the ones that come from the plastic bottles. It is just a tradition that we all do after we eat cevapi, you do not have to, but you can if you want. 

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"Cevapi" by Kurayba is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

"File:Plates of pierogi with sour cream and onion.jpg" by stu_spivack is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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"Dad and Rebecca holding up the platter - Limor's" by avlxyz is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0