Translation: “This tastes great”

It only took a moment, but suddenly it is spring in Slovenia.

Cecile once had me convinced that Earth is a cube, rather than a ball. When we lived in the far northern latitudes, winter lingered unbearably. Then in what seemed an instant, Nature rolled out the sunshine, flowers and smiles – we had rotated over the edge of the cube.

I’m sure my scientist friends would go crazy at just the mention of another fake news theory, but it certainly appeared that the weather went over the edge this week. The Spring Equinox took Ljubljana from wet and gray to warm and sunny overnight.

It was not just the flowers that bloomed. You could see spring on the faces and coatless shoulders of people everywhere.

The ancient Brits were so excited about this annual change that they built Stonehenge. The wise folks in Ljubljana passed on the backbreaking stonework and opted instead for the diet-breaking Open Kitchen. Each Friday until the world dulls again in October, great cooks, fine restaurants and simple purveyors of good food pack the market square in the old city center with booths offering an astounding variety of food.

We are not just talking about Slovenian traditional dishes here – though there were plenty of those. The fare ranged from Slavic to Mexican to Thai and beyond. The double adventure for us was that most of the posted menus were in Slovenian, so we let our noses and taste buds do the translations.

Friday was never so tasty. I tried my first horse meat burger (a Central European staple that tastes a whole lot like a beef burger), Cecile tried the roast pig with kraut and potatoes,  and we both gorged ourselves on an odd-looking concoction of scrambled crepes topped with chocolate and berry sauce.

You really had to be there to see and appreciate that last dish. A muscular young man poured batter into enormous frying pans, let the mixture set and then chopped, stirred and tossed it until it looked like a big plate of small dumplings. It was rich, heavy and a true waistline expander.
Good food, good people, good memories. Open Kitchen was our perfect segue to our next Slovenian adventure – a trip to the wine country.

Captions: With the hungry crowd; The horse burger' Scrambling giant crepes.