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| Kepta Duona Su Suriu: fried bread with garlic and hot cheese dipping sauce |
For the first night in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, it seemed advisable to eat at a traditional Lithuanian restaurant “like your grandmother’s cooking”. Senoji Trobele is a small cottage with an open air garden. The homey decor and welcoming waitresses were the perfect antidote to a day of airports and cramped up plane rides. We had been warned that the Lithuanian menu is pretty much all potatoes. As a diversifier from the potatoes, we ordered fried bread with garlic and hot dipping cheese. Those were delicious and our favorite item of the meal. The closest thing to compare them to is a plate of crispy French fried potatoes.
The amount of potatoes in our meal was astonishing.
1. Cepelinai, sounds like "zeppelin" because it is one. A big wad of potato flour is formed around a ball of ground pork stuffed in the center. After eating that as an appetizer, you really should stop eating because it makes you full. But we didn't stop because we had ordered tons more to eat.
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| Cepelinai
2. The Lithuanian word for this purple soup dish is Saltibarsciai. It is Beet Borscht -- just like I remember my grandmother making it. She mixed sour cream into the beet soup, turning it a bright magenta. Hard boiled eggs, dill and boiled potatoes (again with the potatoes)....and a side of boiled potatoes (but not worth a photograph).
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3. Potato pancakes (grated potatoes mixed with onion and fried in oil), served with cottage cheese. So delicious. Could have stopped there, but did not.
4. The main course was whipped potatoes served with lamb (too full to take a picture).
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| Herb after dinner drink, kind of like Jaegermeister, served cold in a cup made of ice |
Taste test results: the fried bread, non-potato item was the best, even though it tasted like potatoes.