Serbia (Dance until you drop! Or until the neighbors get angry)

We were just about to celebrate Yugoslavia when I found out that it technically didn't exist anymore.  <Whew>  How embarrassing would it have been to have a dinner party for a country that no longer existed?  Turns out Montenegro was also part of Yugoslavia, so to answer your question it would have been really embarrassing.

Serbia (formerly part of Yugoslavia) joined the UN November 1st, 2000.

While looking for a recipe it was clear than Serbians liked their potatoes, paprika, peppers, and meat!  That sentence would have been so much better if meat somehow started with a 'p'.

I decided on Cevapi, a skinless sausage in a pita with a pepper/eggplant topping.  One of the many national dishes of Serbia!  The sausage was a piece of cake, I had no issues making the topping, the pita however...  A friend joining us was allergic to wheat so they had to be gluten free.  After searching three grocery stores and not finding any I decided that I would take a stab at making gluten-free pitas.  Everything seemed to be going well until I started flattening the dough and cooking it.  It ended up being a mess of gluten-free bread crumbs.  Curious if it still tasted good I popped one of the pieces into my mouth... and then spit it out.  Yuck!  The remaining crumbs and dough got thrown into the compost.  Gluten-free dinner rolls it is!

I don't know why but I wasn't feeling the usual pumped feeling that comes with one of these dinners.  So, on my drive over to Jenny's I hit play on my "Yeah!" playlist and a few great up-beat songs and some shameless singing in the car I was ready!  Than you Ke$ha.

 I was the first to arrive.  Bryan, Amber, and Annie soon after, and cooking frenzy began soon after that.  Except Bryan, whose only job was to watch, drink, and eat as you can see in the following photo.  Thanks for the help Bryan!

(I poke fun but he actually did help with clean up, so not a total dead weight.)

Cooking was completed without a hitch.  And once again the food was delicious!  I keep waiting for that dinner that's a total failure but I'm continually surprised by how good these dishes are.  Sure, there's a little bit of bias because we choose the recipes that look the most delicious, but that only goes so far right?

Dinner's over, time to clean up.  Unfortunately, we first did the very opposite.  We had a catastrophic failure of the only compostable bag we had, and ended up doing a little more cleaning than what was first anticipated.

Once we wiped down the floor, Amber started in on the shufnoodles.  The sugar for this dessert was generously donated by the local Seattle hotel Bryan and Amber were staying at, and as such, we needed to rip open a couple dozen packets of sugar into a bowl.

Cooking the shufnoodles was a little hazardous, the oil would spit when the shufnoodle was added and I heard Amber yelp a few times while frying them.  But they were quite delicious.  We decided they're kind of like churros but with potatoes.  So good!

After a few games of Camel Cup (or Camel Up depending on how you interpret the text) which I enjoyed a little too much to be considered healthy, we YouTubed a few traditional Serbian folk dances.  I really enjoyed watching friends try to replicate the dance as the skipped and kicked around he room (including a video that I was forbidden to post to this blog).  Until the downstairs neighbor started pounding on their ceiling.  Oops!

(Celebrated December 5th, 2015)