#Noovi Intruduces Us to #Rakja and Delicious Food

Guess what
day it is? Guess what day it is? It’s HUMP DAY! In Bosnia for this post at least. LOL I
couldn’t resist. I woke up thinking,
“This two weeks are going to take FOREVER!”
It’s only Wednesday. *sigh*

I splurge at
breakfast this morning and get a croissant.
I slather it with the hazelnut cream from the breakfast “buffet.” They were milk chocolate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen milk chocolate
croissants… ever. Not that that’s bad,
but it’s just…different. They look
better than they are on the inside. The
flakiness and layers losses something in translation when you open it up.

It was a
quick day today, actually. For some
reason, I didn’t photograph lunch. We
had 4 types of pie. I talked about pie
in the first post . There was beef
pie, cheese pie, potato pie, and spinach pie.
I liked the potato and the spinach.
I didn’t try the cheese. The meat
was really heavy. I can’t imagine how
the Bosnian people aren’t all clogged up.
I’m sorry if it’s TMI but seriously!
I drank two containers of the yogurt in hopes of the probitocis doing
their magic. GAH!

Okay.

Since this
is a food blog, and I can’t REALLY tell you what I’m doing, I’ll just say, it
was a productive day. We all piled into
cabs and headed to Noovi. If you’re in
Bosnia, you HAVE HAVE HAVE to eat at Noovi.
It’s across from the British Embassy.
Apparently that’s important when you’re telling a driver who’s never been
there before where to go and you don’t really speak either of the three
languages spoken here.

Anyway. The sky was amazing!

Noovi is
this small restaurant. All the food is
cooked to order. DO NOT expect this to
be a quick meal. This is a grazing
restaurant. You nibble, you talk, you
drink, you talk, you sip Rakja, and talk.
Seriously. It’s the experience of
eating; not just the eating.

We have a
nice white wine. It was oak aged Žilavka by Gentille Vinarija,
which is a grape found primarily in the Herzegovina region. It was a delicious white wine; very similar
to a white burgundy. *shrugs*

They bring
us a basket of what they called foccacia, but it was like thin crust pizza
topped with herbs and cheese and baked.
It was the same dough they use for their pizza crust.

We started
with a traditional cheese and sausage plate with olives, dried figs, and
tomatoes. Fabulous! I loved the olives. They weren’t like the regular green olives we
get, that are over brined. These had the
olive flavor without all that salt/vinegar taste that we’re used to. You could taste the olives. It was amazing!

N and L
ordered pizza. Yup. It’s on the same dough as the foccacia. It’s crispy and tasty and delicious. The “ketchup” is a fabulously fresh tomato
sauce with spicy pepperoni. I had one
slice. It was like pizza SHOULD
taste.

I ordered chicken and mushroom rotini. WOW. I
actually thought I ordered the mushroom pasta, but they confused me and thought
I was ordering what H was ordering. It’s
okay. There wasn’t TONS of chicken in
the dish. There were tasty mushrooms,
some tender chicken and this light, yet creamy sauce. It was far from a heavy cream sauce pasta
like we would have received in the States.
Amazing food! It has so much
fresh flavor! And it was so
inexpensive! Why can’t we get this
quality at this price back home?
Seriously? Simple and
fresh.

Okay…now for rakja.
Do you know this rakja? Holy
cow! The owner gave us one round for
free. The women receive cherry (višnjevača) and the men
received walnut (orahovač). O. M. G.
The cherry was fabulous! I mean,
lick the glass can I please have the bottle fabulous! It’s tart cherry flavor in this sweet
wine. The perfect marriage of sweet and
tart in alcohol. WOW. We were all enamored with this drink we’d
never had before, so we all, of course, wanted to purchase bottles of this
heaven. I only purchased one bottle of
cherry. I imagine I will have withdrawal
symptoms from this one bottle and will DEMAND anyone someone form the Balkans
will have to purchase me a bottle, which I will reimburse them for, of course.

The next
round, I asked for the quince. Now, that
one came in a little bottle. Now, that
one, holy alcohol! It’s like quince
flavored everclear! Man did it
burn. I can see why A warned us about
this stuff. If all we had were the
bottles, I probably wouldn’t have even considered purchasing any. Thankfully, I wasn’t ruined by the second
rakja and was able to taste the cherry. I
can’t wait to get home and crack that bottle open and share it with S and the
rest of the fam.