... with chickpeas on the side

Ingredients for the steak:

• one steak per person or double that number depending on how hungry everyone is
• oil
• one onion
• two to three cloves of garlic
• half a bundle of parsley
• salt
• pepper
• 100 ml of prošek (sweet dessert wine)
• spoon of honey
• herbs as listed below
• two to three fresh tomatoes or canned tomatoes.

Guess what everyone? Medo has come up with the name for our cookbook, but I'm going to keep it a secret for now. The title is great and all I can say is that it's something women ask themselves every day!

There, Medo has come up with the title of the cookbook, but he didn't bring all the ingredients for today's dish, did he? So the cooks from Medo's kitchen immediately reached for their mobile phones and called me to ask me to pick some Solin herbs with which to season our stake. So, after picking my daughter up from kindergarten, I picked local herbs (aromatic grasses, among other things) from many different places including Sridnja strana, Sesartić, Priko vode, all just to make our stake even tastier.

This stake can be prepared as an Easter dish or for dinner parties as a genuine local specialty. Having a garden will save you from all that trouble of finding the herbs, you only need to buy one thing - the meat. And if you think some of your guests could be put off by the herbs from our meadows, don't tell them what they are eating until after they have tried it, because they will be glad that they did, just like we were.

The recipe goes like this: Briefly fry the beef steak, or rump steak, in a pan, for one minute. Then, without cooking it separately, add the sliced onion, 2-3 chopped cloves of garlic, half a bundle of parsley, and season everything with salt, pepper and Vegeta. Add 100 ml of prošek, a spoonful of honey, and then the leaves of the local Solin herbs without chopping them. The herbs may include sage, chives, St. John's wort, purple betony, marshmallow, chicory etc. Finally add 2-3 mashed tomatoes.

The dish is left to simmer for approximately 30 to 45 minutes. If you use rump steak instead of beef steak, cook for only about 25 minutes. As I mentioned before, the herbs we used in this dish were collected in the Solin area where there are still wild, untouched meadows, including the royal Dvorine, which is where our kings used to live according to legend.

Chickpea soup or salad

Chickpea:

• (served either as a soup or salad) 500g of chickpeas
• olive oil
• salt and pepper in both cases
• a teaspoon of Vegeta if you are making the soup

In both cases, we soaked the chickpeas the day before and changed the water once to soften them. If you are preparing the soup, put all the ingredients (chickpeas, salt, pepper, olive oil and Vegeta) into a pot filled with water. Leave it to cook for approximately an hour once it starts boiling and you'll get a really nice chickpea soup. If you decide to make the chickpeas as a salad or a side dish, season the chickpeas with olive oil and add some salt and pepper to taste.

Go on, I can't wait for you to try this steak. I was delighted with it, especially because these local herbs gave it such a special taste. Jakov liked it, too! And Nina! And the cooks! Medo knew from the beginning tha it was going to be a hit. Hopefully, you will love it, too!

Source: "What Will I Cook Today?" – Notes from Medo's Kitchen
Text: Mia Sesartić, Recipes: Zoran Kljaković Gašpić – Medo