Montenegro Unit

I’m just going to start out by saying if I spell Montenegro wrong, it’s because I apparently can’t spell despite having spellcheck on here. I have had to correct more than a few images for this Montenegro Unit post. Now to what I was going to actually say to introduce this geography lesson: Montenegro is a small country in Europe, part of the Balkan countries. Unlike many of the “noisier” Balkan countries, it’s not really talked about quite as much. So, I had a lot of fun learning all about it with our Montenegro Unit as we worked our way through Europe.

At some point, I need to update my Europe Unit to include all of these European countries I’ve written about.

Montenegro Unit

(there are affiliate links in here)

Montenegro Resources

Ha ha ha ha, I have to laugh at the start for the Geography Now, “The Balkans it’s like Europe’s most dysfunctional family.”

And, I’m also going to start including the Flag Friday episodes, because once he quit putting them into what the flag means into the episodes, I rather missed it. I mean, it’s fun to see how many ways he can say red is the blood of the martyrs again and again.

And to give a bit more to talk about. Seriously, today I cannot type for anything. TLAK, tlak is not a word.

Montenegro Burek recipe

Looking up a dish to make for Montenegro led me to this site of 10 traditional Montenegran recipes. This then led me to look up burek, and then I discovered that there is disagreement on whether this is Montenegrin or Serbian, but the other Montenegro recipes had the same problem, so I’m guessing the Balkans just have a feud going over who gets to claim what.

Montenegrin Burek recipe

This does not surprise me given what little I know of their history, see the WW1 meme on this page. I like to collect WW1 memes.

Sigh, I have had to delete and upload the image for this three times because I apparently can’t spell. Make that four, I saved the wrong version the last time. Double sigh.

Burek ingredients

  • ground beef
  • 1 tablespoon allspice
  • 1 tablespoon paprika
  • salt and pepper
  • 1 potato finely chopped
  • 1 onion chopped
  • 1 package phyllo dough
  • 1/4 cup melted butter

Let’s make some burek!

  1. Brown ground beef, then stir in spices. Transfer to bowl and stir in potato and onion.
  2. Unroll the phyllo dough and put 2 sheets on a work surface. Sppon part of the ground beef mixture on then roll the dough into a long tube and coil into a snail shape. Then put on the baking sheet.
  3. Repeat this until all of the meat mixture has been put rolled into shapes.
  4. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-30 minutes.

Montenegro Burek

Montengrin Burek main dish Europe

Create this original recipe from Burek.

Prep Time 20 minutes
Cook Time 30 minutes 20 seconds
Total Time 50 minutes 20 seconds

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 tablespoon ground allspice
  • 1 tablespoon paprika
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 potato finely chopped
  • 1 onion chopped
  • 1 package phyllo dough
  • 1/4 melted butter

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
  2. Brown ground beef, drain the fat, and then mix in the spices. Transfer to a bowl and stir in the potato and onion.
  3. Unroll the phyllo pastry and take 2 sheets, spread part of the beef mixture across the top, then roll up into a tube. Coil the tube in the shape of a snail. Place on a baking sheet.
  4. Repeat this process with the remaining dough and meat mixture.
  5. Bake for 20-30 minutes until golden brown.

Generally speaking, no one was super in love with this recipe. The phyllo dough had a tendency to fall apart, and the filling wasn’t our favorite flavoring.

Montenegro Notebooking pages

We pulled out our Europe notebooking pages to fill them out.

Montenegro notebooking pages

Some fun things I learned. Montenegro isn’t known for its’ resources, as the primary resource we could find was tourism. It’s got some amazing geography and landforms.

It has a monastery built into a cliff (pictured below), and they have “Lazy” Olympics. That idea is absolutely hilarious to me, and I’m sure I would be an early loser as sitting still for a long time doing nothing sounds horrible.

Montenegro Unit

More fun ideas to learn about

“File:Monasterio de Ostrog, Montenegro, 2014-04-14, DD 11.JPG” by Diego Delso is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

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