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Lunch ideas

Lunch ideas from Slovak home cooking. In Slovakia, lunch is usually the main hot meal of the day – a soup followed by a main dish. The recipes here are sorted by how much time you have and what you feel like: quick lunches in 35 minutes, soups, chicken and ground meat, meatless lunches, Sunday lunch, cheap dishes from potatoes and cabbage, one-pot meals and sweet lunches. The most popular recipes are at the top of each section.

Lunches for the whole week with a shopping list are in the weekly lunch menu. More ideas are in quick recipes, main dishes and Slovak cuisine.

Quick lunch in 35 minutesSoup for lunchChicken and ground meatMeatless lunchSunday lunchCheap lunch from potatoes and cabbageOne-pot and one-pan lunchSweet lunch

Quick lunch in 35 minutes

When there isn’t much time to cook: quick pasta with Orava bacon and processed cheese, chicken and rice with vegetables, Hungarian halušky with cheese and bacon or roasted cauliflower with cheese and garlic. According to the times in the recipes, all of them are ready within 35 minutes.

Soup for lunch

Hearty soups such as sour potato soup, kulajda, goulash soup or bean soup are filling on their own. A lighter cauliflower soup or garlic soup goes well before the main dish. All of them are in the Soups category.

Chicken and ground meat

Egyptské zemiaky, potatoes layered with ground meat, chicken schnitzel in mustard marinade, spaghetti with ground meat and corn or stuffed cabbage rolls in tomato sauce. More recipes are under the ingredients chicken and ground meat.

Meatless lunch

Filling dishes without meat: sweet-and-sour lentils with fried eggs, tangy bean stew with fried eggs, fried cheese with tartar sauce, cabbage and noodles or zucchini pancakes. More are in the vegetarian recipes.

Sunday lunch

Sunday is a good day for roasts and dishes that simmer longer: breaded pork schnitzel, svíčková, beef in cream sauce, Szegedin goulash, stuffed peppers or roast duck with red cabbage.

Cheap lunch from potatoes and cabbage

Dishes from everyday ingredients that are usually at home – potatoes, sauerkraut, flour, eggs and pulses: fučka, granadiersky pochod, potatoes with pasta, strapačky with sauerkraut, sedliacka výplata with sauerkraut and sausage, lokše sauerkraut flatbreads or cheese fritters from stale rolls.

One-pot and one-pan lunch

Everything cooks in one pot or pan or bakes on one tray, so there is less washing up: Hungarian beef goulash, beer-marinated pork with potatoes, one-pan pork cutlets with potatoes and cheese or one-pan roast chicken with potatoes.

Sweet lunch

Steamed yeast buns with plum butter, potato dumplings with poppy seeds, sweet poppy seed noodles, quark dumplings with sour cherries, bread pudding or rice pudding. In many Slovak families a sweet lunch is cooked on Fridays.

How to plan lunches for the week

It pays to cook soup for two days at once and to vary the main dish: meat one day, a meatless dish the next, then something from one pot. A ready plan with soup and a main dish for every weekday, including a shopping list, is in the weekly lunch menu; you can put together your own in the meal planner.

What to cook with what you have

If you don’t know what to cook, enter the ingredients from your fridge in the search by ingredients – it finds recipes that use them.