APPETITE for LIFE

Dandelion roots and pea greens, truffles and wild mountain thyme: a meal in Slovenia is like a walk in a fairy-tale forest. Sierra Crane Murdoch falls under the country's spell.

- Sierra Crane Murdoch

I HAD BEEN IN SLOVENIA just a few hours when, walking along a forest path outside the northwestern town of Kranjska Gora, my partner, Dave, and I saw two women huddled around a spruce tree, harvesting the soft green tips of the branches. I wondered what they would do with them. By the time it occurred to me to ask, we had continued on our hike, and when we turned around, the women were gone.

I might have forgotten about the spruce tips had it not been for our dinner that night. It was early evening when we arrived at Milka, a sleek, modern guesthouse on the edge of Lake Jasna. Built in the 1960s, Milka is one of Slovenia's many gostišćes, family restaurants that speckle the country, offering overnight accommodations to dinner guests.

Seated on the deck, as the evening light channeled through the Julian Alps to the west, I drank a cocktail infused with dandelion root and black-currant wood and snacked on a buttery wafer topped with a compote of foraged barberries. When I asked Dino Katalenič, who was the general manager at the time, to explain a wild-asparagus canapé garnished with forget-me-not blossoms, he told me that every Tuesday, Milka's younger chefs go out into the forests and fields to gather fresh ingredients. Dino-he had introduced himself as "Dino, short for 'Dinosaur"" was slim and debonair. A tattoo of a tiny airplane and its contrail spiraled his right wrist: a memento of his 16 years of travel before he returned home to help open Milka. When the sommelier brought us a bottle of Keltis Žan Belo, a skin-contact white wine from eastern Slovenia, the pairing was floral, unexpected, and perfectly precise.