You Cook – I Eat Part 2: Supersoup

Supersoup is a nickname that I translated based on my friend’s Szilvi’s nickname for this soup (she dubbed it “miracle soup” but supersoup just sounds so much better in English.) Surprisingly enough, I actually learnt this from my sister. You may ask why that is so surprising, but trust me, you would have no further questions after seeing her “world famous” mashed potatoes. I mean, I love my sister, but mashies from a blender (yes, she actually puts the boiled potatoes in a food processor =/) without milk or nutmeg, or even salt for that matter is something that even the least picky person (my father) can only stare at with disbelief.

I have no idea where she got this recipe from, but I do know that I first saw her make it around the time when she started dating her last boyfriend (who is her husband of ten years or so now ;)) – but having seen some cookery in his family, I highly doubt she learnt it from them.

I’d love to say that it was me that perfected this recipe, but it’s not true. I do believe that this soup was pretty damn unbeatable by the time it first got onto my plate, so I really didn’t have to change anything to make it as delicious as it is. The other interesting fact about it that even avid soup haters can eat truck tons of it. If it so happens that I make it at home, Yuri will usually have 2-3 (or sometimes 4) bowls worth of it – and usually stops only because there’s no more left.

I really like the idea that there’s no tarragon or double cream involved in making this a ragout-like soup. A very similar taste is acquired via the lemon and the sour cream. Supersoup is the base pillar of all simplicity, there’s no roux involved, there’s no complicated tricks, and there’s also no high calorie impact ingredients. Without further ado, here are the ingredients for 2 people:

• 1 chicken breast cut into bite-sized pieces
• 250 g mushrooms
• 100 g rice
• 300 ml sour cream
• 2 slices of lemon
• Thyme (I prefer fresh but dried thyme also does the job perfectly fine)
• Salt / pepper
• Water
• About 2-3 tbsp oil (olive oil is not a good choice for this.)

First, throw the chicken in a pan, add salt to it and sautee it till golden brown. Take it out of the pan and put it into a cooking pot. Meanwhile, put the mushrooms into the same pan and sautee them until done (it’s important that all the juices come out of the mushrooms before they’re being put in the actual soup, otherwise they become too mushy.) Once the mushrooms are done, add them to the chicken and place the pot onto the stove. On high temperature, stir them well together and add the rice. Right before the rice would start sticking to the pot, add the water, some extra salt, the thyme, and the two slices of lemon.

The cooking time of super soup is rather short, since the chicken and the mushrooms are already done, so basically, the soup only needs to simmer on medium temperature until the rice gets done. Once the rice is soft, add the sour cream and stir well. I usually let the soup simmer for a few more minutes before I serve it so that the sour cream becomes nice and consistent within the soup (I dislike chunks of cream in my food.) Scoop the soup into a bowl, grind some pepper on top, and you’re ready to go.

Et voila :)

So… What have I Learnt in the last few Weeks?

Other than the fact that for some reason, I find it difficult to copy my pictures from the camera to my machine, which also explains why there haven’t been any posts for almost a month, I have had a rather interesting time during the last couple of weeks. Yes, I have also cooked bazillions of things, including lentils, pea stew, lasagne, meat balls Hungarian style, various soups, falafel, etc. etc. – I’ve been a bit behind as far as writing posts is concerned.

These are some of the things that I learnt while being inactive (at least as far as blogging is concerned):

• Ground cumin (unlike its non-ground counterpart) is not the creation of Satan as a part of his evil master plan to take over and conquer the world.
• Tarragon, however, is.
• Juniper berries are very nice in gravy, even if it’s not venison you’re having the gravy with.
• It is a sad fact that steaks cannot only be eaten super well done. They are actually quite tasty when they’re only medium. I stand corrected. (It’s not that I’d never tried medium steaks before… it’s more the fact that either the meat or the cook was very bad, because I just had this feeling of immense gagging as soon as I cut into my steak. It also didn’t help that they served me a medium steak when I ordered well done. However, I actually took the courage to order a medium steak the other day and it was quite nice. QUITE.)
• There is still a hope for Hungarian culinary art. By this, I mean that you can actually cook good Hungarian food without the 9 litres of compulsory fat, and the 15 kilos of onions.
• Not every restaurant taking part in Torkos Csütörtök is an epic fail. The one we chose was actually really really good. Really. (More about this later, perhaps…)
• It is close to impossible to get non-fresh coriander in Zürich. I was looking for it for 3 days, went to approximately 9 stores, no joy.
• I am an obsessive compulsive buyer of cook books. I bought six cookbooks during a 5 minute visit to the post office (no comment.) I don’t have bookshelves, so my entire apartment has various cook books lying around.
• As time passes, I get the feeling that I’m going to die a horrible death if I don’t make a stew or casserole anytime soon.

P.S.: a new post is finally done. Just need to wait for the images to transfer to this machine from the PC at home.

Making the most of your Leftovers – Chicken Skewers

It’s been almost two weeks since I posted something and it makes me feel bad. The reason for this is quite simple, it’s target setting period at work and there’s crap tons to do. Apologies, and here’s something to make up for it.

Unfortunately, this time around I have no funny stories or long long memories about making this dish, or how I learnt it, but I am sure the few people that read this won’t mind, since the previous posts were always fifteen times longer than I had originally anticipated. I am also trying to (not so) secretly please Kenny and post something without beef.

So it was one of those grey Sundays and I realised that I had plans with everything I had bought the day before. However, we were hungry, and I didn’t particularly feel like ordering or eating out (Sunday is my greasy hair and comfy clothes day) so I had to come up with something.

On top of everything else, the sausage I bought in Hungary last time I was home was quickly approaching its best before date, and since I feared it was going to go off, I had to find a use for it. So I took a closer look in the fridge and around the kitchen trying to find out what I can make for dinner, and found the following:

• 1 chicken breast
  
• 4 mushrooms
  
• Sliced bacon
  
• The aforementioned sausage
  
• Onions
  
• Potatoes and salad material vegetables as sidedish

I also realised that I still had quite a few of the bamboo skewer sticks lying around from when I bought them last year to try something out – so the solution was pretty easy. Chop-chop, stab-stab, bake and ready. The bamboo sticks of course have to be drenched in water for a couple of hours beforehand (and I still end up with a few spikes in my fingers while putting them together…) but other than that, this food is as low effort as possible.

The only thing you need to pay attention to when putting the skewers together is that you don’t place the high flavour and/or fat value items next to each but try to put them next to the low flavour/fat value items. This means, the sausage will never get next to the bacon and the mushrooms / chicken / onion sequence has to be broken by either a slice of sausage or bacon.

Here’s what the skewers looked like when I was done composing them:

And here is the glorious end result: :)

It also needs to be said that since the bacon and the sausage are by default salty, you really needn’t add extra salt to the chicken, otherwise the end result will be close to inedible. I have tried this before by adding “grilled meat” spice mix to the meat (although I generally dislike spice mixtures because of all the extra crap they add to it which they don’t want you to know about) but it works for me much better without the extra spice.

“You Cook – I Eat” Part 1 – Spaghetti Bolognese al Forno

“You cook – I eat” is a long standing agreement between me and Yuri, and it goes back to the beginning days of him moving in with me. From the very beginning, I had been pestering him with asking him to help me find out what the heck it is that I want to cook during the weekend, and what kind of things he wouldn’t mind having during the week, so that I could do the shopping accordingly. The answer was always “I don’t know” or “I don’t care,” and it frustrated me endlessly after a few weeks, which is when he came up with the term. This basically frees him up from the responsibility of helping me find out what the heck I should be making – as he’s fine with anything, because I’ll make it so well anyways. He also knew that I wasn’t going to go shop for the things he utterly despises just to spite him, because the mother in me always wants to make sure that everyone around me is well fed.

When I say “you cook – I eat” nowadays, I usually refer to the things that he loves the most from my recipes, and this one’s a prime example for that. There are of course others, and some of them are actually waiting to be posted – I promise I’ll get to it someday.

My love for spaghetti Bolognese comes from when I was a little child. I already mentioned that it went under the name of “cat stew” in my family, which is a reference of the silly stereotypes that Italians eat cat meat. It is not a generally well known stereotype and as such, the term did cause some funny moments in my family’s history. One day my aunt was taking my cousin home from school and they got onto the super busy underground. My cousin had this really low and loud voice for a child, so when he turned to my aunt and asked “Mom, when are you making cat stew for dinner again?” the entire car heard it. Needless to say, my aunt got approximately 300 killer looks, and people swiftly moved away from near them. So there she stood with a 6 year old child in the middle of the car with nobody around her in a 2 metre radius, all because of the silly cat stew. I think that’s pretty funny. :p

I am not going to give tons of details of how my mom makes spaghetti, but let it be said that she actually never buys ground beef for it – nor does she grind the meat at all. She will spend about half an hour cutting the beef into miniscule cubes and only then can the cooking begin. When I was a kid, I used to eat Bolognese with ketchup on top (I am really ashamed of this now) and I didn’t know better until I was 16 and went to Canada. The lady I stayed with in Canada decided to make Bolognese one day, and when I asked for ketchup to go with it, she downright refused and said that ketchup probably ruins the entire taste, and insisted that I try without. And how right she was!! I’d like to mention at this point that my father still puts ketchup on his spaghetti, and every time I am there to witness it, I argue with him about it. But oh well, old habits die hard. :)

I think the key to a good Bolognese is to not be afraid of investing time into cooking it long enough. It usually takes me 3-4 hours to be done, and I really don’t regret that I’m taking my time. Over the course of years, I have changed many things in the original recipe that I took from my mom (i.e. I try to completely avoid ketchup when making the sauce, and have also significantly reduced the amount of spices and salt that I used up until a couple of years ago) and I think it has evolved into something really exquisite by now.

I also use mushrooms (although standard Bolognese doesn’t have that) and fresh herbs, especially since I moved to Switzerland. Having said that, I have also found it reasonably difficult to find good enough meat here for Bolognese. The ground beef that you buy at the store has a horrible after-taste, which just won’t go away with cooking, and until recently, I just simply couldn’t find meat that was the quality that I needed. It was either not juicy enough (the Swiss like to remove every single trace of fat from the meat, which is normally great, but not when you’re trying to make something that needs not totally lean meat.) I buy the meat for the sauce in either slices or as a single piece nowadays, luckily I managed to find an acceptable quality after all these months of being here.

So without further ado, here’s the recipe and the ingredients – this does serve 6-8 people, depending how hungry they are:

• A few slices of bacon (cut into small pieces)
  
• 2 big onions (finely chopped)
  
• 4-6 cloves of garlic depending on the size of the clove (crushed)
  
• 1 kilo of ground beef
  
• 500g mushrooms (thinly sliced)
  
• 2 carrots (grated)
  
• 1 turnip (grated) (If you have no access to turnip, you can use half a celery)
• 500 ml tomato puree
  
• Fresh marjoram, rosemary, thyme, oregano and basil (finely chopped)
  
• Salt, sugar (to taste)
  
• Spaghetti
  
• Tons of cheese (grated)

In a large pan, sautée the bacon until golden brown. Add the onions to it and crush the garlic on top of the bacon-onion mixture. Stir carefully and add the marjoram, the rosemary and the oregano. Stir for another half a minute, turn the stove on to high temperature and add the meat. This is when you start stirring like crazy and stabbing the meat (that just gave me a very bad mental image :)) to make sure that it mixes well with the onion-herb mix and that it actually falls into crumbs rather than stick together in a huge patty. Once the meat has browned and is crumby enough, stir the mushrooms into the mix, put the lid onto the pan and leave them there for about 5 minutes.

After about 5 minutes, the mushrooms will have released enough juices and reduced in size to be ready for the tomato puree. Pour the puree into the pan (obviously after removing the lid, no Dutch jokes today :p) and stir everything well together. At this point, you can do a preliminary taste check and add salt and sugar, however, since carrots and turnip will be added to the mix, they’re going to significantly change the taste of the dish.

Add the carrots and the turnip, and if you think the sauce is too thick, add some water. Now is the time to leave the kitchen and do something else for the next two hours. Of course, you can check on the sauce every once in a while (I’m an obsessive compulsive taster, I have to taste the food every half an hour to check whether anything else needs to be added.) After about 2 hours, you can be sure that even the grated turnip is soft, moreover completely disappeared in the sauce, you can now add the thyme and the basil, alongside the salt and sugar, if necessary.

In the meantime, cook the spaghetti (al dente, otherwise it’s going to turn into a big mushy mess while being baked.) – and make sure you keep to the basic rules, fools (as Mr. T would say) – do not put oil into the cooking water, and for god’s sakes don’t rinse them in cold water when done aaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!! When the spaghetti is done, get a decently sized porcelain/glass baking dish (I have no idea what these are called in English, I don’t even know what they’re called in Hungarian.) and put a layer of noodles onto the bottom. Add a layer of the sauce on top (I usually make sure that it’s evenly spread all across the spaghetti, and then I mix the pasta with the sauce.) – continue until you run out of pasta.

Put the bazillion tons of cheese onto the top (I usually use standard mozzarella, or gratin mix) and put it into the oven at 250 degrees for about 10 minutes, which is when the cheese turns golden brown and crunchy on top, and you’re good to go!

Needless to say, serving can be quite tricky, I usually end up happy if I only mess up the first plate. :)

These are the terms that Wordle found interesting in this blog.

Clickie for a bigger image! :)

How other People’s Friends Influence your Life

My father told me on Friday that a very good friend of my sister who happened to be English passed away earlier on last week. Normally I really don’t like to write about my private life, but I can’t really pass by this without saying anything. Not because I’m mourning, because, well, he wasn’t my friend, we didn’t even get along until I became much older. I think they befriended each other when I was about 10 – and well, my English wasn’t particularly good at that point. :p

When I got older and my English got better, I think Dave (because this was his name) could not believe that someone like me could be the sister of someone like my sister. Our characters are very different, and obviously his preference lay in my sister’s character, so we spent most of the time ignoring each other. And when not, it was usually him making provocative remarks (I’m guessing this was to help me see my sister’s end of the story better,) which I then shrugged off or responded to the way I felt appropriate.

What I found very interesting about him was that I never heard about him work – I know he had a job and that he was successful, so successful that he retired early, but I have no clue what he had been doing. I also don’t remember his last name (shame on me) – but I do remember several other things.

He was a handyman – he built and restored furniture, he had this old English house that he pimped out pretty nicely, etc. etc. He also traveled a lot, and if I am not mistaken, also for the purpose of charity work. (I’m going to check with my sister about this as I’m not sure this is true.) He was a very good photographer and a very keen one too – I think this was one of the things that really bothered me when I was a teenager – I couldn’t quite understand why you’d want to take pictures of everything and everyone. (Let it be said right here - he took one of the best portraits ever of my grandmother and my sister together (and also separately.) I think he really had talent for photography, good for him. :p)

In the year 2000, while I was living in the Netherlands (I didn’t dare to write Holland in case any Dutch person reads this and yells my head off since Friesland is not in Holland :p) – my sister and her then brand new husband took a year off to live with Dave in the UK. And since my sister celebrated a nice round birthday in 2000 (not sure she’d like me to tell how old she is) – Dave was nice enough to invite my whole family to stay in his house for a while. The house was very nice (as I already pointed out) but what amazed me the most, and this is the one thing I had absolutely no idea about – he was quite an excellent cook.

And when I say excellent cook, I don’t mean it in a fish & chips or penne with tomato sauce way. He made 2-3 course dinners that suited about 15 people every night, and it looked to me like he was leading a traditional English kitchen. I must admit that Dave single handedly restored my faith in English cuisine - don’t laugh, it actually exists beyond the Woolton Pie and the Cornish Pasty or however you spell it.

He was a great inspiration to me in some aspects. I know for one that his recipe allowed me to make a mean Shepherd’s Pie. Mmm… that was actually quite amazing, even though I expected it to fail. He also put new ideas in my head about how to make roasts. He’d either marinade his roast in treacle or stick cloves into the meat. I tried both, they were both really tasty. He also cooked carrots in orange juice with fresh ginger added – maybe this wasn’t his invention, maybe this is totally common, but I’d never had it before, so I’m obviously always going to connect this to him.

Unfortunately, I will probably never find out what exactly he put into that one pork stew (casserole, more like) that gave it its spicy hot taste. I am pretty sure it wasn’t chili peppers, or cayenne pepper, but it was so good, even for a person that doesn’t like spicy food (me) that I will never forget it.

So, I guess this is my way of saying thanks to a guy that was probably a better person that I ever credited him (and vice versa) – I know for a fact that he touched many people’s lives, although possibly not through his cooking, which was what touched mine.

So long Dave – safe travels.

Slacker Extreme

I know, it's only been two weeks and I already started slacking. This is inexcusable.

I have been a busy bee in and outside the kitchen, to be honest, and I've also been heavily documenting everything I've done. But to write all the posts... I wish I were a millionaire so I could just take the time and do nothing but the things that I actually find exciting. :)

I'll try harder from now on.

A Giant Slap to Haute Cuisine – Noodles with Cabbage

So, after a busy weekend of cooking everything that was left in the fridge, and more, I finally have time once again to post something. I guess this is truly one of those recipes that

a./ are impossible to mess up

b./ require low effort

c./ get done in no time

I have already complained about the fact that I have rather interesting office hours (this means anywhere between 9 and 14 hours a day) – I am also very reluctant to buy fast food, especially so late in the evening. Mind you, I am not going to lie, I do go to the Turkish in the corner every once in a while, and yes, McD too once a month, or every two months, but whenever possible, I try not to do fast food or order from a home delivery service (especially not after last time’s overcooked penne with the super salty Napoletana sauce, which was basically uneatable.) So, yesterday, I had one of those funny hour office days again, and have decided that it’s no use warming up leftover stuff from the weekend (too heavy) – too late to get stuff from the Turkish, and as an extra, I still had some cabbage in the freezer from last time.

Yes, I know I gave myself away… it does happen from time to time that I cook in advance and just put stuff in the freezer. Cabbage is actually perfect for this. So I took it out, cooked some noodles, and ta ta, it was done!

Of course, I will explain how to prepare it, however, I felt the need to share why there’s not going to be imagery about the raw ingredients.

Noodles with cabbage takes me back to my childhood – it was a very popular dish at school canteens and also a much dreaded course for kids, as it featured a “K” vegetable, which most kids severely dislike.

“K” and “B” vegetables is a Hungarian term, or at least something that has been frequently used in my family – rumour has it that any vegetable whose name (in Hungarian) starts with a K or a B will have a horrendous smell while being cooked, and a unique (I’m being politically correct here) taste once it’s done. The following vegetables belong to this category:

• Cabbage (red as well, but especially white)
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Brussels sprouts
• Savoy cabbage
• Potato
• Kohlrabi
• Beans
• Peas
• Chinese cabbage (or Bak Choi)

Is there something like this existing in English? I wonder…

But anyway, Mondays and Wednesdays were typically the noodle dish days in the canteen. They’d take the same kind of noodles (similar to tagliatelle, except it was cut short) and cook them completely tender in very salty water (no comment) and then they’d put something on top – grits and marmelade, potatoes, poppy seeds, curd cheese, walnuts, or cabbage. I despised this at school (since salty noodles + sweet toppings are disgusting in my opinion and especially the curd cheese noodles were the height of culinary experience with cooked pork skin (which they referred to as bacon) mixed in with the noodles and SUGAR on top of the curd cheese…) and I never quite recovered. Until this very day, I can’t process any of the sweet noodle types and I really don’t have fond memories of the school canteen because of these. I think this is also the reason why I still hate poppy seeds (unless they’re baked onto the top of bread) and don’t particularly like walnuts either.

I guess it’s a small miracle that I like the cabbage version but it also has to do something with the fact that my mom obviously had a totally different approach. Basically, there are four ways to eat noodles with cabbage.

a./ by itself with nothing on top

b./ with sugar

c./ with pepper

d./ with pepper and sugar

Of course, the canteen never gave an option and they always smacked a spoonful of sugar on top (and had no pepper added to the cabbage at all) – but at home, we had all the goodies, so we could just choose how we wanted it. So when I got older, I just took my mom’s approach to it, and eventually totally skipped the sugar on top.

Enough small talk – let’s see how it’s actually made. You take a small white cabbage and grate it – you have to grate it with the smallest holes on the grater. This usually takes a long time, so I usually end up asking Yuri to do it, as he has the raw power (and patience) that I don’t. I guess I could also chop it up in one of those universal blenders/chopping machines, and maybe I will in the future, but this time, it was all Yuri’s work. Once the cabbage has been grated, you add salt to it and leave it lying around for a while. Eventually (I usually give it an hour or so) squeeze the juices out of it and then the cooking process can begin.

Heat some oil and caramelise some sugar in it (I can’t give exact measures, I’d say about 2 tbsp of sugar for half a cabbage, but if it’s not sweet enough, you can always add more) and put the cabbage in it. Stir it continuously to make sure the caramel doesn’t stick together into huge inedible sugar balls, and after about 10-15 minutes, it’s ready – taste it and add salt and/or sugar to taste. I usually add black pepper to it at this point, because it’s just lovely.

In the meantime, cook the noodles. In Hungary, we usually use traditional square-shaped noodles for this (it’s referred to as “cube noodles” if translated directly, although the shape is obviously nothing like an actual cube :)) but since I couldn’t get those in Switzerland, I bought some fettuccine (alla casiligna), which was cut short and was certainly much thicker than what I’m used to.

Once the noodles are done cooking, stir them very thoroughly into the cabbage, to make sure that it’s evenly distributed and there you are, the dinner’s done.

Oh, by the way, I found this nifty feature on my camera called "FOOD MODE" - so now I won't have to take pictures as if I were taking close-ups from flowers anymore. Granted, this is not going to turn me into a new Annie Leibovitz or Stéphane Sednaoui but you might see a slight increase in image quality. :)

Fabulous Faux Beefsteak Budapest Style

So I was talking to Kenny the other day and he asked me what I was going to make for dinner – and I visioned these little chicken skewers, with a salad on the side, and some potatoes (which then lead to an argument of course, because he said I should make a gratin, but meh… I don’t like gratin that much.)

Then, the next thing I know is that it’s 7.30 PM again, and I am still caught up in Excel-hell and by the time I’d get out, the stores will have closed. This would have been okay, except I missed one ingredient to the chicken skewers, and that was the chicken.

So I packed up and ran to the baby-Coop around the corner (I call it baby because of its size and because it’s obviously a convenience store, rather than a standard grocery store.) And… they had no chicken. They had turkey, which is something that I stopped eating since about a year ago, when a vein hidden inside a slice of turkey breast started spraying blood all over my plate. It was a rather enlightening experience that taught me well – either don’t look at your plate when you eat turkey, or don’t eat turkey. So, obviously the skewers were crossed off the list, but I still had the other ingredients that I desperately wanted to use – mushrooms, onions, bacon, etc. so I had to think of a different solution, and a different type of meat.

They had pork chop steaks à la minuit (which means they’re sliced so thin that you can see through them) – and the same with beef, but then I saw that they had nice rump steaks available. Yuri loves steak, and I remembered that I still had some leftover peas in the fridge (our freezer is currently in such a catastrophic state that I prefer not to put anything in it.. not like it would fit in due to the amount of ice that had already cumulated in it.) And then it dawned on me… Budapest style, baby, all the way!

Well, fake Budapest style, really. For those of you who don’t know, the original recipe takes a nice juicy tenderloin steak, and puts a “Hungarian Lecsó” based stew on top of it. It will contain bacon, onions, peppers, tomatoes (that’s what lecsó is) – and on top of that you’ll have mushrooms, peas and goose liver. So the food I cooked was faux for several reasons:

1. I had insufficient amount of peppers at home and they take too long to cook (for my taste anyway) so I skipped them
   
2. No goose liver (apologies, foie gras!) – I’m also not a huge fan, and Yuri gags by the thought of liver, not to mention by the smell of it.
   
3. I used rump steak and not tenderloin
   
4. The side dish was not French fries

I think it’s a real culinary experience to go and try Beefsteak Budapest style in Budapest restaurants, because you can be almost certain that you will not get what you’re supposed to. For one, people are too cheap to use tenderloin for it, they just sell whatever else they can find that can be sold as tenderloin, and secondly, you have a 99% probability that you’ll get chicken liver instead of foie gras. Because the two are totally comparable, am I right? :) I love it when the staff thinks that you’re too stupid to notice the rather obvious difference between the two.

However, there are the rare occasions when you do get what you paid for. I had my best Budapest steak in a restaurant quite a few years ago. It was quite a classy place, which since then has unfortunately closed, and work took me there for a business dinner. I remember that I was very surprised when I bit into the liver and realised that they didn’t try to screw me over for once. I also remember that my boss (his nationality and other characteristics concealed, of course) ate off the clients’ plates (he’d either try a bite of their starter, or finish whatever they couldn’t eat anymore.) The rest of us (including the clients) were sitting and staring with our jaws dropped, it was unbelievable.

He made another interesting choice that evening – he ordered ketchup to his steak. I could see the look of sheer disgust on the waiter’s face as he carried out the order, and needless to say, I was quite surprised myself that something like that could happen. :p It kind of reminded me of the story a friend of mine told when a girlfriend of his ordered ketchup in a French restaurant alongside her duck breast, and the waiter told her to go to the fish and chips shop around the corner if she wants to humiliate her dinner like that. :)

But anyway, back to the matter at hand. I quickly chopped up the mushrooms and the onions, sliced the bacon and shortly thereafter, pretty much everything was in the pan. I was contemplating whether I should put any spices in the mix (like marjoram,) but a simple salt + black pepper combo did the job. I added the peas and I was happy happy joy joy that I was soon to be finished, but then I looked to my right and noticed the two kilos of ripe tomatoes that I had bought earlier on in the week for tomato sauce to be made, and said to myself, ahhh, what the hell, I’ll just do it. I peeled 3 tomatoes quickly (yes, this does mean that I didn’t put them into boiling water for 3 minutes to save myself some time, you convenient people,) chopped them, and off they were to faux-sauce land! I guess this explains why the tomatoes are nowhere to be seen in the picture showing the ingredients, but hey.. what can I say. It so happens that I improvise from time to time, and by the time it came to that, I couldn’t restore the rest of the ingredients in raw form just to take a picture with the tomatoes. Tough luck!

Here are the ingredients:

• 2 slices of rump steak
• 200 g mushrooms
• 200 g peas
• 50 g bacon
• 2 mid-sized onions
• 3 mid-sized tomatoes
• 8 small carrots
• 4 small potatoes
• salt, ground black pepper, oil, rosemary
  

As a bonus, here are some pictures of the stew (or ragout, if you like) being made. Mind the artisan skilled photography!

I just realised that I made absolutely no mention of the side dish, I only explained what all it was not going to be. I chose roast potatoes (Amandines are the best for this in my opinion) and roast carrots. Once again, easy method – peel carrots, wash potatoes (oh my God, do not ever peel Amandines – not ever!!) chop chop, into the pan, oil + a bit of water + salt (and in my case fresh rosemary) on top, into the oven at 235 degrees, shut the oven door and you can forget about them for the next 30 minutes, which is when you open the oven door, take the pan out and cheer, because your side dish is ready to serve. :)

So basically, with my stew ready and the potatoes / carrots in the oven, all I had to do was to grill the steaks. Yuri likes his medium (or medium-rare, but I’m sure he’s going to correct me if the latter is not true) and I like mine close to well done, but not well done enough for the meat to lose its juiciness. Well, I would like to report that I actually did a perfect job on Yuri’s steak, it was just the way he liked it (he told me at the end that it was a bit tough, but that also could have been because the meat wasn’t perfect in the first place and because he usually eats pretty slowly, so towards the end, the meat was totally cold.) – and as far as mine is concerned, since I was so busy taking pictures of the result on Yuri’s plate, that the steaks entered the super well done category. It was still okay though, I’ll just make sure to not burn it next time.

Here is the end result (eventually, the triangle-shaped plate will be boring, then I’ll buy some new ones :p) – I think it turned out to be much nicer than I had originally thought.

On a side note – it seems this week is beef week in my house – I have approximately a kilo and a half of beef waiting for me to process it one way or another. This should be interesting… :)

How Football Fever Inspired the Sandwich of Awesomeness

You may ask why I say “cookery” and then proceed to post about a sandwich as my very first recipe. Well, it’s because my best friend Szilvi has been drooling over this sandwich for quite a while now and I thought I’d show her what it actually looks like. But here’s how I came to the idea of making this at home, and how it evolved from a simple idea into the most amazing sandwich I’ve ever eaten. (On a side-note – I generally don’t like sandwiches, and also avoid bakery products. Maybe a bad childhood experience, I don’t know.)

A couple of months ago, the whole of Switzerland was in complete football fever. Yes, football, not soccer. Soccer is what Americans call it, we, the rest of the world refer to the sport as football, because, well… that’s what it is. The country co-hosted the European Championships with Austria, and had truck tons of tourists attending, which also meant that the Swiss service industry, including the restaurants, bars, and even the grocery stores had to come up with new ideas, inspired by football.

My guess is, as the Austrians probably grabbed every single idea that is connected to the Wiener Schnitzel, given it’s one of their national dishes (although, I hate to break this to you Austria, it’s actually of Italian origin, boooo) – the Swiss also had to think of some things that they can use as their football food. Now, I highly doubt that the Berner Rösti can be stuffed into a bun, nor can a Fondue Chinoise so, they thought of other things, and for this, I shall be eternally grateful.

One day, I had some stuff to do around lunch time, so I hopped out to the nearby Migros (more about the Migros later) to grab a sandwich. Of course, it was super crowded, especially around the area where you could get the sandwiches and canapés, but it still beat the canteen in time efficiency. I noticed that they had ”Fussball EM” Specials, which were basically sandwiches created for the occasion. And there it was – I swear it was one of those movie moments where you can see Arthur grabbing the Excalibur, or finding the Holy Grail – I totally picture it with the little sparklies around it, and angels singing in the background. The sandwich.

It was quite simple actually – they took a Tomatenbrot (which is basically a Focaccia with dried tomato pieces in it, and tomato sauce and oregano on top) – cut it in half, put some crème fraîche onto one side and some pimento sauce onto the other, stuffed baked courgette, cheese and dried tomatoes in it, and off you go. I bought two. Because it’s light, right? Well, after having the first, other than the fact that it was a rather intensive experience in taste, I also felt totally full. I gave the second one to Yuri (an avid vegetable hater) and to my greatest surprise, he actually loved it, too. This is when I realised that this sandwich was a keeper, and decided to go back every day to buy some more for lunch. But... the Migros thought otherwise and they took it off their selection after a week and replaced it with some not-so-nice salami/green pesto/rocket salad crap. :( Nonetheless, since I had all the ingredients down, I decided to recreate it. I changed a couple of bits and pieces (I use younger cheese and added ham, and skipped the pimento) – but here it goes, ingredients and everything for 4 sandwiches, which is more than enough for two very hungry people.

• 2 pcs tomato bread (I either buy this, or cheat and make my own focaccia)
• 2 slices of young cheese (I used Fol Épi for it, but I’m pretty sure it works with say Gruyere or Trappista as well, if you’re Hungarian) per sandwich, if you’re a cheese lover, if not, one slice will do perfectly.
• 2-3 slices of Black Forest ham per sandwich (I think my dad will hate me forever for having such easy access to the original Schwarzwaldschinken since I live here, and my God he’s right... the ham is just exquisite!)
• 1 small courgette, sliced thin
• 4-5 sundried tomatoes per sandwich
• 1 tbsp sour cream per sandwich (I use sour cream from the Coop, because it’s pretty much the best you can get around here.) I chose sour cream instead of crème fraîche for the soury taste and simply because crème fraîche is too heavy for me, especially since the tomatoes are oily by default.

Here’s a picture of the ingredients:

So, I split the breads in two and then sliced them through the middle, and meanwhile, started grilling the courgettes on the stove (obviously in a pan :p) – spread sour cream on one side and put the dried tomatoes on the other. I covered the tomatoes with the ham and the cheese, and then just waited till the courgettes were ready. I placed the hot courgettes on the cheese, and closed the sandwich, and voilà, you have your dinner ready!

This is what the sandwich looked like before I closed it:

And this is the end result:

I was quite happy with it – maybe the pictures give at least a slight view of how great it was, despite the fact that I’m not exactly a genius photographer.

Where it all began

So I already mentioned my mom’s cooking and how it was the basis of my future as a kitchen fairy, but I figure I’d give more details as to how exactly my career developed.

I think my mom is an amazing cook – I really like a lot of the thing she does (and dislike a lot of others) – and I had an interest in cooking from when I was a little kid. I’d snoop around and have her let me taste the stuffing to the chicken for the Sunday dinners, or just look at what she was doing and eventually helping out (especially when it came to breading the schnitzel or the potatoes for lunch, or peeling vegetables for the soup.)

Then, when I was about five, I got a children’s cook book, which was published under the name of a Hungarian cartoon figure, Pompom. Pompom is this amazing little dude who cannot be characterised as any species, but he’s brown and fluffy and can serve as a hat, or a wig, or a scarf, or a muff – pretty much anything. He was a good friend of Picúr, a little girl and he’d spend a lot of his time sitting outside her school building on a tree, waiting for her. Now… Pompom had a cook book, where him and his friends would present recipes under their names, which was doable by children for the most part. I’ll never forget that I chose a liver recipe to surprise my mom with one day, dug through the freezer to find liver, and then finding out that I wasn’t going to be able to cut it up in slices. My dad was at home, and so, I asked him to help. My father, a real manly man, despises anything to do with cooking, and especially working with meat (let alone organs like liver.) He said no, and then I threw this huge whine fest about how I wanted to surprise mom but I was only 5 years old and couldn’t do it and now we won’t have lunch because he’s not helping, WTF, etc. to the point where my otherwise ridiculously patient father lost his calm, sprinted into the kitchen, chopped up the liver while gagging, and then said “well I hope you’re happy now!!!” I was. Of course I don’t remember how the dish tasted, but I know that I actually didn’t mess it up (i.e. didn’t put salt on the liver so it didn’t turn all tough, etc.) And that was my first “self-made” dish.

Then I made my own spaghetti Bolognese, or “cat goulash” as it is referred to at home, when I was nine years old (or so I thought at the time) – obviously my mom was in charge, but she made it look like I was doing everything. She never officially taught me anything, I pretty much picked everything up from her and my grandma (on my father’s side.)

I used to spend all my summers with my dad’s parents when I was a child, so my grandmother’s influence to my cooking is undoubtable. I would like to think that I learnt many things from her, however, our arguments about cooking mechanics are much more memorable. My grandmother and my mother had very different cooking styles, and as a child, I didn’t notice much of this. But as I got somewhat bigger (10-11) – I started noticing that my grandmother is doing some things differently, and I spoke up. This obviously unleashed my grandmother’s fury… :)

Example – my mother cooks green bean stew with garlic and sour cream. I think this is amazing, and I highly doubt I could eat it any other way. This is very untraditional, and my grandmother actually used to make it with parsley and then ate it with sugar(!!). When I told her that I wanted garlic and sour cream with my green beans, she went berserk, and told me that it was completely unorthodox, and my mother’s blasphemous cooking ideas shall never enter her kitchen. So I had to do without, until eventually I took over the cooking responsibilities from my grandma when she got old (and started putting leftover rice from the previous day into next day’s soup because she didn’t think it would hurt, etc.)

But all in all, my grandma was amazing. She’d actually make her own noodles (including vermicelli) and cut everything up herself – no machines, nothing. I wish I had learnt properly how to do this from her before she died, but I really didn’t have the patience when she tried, and she stopped doing it the last few years of her life. She also made the most amazing potato gnocchi I’ve ever had and I believe my sister still has that recipe, and it’s definitely on my list of things to learn.

So this is pretty much where it all started and then evolved into something possibly better as I grew older, but more about that later.

Oh, for the Love of F... Food!

So this is going to be my attempt to make a blog about my cooking. I am not quite sure whether I am going to be able to keep up with this – I have always been an epic fail when it came to consistently writing down anything, like a diary, or stories or anything else.

Why am I doing this? Interesting question. It has been on my mind for a while now because I really do enjoy cooking, and especially in the last few months, I’ve been doing more and more of it, regardless of the fact that my job and other activities allowed me very little spare time (this also means that weekday dinner sometimes only made it to the table at 10 PM, but oh well, I’d rather do that than eat junk food at 7.) Yuri told me a few weeks ago that if this was something I’d like to do, he’d be totally supportive (even though he’s not much of a gourmet, but more about that later.) I’ve also been having many conversations with friends about cookery and stuff that I have been doing, and as part of this, Kenny started pestering me about starting a blog. I then spoke to Szilvi about the idea and she said she’d definitely appreciate it, since she loves my cooking and I’m the one that managed to teach her how to bind soups and stews!

I have many second thoughts about this, of course – as a passionate cook, I love browsing through people’s blogs for recipes and ideas, and as I’ve been doing this, I realised that my cooking is just downright ordinary and boring. I will most likely never make cucumber mousse with caviar, or venison paté with truffles, because my world of taste is completely different.

I come from a family, where my mother was cooking more or less according to the rules of traditional Hungarian cuisine. She of course claims that her cooking is very different, and it has something to do with her Slovakian roots, but trust me, a lot of the things she makes differently from the ‘original’ way are probably results of family tradition, rather than Slovakian roots.

I also spent the first 10 years of my life behind the iron curtain, and granted the 80’s weren’t half as bad in Hungary as the 50’s, the best idea of a pizza we got was a thick mushy piece of pastry with tomato sauce and vegetables on it – deep frozen of course – which we then microwaved (my family was special like that… we had a microwave and a colour TV and a dishwasher and our own telephone line) and put spicy Hungarian sausage and mustard (of all things!!!) on top. I guess this pretty much describes the culinary excellence and variety of non-Hungarian dishes and ingredients that were available to me when I was a child. (And no, I am really not proud of that pizza. But this example usually scares off even the least picky and most well-trained stomachs that I’ve met. :))

So, coming from that background, I think it is somewhat understandable that I haven’t really developed a sense for haute cuisine – or whatever it is that I consider haute cuisine is very much different from other people’s ideas. One of the things that actually pains me very much in today’s restaurants is that it is no longer possible to get simple dishes on the menu – it always has to be overly complicated to ‘sell.’ Or so they think. I’m usually happy if I can find one item on a menu card that I find acceptable. In other words, no, I don’t like it when my steak is glazed in orange jam and whiskey. Or as Denis Leary would say: “I WANT A COFFEE FLAVOURED COFFEE!”

So if you’re after recipes that are complicated, have hard to come by ingredients and mix sweet with salty (oh NO) – this is not the right place for you. If you want to see simple things (although I always spend many hours in the kitchen making the easiest things, but that is because I choose to do so) – and don’t mind the usual “take 2 kilos of onions and paprika powder” stuff – you might find some interesting things.

Enjoy!