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!