Oh my gosh, goulash!

For Christmas this year, I received mostly adult and utilitarian gifts- pants, shirts, shoes (sadly, no socks)- but there was one curious little gift that stood out amongst the piles of denim, cotton and poly blends: a packet- straight out of Budapest!- containing most of the ingredients for Hungarian Goulash.

Nothing about the package made sense when I received it from Jessie’s mother. I stared at it until she explained that those ingredients plus beef, an onion, a few carrots and potatoes would combine to make a meal. I mean look at it, it’s a tube of toothpaste, a few dried peppers, a package of something and a pouch that could be full of Angel Dust, but tonight my darling wife and I tried it out.

The first issue was the instructions. They were written in Hungarian and translated into English through a pre-Babelfish translator. Measurements were in metric, and words like “meat” and “and” were spelled “meet” and “end”.  We laughed and armed our kitchen with Google, and away we went.

The first step was the rather fun task of caramelizing onions with cooking fat. With Jessie stirring and I chopping (as well as taking pictures) we plowed ahead.

Following this, we then proceeded to add Jessie’s favorite ingredient: the Real Hungarian  Paprika (both in dried pepper AND powdered varieties) along with a teaspoon from a packet included in our gift that had a Viking Ship on the cover. We later on learned that these were caraway seeds. The addition of these changed the scent that was rippling through our house from the smell of onions cooking to a smoky and altogether different odor.

Next up I added some beef I cut into smaller pieces.

We let the dish simmer for a while until I added some fresh carrots and some parsley (which the instructions had only said we required 2 parsley to complete the recipe= 2 what? pounds, tons?)  to the mixture.  The dish began to look great, like a hearty stew by this point.

A little while later came the mysterious part- we added four teaspoons of the stuff in the toothpaste tube (which was called Gulyaskreme) into the mixture. Here I am adding it.

Next up came several potatoes I had chopped up, as well as some water to turn the simple stew into a soup. We then made a pastry out of egg, flour and water and dropped pieces of them into the soup. It made no sense to me at the time either.

The result was damn good. The pieces of dough weren’t that great, but all in all it was a damn fine meal.

It’s so weird loving cooking so much. I guess that is something that I’ll never get sick of doing with Jessie. With my ex, we never cooked together. Towards the end, when she was a vegan, we never even ate together. We just kind of got into our nightly fight and existed in the same room while shoveling nutrients into our respective mouths.

But not Jessie and I- we talk about our day, we dote upon each other. We dance to Beyonce and laugh at Waylon Jennings doing bad covers. She bitches about her class and I tell her my latest scheme to stop selling books and start typing words real fancy-like for money. I tell her about gossiping on the phone with Gretta, or some funny internet confrontation I had that day.

In short: fuck breakfast- dinner is the most important meal of the day. I’ll eat breakfast with anyone, but dinner is sacred (and I’m an atheist- so you know it’s important when I start throwing the s-word* around).

Until later,

Be good.

*Speaking of the sword, Jessie saw this video tonight and just about died laughing.