TheDromomaniac.com

I have an Italian friend named Werner (no, really!) and he claims you need to put some carrot and a dash of sugar in your pasta sauce. I tried that for a second time, but it doesn’t cook in so well. I chop it up fine but does it need to be a puree?
I also cooked textured dry soy chunks for the first time. My favorite restaurant in the world in Malaysia does magical things with the same soy, but that’s the future; we all have to start somewhere, don’t we? I dutifully let the chunks soak in hot water first before putting them in the sauce, but I just ate and it feels like the soy is expanding in my stomach. I have a sudden urge to sumo wrestle someone. I will go see what the old lady next door is doing.

It’s a legitimate question. The only things I do all day are trying to cook new things (veal chunks with pasta?) and work on my website.   This weekend I turned down some nice offers to visit friends out of town, but I need to bear down and finish off the beast.

If a foreigner is reading this blog, and you come to visit someone in Budapest, and your friend offers to take you to their hometown, go.   Go!   Don’t think about what you might do in a tiny place on a weekend and how it must be boring.   It won’t be.   It will be a great experience, no matter the size of the town/village.   The hospitality will be overwhelming:   home-cooked food, friends of friends to meet, events, parties, relaxing Sunday mornings, a different feel to the country you can’t get in Budapest.

Hungary is just small enough that there is a countrywide mass migration on Fridays to go home, particularly college students.   In fact, this is how I got to know Hungary.   In the good ol’ communist days of 1986 I stayed in Budapest with a family through Servas (a great organization to be explained soon in the redesign!) and I went with the daughter to her college town of Szeged.   A friend of hers invited me a tiny village where I met another friend of whom I am housesitting for right now.       This daisy chain continued  to Pecs where that family later informed me of a last minute opening for an English teacher.   I flew over 10 days later.   That job, at a salary of US$230 a month, was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

When the peaches and plums are 168 forint to the kilo (US 35 cents a pound) I’m buying. I also bought sour cherries, but they, like these, were overripe so I quickly sorted the best ones and froze them.

Now that I can cook in a temporary place of my own, I take advantage of the typical Hungarian specialities on offer in the fresh market behind the Mammut shopping mall. I bought duck and goose legs though I’d never cooked either before. It was a challenge (i.e., I almost burned the whole apartment block down), but there’s not much meat on such poultry, plus it’s very fatty.

I have been in consultations with my pro chef friend, Lynn. She is starting a business and this is the beginning of her website. I think I am going to buy some mangalica pork, a startlingly distinctive, uniquely Hungarian pig, something close to a wild boar (Here is a webpage from Japan(!) about it.) It’s supposed to have much leaner meat. I’ll cook that in some fashion and then make a sauce from the pitted sour cherries with wine. Lynn says wine but I don’t have any so rubbing alcohol should do.

Hungary is a great pork country. One theory about this is that during the Ottoman occupation, the muslims wanted no part of the Hungarians’ pigs so they were allowed to keep them unmolested and their love for them flourished.
I’m a wee bit miffed at my friends that I had to discover mangalica on my own. It’s going to be fantastic, I’m sure, if I don’t burn down all of Buda first. I might get a little of the smoked stuff, a little sausage, and a cut of some sort to try with the sour cherry sauce. Did I mention I weigh 300kg?

I made a salad—I really did; no one has hijacked my blog—of leaf lettuce, carrots, ewe cheese, diced pork chunks, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. As we say food professionals say, it was delish.

Not many people know this, but “Budapest” is an ancient word originating from east of the Ural Mountains that has been carried overland through Central Asia and Turkey and means “place of the fast metro escalators”.
(crickets)
Wow, tough crowd.

These three signs below are from the market. Hungarian is just a different animal. Even the word for “goodbye” is 14 letters: viszontlatasra. It’s also said that Hungarian is the only language in the world where “I love you” is one word: szeretlek.

Just a day after my Bizarre Foods encounter, I read that last week Rick Steves was next door at Szimpla. This crazy bar is right behind Peter’s building. There are lots of these abandoned lots turned into summer outdoor bars in this area. Don’t be the last one to visit the Jewish district of Budapest!

I still eat a little horse sausage everyday. I don’t think there are any side effects to it, though the other day I walked by a patch of tall grass and I got on my hands and knees to graze. I didn’t see anyone else doing it, but maybe they just can’t recognize good eatin’.

Sometimes I think Hungarians don’t have any idea what this stuff means either.