As a little sendoff for this year, I’ve compiled our weekly menus into a year-long calendar of dinners. It was interesting to see which ones were repeated most often (can you tell we have a kid who loves burgers?), and how often we cooked versus going to a restaurant or getting takeout (although the meal plans are a little unreliable there, since they’re done in advance and if we end up at our favorite pizza place at the last minute it isn’t reflected in the plan). I have included links to the recipes that have them, and I hope you’ll find some useful ideas for your own dinners in the year ahead.

A big thank you for reading here, and I hope the new year is more delicious than ever!

2011 Year in Menus

You know the expression “paralyzed by choice”? Well, despite growing up in the US and coming back for regular visits over the ten years I was living in Europe, I still struggle in American grocery stores. For the first six or so months after we moved here, I was following my usual shopping routine, going to the supermarket whenever we needed something. After a while, though, I found I was making a trip almost every day because I’d forgotten something basic like milk, while coming home with an armload of peculiar specialties that caught my eye. Too many times, I’d find myself wandering the aisles, because I’d suddenly decided we MUST have sesame peanut noodles for dinner, and do we have fish sauce at home?

I had resisted menu planning in the past because it just sounds so regimented and, I don’t know, authoritarian. Anyone who works long hours is probably all “authoritarian? You bet!” by now. You’ve been doing menu plans forever, right? But with our time becoming more limited, between work and shuttling kids around to their ever-growing list of activities (we get more American every week, I swear), I finally decided to get with the program. So I drew up a little chart and started to fill it in: dinner each night of the week, with vegetarian and picky eater options included. With the week’s meals laid out, I wrote up my shopping list; it only took one trip to the grocery store with list in hand to make me a convert to, even an evangelist for, meal planning. No more drifting through the store waiting for inspiration to strike! I feel like a model of efficiency as I check off items and zip through to the checkout. Well, it doesn’t always go that way, especially when the kids are with me. We still fall prey to kettle corn and other stuff that’s not on the list.

Now I usually do meal planning on Saturday mornings, after a good breakfast because it’s hard to plan when everything looks delicious. I keep a folder in my browser bookmarks for recipes that I’d like to try – I make a hotlink in the menu so I can click on it directly. The library is also a great resource, I have been taking out a cookbook or two every time we go and flagging the interesting recipes (I photocopy the recipes I want to keep). I also have the calendar in front of me so I can remember when someone has a late meeting or something else that I want to take into account. I try to plan for two big grocery runs per week: one to the local supermarket and the other to Trader Joe’s, so I organize dinners around those trips. Now that I’ve been keeping a menu plan for a few months, I have also started going back through the earlier weeks to re-use the best ideas, so I’m glad I’ve kept each week’s menu intact.

Do I sound crazy yet? In case I haven’t convinced you, we been wasting less food and saving money this way – and a lot of lunches get made from the dinner leftovers. While we still end up eating nothing but potatoes once in a while (and sometimes, that’s just what you feel like eating), planning has helped us think about putting a wider range of foods on the table, even if the kids look suspiciously at anything new. They’ll come around eventually, I hope.

Here are a few examples of a week of meals at our house. I’d love to know how you manage your menu planning. Do you do a lot of cooking on the weekends and heat things up during the week? How do you track recipes you’ve tried, or want to try? Let us know in the comments!

Week One
Monday: (Veggie) burgers; sugar snap peas
Tuesday: Penne and cauliflower with mustard breadcrumbs (kids eat plain pasta and cauliflower)
Wednesday: Gorditas with leftover ground beef from Monday’s burgers
Thursday: Roasted chicken; kale and balsamic tofu salad; Nigella’s soft white rolls
Friday: Dinner Off the Grid
Saturday: Töki pompos; broccoli
Sunday: Chef’s salad, with component parts served separately for the kids: boiled egg, beans, sliced cold cuts; baguette

Week Two
Monday: Tortellini in brodo (store-bought fresh tortellini simmered in broth, homemade or not, maybe with some greens added)
Tuesday: Pork chops with roasted beets and carrots
Wednesday: Heirloom squash “farotto”; roasted green beans
Thursday: Leftover buffet
Friday: Paraj (creamed spinach) with fried eggs; french toast for the kids
Saturday: Hummus wraps with pomegranate molasses (using store-bought hummus); cheese wraps for the kids; salad
Sunday: Sausages; collards braised with tomatoes and coriander; garlic rolls

I’ve mentioned before that Valerian gets an upset stomach from eating foods that have a lot of baking powder in them. I’d never heard of this reaction before we met; in fact I don’t think I had ever given any thought to the leavening agents I used. I first read up on the chemistry of baked goods to maintain marital harmony. But if you’re ever interested in working out your own recipes, it does help to have a basic understanding of kitchen science to get the best results.

First of all, there’s chemistry. Chemical leavening works through the release of gasses when you mix together (or heat) different agents; these gasses make little bubbles in your batter or dough that give the light texture you’re looking for. Baking soda is straight sodium bicarbonate, and it reacts immediately when you mix it with an acidic liquid. If you’ve ever made a science fair volcano or rocket car by mixing baking soda and vinegar, you know this reaction is fast and powerful. You need the acid from your liquid to get the reaction going, so choose buttermilk, yogurt, sour cream or even orange juice when you bake with baking soda.

Baking powder combines sodium bicarbonate with another acid ingredient (often cream of tartar, which is potassium hydrogen tartrate). You see where this is going – when you use baking powder, the acid is already present, and is just activated when it gets wet; the liquid itself doesn’t need to be acidic to set off the reaction. In double-acting baking powder, a second reaction takes place when you heat the mixture, giving another boost to your batter when you pop it in the oven. You generally need more baking powder to get the same lift as baking soda, about twice as much per cup of flour.

When you use chemical leavening, you need to work fast to take advantage of the gas-producing reaction (Are you giggling? What are you, twelve?), which explains why most muffin and quick bread recipes that use chemical leavening have you mix the wet and dry ingredients separately, then quickly combine them just before you bake. That said, I know from experience that if you only have one muffin pan and have to let the rest of the batter sit while the first batch bakes, it doesn’t make an appreciable difference in the texture of the muffins.

Next up is cookbook physics. While sponge cakes do use a quantity of chemical leavening, what really gives a cake its airy texture is eggs. Eggs contain protein that gives your batter structure; when you beat air into the egg, that protein helps to secure the bubbles that form and expand as the batter is heated. I had trouble with yellow/vanilla cake recipes until I found one that specifies how long you need to beat the butter and eggs – it takes a lot longer than I thought to work the air into your batter! Since it’s the egg whites that have the most protein, they hold bubbles the best. If you look at our recipe for Valeria’s potato torte, you’ll see that the egg whites are beaten separately to give them maximum lifting power. You need to be careful not to break up the bubbles as you’re stirring the mixture together or else you’ll lose that nice light consistency.

Both chemistry and physics come into play when you bake bread. The yeasts in the dough create gas bubbles as they digest the sugars around them, so the dough rises. At the same time, much as the protein in eggs gives structure to a cake, the proteins found in wheat gluten provide structure for yeast breads. Kneading the bread helps line up the gluten into threads or chains that will trap the bubbles made by the yeast.

When you know what’s happening as you mix, you can modify recipes to see what works best. Pancakes are a great place to start experimenting – try making them with milk and baking powder, or buttermilk and baking soda, or even a yeast-based recipe (which we’ll have for you soon) and let the kitchen be your laboratory.

For some reason (cold weather?) we’ve got a lot of doughy recipes coming up, so I thought I’d say a few words about working with our tiny friend, yeast.

Until fairly recently I had very little experience working with raised dough. My mother made cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning, and sometimes I helped, but that was about it. It wasn’t until I jumped on the No-knead bread bandwagon a few years ago that I started to really enjoy baking. I had always felt that making bread from scratch was more trouble than it was worth; so messy, so prone to failure, no instant gratification as from muffins or even pancakes. But after a few experiments, I’ve found that raised dough is really very forgiving, fun, easy, and doesn’t even need to be messy!

First, I pretty much always use what is labeled here as “instant” yeast. In the US “fast-acting” seems to work the same way. It’s in the form of little dry granules and usually sold in individual packets (one packet works for about 4 cups or 500 g flour) You don’t need to let it dissolve in liquid, or wait for it to start acting (“proofing”), just stir in the liquid and off you go. You do still need to take care not to use liquid that is too hot, because the yeast is a little living beastie and heat kills it.

I sometimes use bread flour, but if I don’t have any, I use the same flour I use for everything else. I have noticed that I don’t need to use quite as much liquid as called for in most recipes, possibly because European flours tend to come from softer wheat than American ones (and I’m usually using American recipes). Or maybe it’s just my sloppy measurements!

It doesn’t take long to get a feel for proportions when baking. After baking a few loaves, you’ll soon find that you recognize when a dough is too soft or too dry for your purposes, and compensate by adding more flour or liquid. Always add a little at a time, to avoid upsetting the balance of flavors or ending up with a giant mass of dough! Don’t be afraid to doctor a recipe you like, or even make one up as you go. It’s rewarding to experiment with using different flours, liquids (beer!), and add-ins like nuts, or dried fruit, seeds, or onions.

And counterintuitively, the way I’ve gotten over my annoyance at having to wait for bread to rise, is to make the dough a day ahead. Most doughs are improved by slowing down the rising process in the fridge, so if you make the dough in the evening, you can bake it up the next day and enjoy!

Here, I have split the fight against hangover into 3 parts: before, during and after. If you fight on all fronts your chances are better. The before and during stages are the most effective. So here are my tips.

1. Before, or prevention.

Eat. Eat a lot of fatty and salty foods a few hours before you drink. Go to the party with a full stomach and eat more there. Try to avoid very spicy foods, and concentrate on fatty and salty (like you need an incentive!). If you plan to drink a lot, take 2000 mg (yes 2 thousand milligrams) of vitamin C. With this strategy the alcohol will be absorbed more slowly. You can also try the ultimate Hungarian party food, “zsiros kenyer” (“greased bread”). Use lard, goose fat or duck fat, spread it on a sliced of bread, add thinly sliced onion, finish with a sprinkle of salt and red paprika over the top.

2. During.

Sometimes it happens that I am drinking a good wine with my friends and realize that I forgot my friend’s wife’s name, tell a story which is not true or have problems walking to the restroom. In most cases I manage to realize that I am getting/got drunk. At this point I switch to drinking mineral water, preferably non-sparkling or lightly sparkling. And I drink a lot of it. I mean really a lot of it, 2-3-4 pints. As much as you can fit into you. You can do this also after a party, before you fall asleep. Just keep yourself awake, watch some TV and drink and drink. This is the most effective method of avoiding hangovers if you are already drunk. If you smoke, then drink 2x as much.

3. After

So you fall asleep. If you need to pee every hour during the night, you will be saved. You took my “drink mineral water” advice. Otherwise, you are doomed. You woke up with church bells ringing in your head, while the road workers are breaking concrete in your brain. I told you! Drink water before you go to bed! What to do with you? Well, it happens to the best of us and here is how you ease your pain with more pain.

the nice way

Go have a shower. Alternate ice cold with warm. Do it for 20 minutes. It works, puts you on your feet. Go have a walk. Drink non sparkling mineral water, you can add a little bit of salt. 2000mg of vitamin C might help. Pickles? Yes! Fermented pickles? Double YES! Coffee? no. rich chicken broth or vegetable broth? double yes. Although I have heard that coffee with lemon helps. I tried it. It did help to empty my stomach which was effective in its own (unpleasant) way…

the hair of the dog that bit you

If you really have to be ok next day, drink more alcohol. It will be hard to get it into your body, but in most of the cases it helps you with your hangover. I have to warn you! You will have a hangover, you just postpone it. Also you are shocking your body – this method gets rid of the symptoms, not the drunkenness. Basically you trick your body that you are drunk again. Do it the nice way. I am mentioning this way only because in Central Europe it is a popular way to get rid of a hangover.

I hope this helped. We wish you a great party and a happy New Year ! Please do not end up as the leader of one of the governmental parties in Slovakia.

It’s the quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s, a good time to introduce you to our family traditions for the holiday season. My in-laws – Valerian’s parents – are wonderful hosts. Even better, they are wonderful cooks, and there is no time of year we enjoy this more than Christmas Eve. There is a whole ritual to the meal, many courses, and then the grand finale: a crash from the living room, the door is flung open, and there’s the outrageously spangled Christmas tree, overflowing with gifts from Jézuska/Ježiško (the baby Jesus).

But let’s back up. A couple of weeks before, my mother-in-law starts baking the Christmas cookies. Chocolate bear paws, powdery vanilla kifli, iced spice cookies, a whole selection. These are deliberately made in advance so that they have some time to soften. Personally, I think they’re so delicious when they’re newly baked and still crisp I don’t know how it’s possible that they last until the holiday, but there are a lot of them.

The menu for the Christmas Eve feast itself is well established. We start with a toast, of course, everyone raising a glass and wishing one another good health – Egészségedre! Na zdravie! Then each family (Valerian has two brothers) chooses an apple and a walnut. These are split open: if there are no worms or blemishes, the nut predicts a year of good fortune, the apple one of good health. I admit I have gotten rather spooked the few times we’ve drawn a bad apple! The shells and other bits are put in a bowl in the center of the table; for each course, everyone is supposed to add a little off their own plate to this bowl, which is “for the birds”.

Next comes the oblatky, thin wafers called “spa wafers” as they are sold year-round at spas and baths. Valerian’s family always serves them with the peculiar combination of garlic and honey; I just rub a little garlic on the wafer and drizzle on the honey, but the less timid chop the garlic a bit and pile it on.

Rounds two and three are also sweet: makos guba, followed by plum pudding. Don’t forget to put a little in for the birds!

My favorite comes next, lentil soup. I always have at least two servings, even though eating too much of any one course leaves dangerously little room for what’s coming next. We usually take some soup home with us, murmuring a little prayer that it doesn’t overturn in the car on the way.

Now the main spread is set out. Fried fish is the centerpiece; at this time of year most of the supermarkets have live carp for sale since it’s traditional to serve fresh river fish on Christmas. Side dishes include two kinds of potato salad, one with mayonnaise and one without and some kind of vegetables for me and anyone else who wants them.

The little ones start to get restless at this point, and so after an exchange of meaningful looks among the adults, it’s time to check out what Jézuska brought. Sometimes it can be hard to decide whether it’s more important to finish dinner first:

We nibble the cookies and sip coffee and try to talk over the shrieks of joy/indignation as the kids examine their haul. It’s a smashing conclusion to a very satisfying evening.

For me, Christmas is always associated with memories from my childhood. I will definitely make a special post about our customs, but before that I would like to introduce to you our Christmas candy. “Szaloncukor”, or as Slovaks know it, “salonky”, can be translated as “parlour candy”. They were hung on Christmas trees, usually in the  parlour. They were “invented” at the end of the nineteenth century, but the fashion did not pick up until the beginning of the twentieth century. And szaloncukor are still in style.  No wonder, because they are constantly changing – the first ones were just fondant covered with chocolate, wrapped in white paper and tinfoil, but since then plenty of flavors have been brought out. I clearly remember the introduction of the jelly szaloncukor (at the end of  the ’80s – beginning of  the ’90s) when we made special trips to Hungary to purchase this valuable commodity.  According to the customs regulations, we could bring only one or 2 boxes (about a pound), which was never enough for our big Christmas tree.

Since then Slovakia and Hungary joined the EU and the flow of szaloncukor is unobstructed. All the big candy manufacturers have their own szaloncukor on the market so everyone can find a favorite. Yes, you can get Tesco value and Tesco “color” brands,  Milka brand, Norbi Update brand (a Hungarian celebrity weight-loss program), szaloncukor for diabetics etc. The business is good.  The romantic, handmade and rock-hard fondant was replaced by an unbelievable selection of flavors spiced up with wide variety of additives and preservatives proudly printed on the package in E numberology. The flavors for 2009 are stawberry yogurt, caramel cream and the good old chestnut is still in.

One lucky reader can win a few of these gems from Emperor’s Crumbs to decorate your own tree! Details are in the next post. Feel free to indulge – it’s the right time of year. Right?

Disclaimer: No szaloncukor were harmed during the making of this post.

In Hungarian, the word “paprika” means both the spice and the pepper itself. Peppers are a very important cooking ingredient. They are plenty of variations, different shapes and sizes and levels of hotness. Each of these peppers has a precise role in the kitchen. We eat them raw with bread and butter, we sauté them, fill and bake them, pickle them, roast them, barbecue them but most importantly just eat them in huge quantities. And that was true even before Albert Szent-Györgyi won a Nobel Prize for isolating vitamin C from the Hungarian pepper.

For authentic cooking it is important to understand what kind of peppers there are and what are they used for. If you do not find these peppers at the grocery store or farmers market, you might try to grow them, or at least try to find a similar variety.

Here’s an index of some of the most common types of peppers used in Hungarian cooking.

Cecei – this is the very basic paprika. It can be hot or sweet and is the basis for plenty of foods like goulash (gulyás), stews (pörkölt), and fish soup (halaszlé). For these types of dishes it’s cooked together with onions until it pretty much melts away. Also, it is the one you can eat with bread and butter, use it in salads or fill it and cook it. It’s also common to see them filled with cabbage and pickled.

Cseresznye (cherry) – has only a hot version. It can be pickled or dried, and often people make wreaths of the dried ones. You hang it in the kitchen and pull off peppers as you need them to add some fire in your food.

Alma (apple) – is the best pickled. It can be hot or sweet. Either way, it’s great to pickle with cabbage. The sweet variety is also used to make so-called “oily pickles”.

Pritamin – a very sweet pepper, perhaps the closest to the red bell peppers most commonly found in the US. Great for oily pickles or eating raw. You can use it in foods where a bit of sweetness is required.

Horn – usually hot. Used pickled or roasted

Spice– the dark red gold of Hungary. It is dried and ground to make the famous spice. It can be hot (csípős or erős) or sweet (édes), as can the ground spice. The hot one is also tied into a wreath and then dried. As with cseresznye peppers you can experience hell just by adding a little bit into your soup or meal.

Ground paprika is an essential component to many of the most famous Hungarian dishes. Katy grew up knowing paprika only as a colorful dash across devilled eggs, but here it’s used in quantity, often added to a roux to flavor soups and stews, and gives dishes like paprikás and gulyás their rich color and flavor.

Warning! If you can, avoid the cheapest brands, or best of all, buy directly from a farmer. A few years ago there was a scandal in Hungary because many of the inexpensive brands of paprika actually used peppers from South America!

An example of socialist advertising at its best.

In the time I’ve been living in this part of the world, I have seen the difference between American and Central European supermarkets shrink every year. No more crowds when bananas come in, now I take it for granted that I can get fresh broccoli, frozen blueberries, and real parmesan cheese pretty much anywhere I shop (coming soon – the locavore trend?). So I expect when we move to the US next year that we won’t have much trouble getting the things we are used to having in our pantry. Still, there are some local specialties that might not be easy to find, and that you might not already have in your kitchen cupboard.

Beans: Many local recipes call for “beans” without getting more specific. Usually, red kidney beans are fine.

Breadcrumbs: Store-bought breadcrumbs here are very fine, but grinding up stale bread in a blender works just as well. They are frequently used in sweet dishes too, so don’t buy the kind with herbs already mixed in.

Cherries: Meggy, višna, cooking cherries, pies cherries, Morello cherries, whatever you call them, they’re very common here and harder to find in the US. Worth it if you can get them fresh, but frozen are pretty decent.

Poppy seeds: More than just a sprinkle on top, poppyseed (or mak) is a common filling in all kinds of pastries and more. Here you can buy the filling ready-made, but just grinding two parts poppyseeds with one part granulated sugar will get you the same results.

Flour: In Hungary, there is liszt (flour) and rétes liszt (strudel flour), and occasionally I’ll find bread flour. In Slovakia, there are more variations, but they are based on the fineness of the grind, rather than gluten content or other factors. It all comes from the same wheat, which seems a bit softer than standard American wheat. I use 00 flour, “special” here in Slovakia, which is the closest thing to the all-purpose flour I’m used to, and which should work in any of these recipes.

Pasta: The Hungarians, in particular, love their csusza, which are usually small flat pieces of pasta, either kocka (squares) or longer ribbon segments. I don’t know if you can find something similar – if not, try breaking up tagliatelle nests into smaller fragments, or shattering lasagne sheets.

Peppers and paprika: Valerian has written a whole post on this, here. While in general the selection of fresh produce is still much more seasonal and limited here, we do have a range of peppers that you don’t see in the US much. Paprika gets old (like any other spice) so buy a fresh jar if you last used it to sprinke over devilled eggs at the Labor Day picnic in 2007.

Rétes tésta/štrudel: Yes, the true test of a housewife is how thin she can roll her rétes dough, but really, just buy phyllo sheets and be done with it.

Semolina: Coarsely ground wheat meal, the main ingredient for Emperor’s Crumbs. If you can’t find something actually labelled as semolina, look for farina or even plain Cream of Wheat.

Túro/tvaroh: This is a soft, mild cheese that is often sweetened and used as a filling for strudel/rétes and various pastries. Ricotta is a good substitute.

Vegeta: OK, we don’t really cook with this all that much, but it’s a very standard “seasoning” here. It’s MSG (monosodium glutamate, “flavor enhancer”) plus some dehydrated vegetables and herbs. The original is Croatian, there are plenty of local knockoffs, and you can occasionally find it in shops in the US. My secret shame: I love eating buttered noodles and peas with a little Vegeta sprinkled over – salty umami goodness!

Gulyás in Hungarian means shepherd or cowboy – somebody who tends cattle. And that’s where the name for the food comes from: while gulyás were off far away from their homes they made food from the available ingredients. For these trips they brought things that kept well: bacon, herbs and spices. In the beginning they ate it with bread and there were no potatoes or fancy stuff involved. The real revolution in cooking gulyás started in the nineteenth century when it found its way to home kitchens and restaurants. That’s when the potatoes, paprika and other things started to be used. In all cases, the gulyás is a thick soup or thin stew made of onions, peppers, tomatoes and spice with added meat, potatoes or other ingredients depending on the region or the person who makes it.

Where do people make mistakes? There are plenty of Hungarian “gulyás-like” dishes which are not gulyás like:

Tokány – tokány is a meaty dish. The onions are steamed and not sautéed, and the meat is cut into strips. It has a thick consistency.

Pörkölt – most mistaken for gulyás. The basis for pörkolt is very gulyás-like, but while gulyás has a thick soup- almost stew-like consistency, pörkölt has a thick, true stew consistency. The basis is just onions, peppers, tomatoes, cubes of meat, spices and a little bit of liquid. It is poured over dumplings (nokedli) or eaten with bread.

Paprikás –is almost like pörkölt, but is prepared a bit differently. Some regions do not differentiate and they make only one kind of paprikás,  the famous chicken paprikas.

Czech Hungarian Guláš – this fake gulyás is a part of Czech cuisine. Basically, it is simplified pörkölt eaten with knedlíky (steamed bread), a Czech speciality. With a good local beer, it is a tasty Czech classic, but it is not Hungarian gulyás. I wonder why they don’t call it Czech goulash?

Czech/Slovak Szegedínsky Guláš – this is a weird meal. It is a pork stew with sauerkraut and sour cream. It is also eaten with knedlíky. I have to say I rather like it. The oddity is that it has nothing to do with gulyás or with the Hungarian city of Szeged.

Gulyás Leves – clear beef soup with root vegetables.

Gulyás, together with Hungarian fish soup (Halászlé), is the barbecue of the Hungarian people. Imagine a burger. You can make in a pan at home, but what a difference when you grill it on a barbecue! Similarly, gulyás is traditionally made in a huge pot over an open fire. Often families will organize a cookout, where everyone hangs around playing soccer, arguing over politics, drinking beer and waiting for the gulyás to be ready. It’s not at all uncommon in the summer months to see groups of people climbing into trains at the Budapest stations, carrying a gulyás pot and three-legged stand to go somewhere in the countryside for a picnic. If you decide to serve gulyás, make gulyás and not something else. It is like asking for a hamburger in a Hungarian fast-food stand and receiving an unidentifiable object and lettuce on a bun. (Which is also a classic here, but that’s a story for another post.)

Here is a recipe and a video on how to cook gulyás, featuring a gulyás master, a.k.a. my dad. Enjoy.