Look Mum I'm Cooking

So I disappeared from here for a while. The main reason is that in the past few weeks there were quite some changes in my life, and I am still adapting. I have a new job, and I went back to the gym. This second one is something I wanted to do for a while, and as I had health stuff last year, it took me some time to make myself want to go again. But now I’m back, and I enjoy it a lot - surprisingly it makes me more excited than I expected it. Also, I am counting calories like crazy, and have some goals too, but sharing those would jinx it, so I keep them to myself and a few close ones.

But! I started eating a lot more healthily than before, and I pay attention of my intake in general.

I try to eat various types of food - a lot of eggs, some cheese, ham, a loooot of veggies.

Here’re some cool tuna patties with coleslaw. This doesn’t look much - and it wasn’t, but I keep the rest for lunch tomorrow.

Also, here’s a wonderful salad from two weeks ago - arugula, dried tomatoes, some leftover Boursin, and balsamic vinegar.

I promise I will get back on track with posts, just dunno when :)

It’s kinda obvious that I’m a sucker for Indian food. The spices, the sauces, every part of it just makes me happy. When I moved back to Budapest, I wasn’t a brave cooker of Indian dishes, but I just went on with it and started collecting spices. My all time favourite is the tomato-y butter chicken and the tikka masala, but I love trying out new tastes. Yesterday we ordered lunch to work from the best (well, at least my favourite) Indian restaurant, Pandzsab Tandoori (which has the most retro website ever, just soooooo 90’s), and my friend ordered chicken hyderabadi. This is more gingery and garlicky than what I usually eat, and I just fell in love with it. So today I found a recipe, one which didn’t have any unfamiliar ingredients, and then went with it.

Yes, it’s fingerlickingly good.

So the thing is that I love egg. Hard boiled, soft boiled, scrambled, sunny side up, I love it. But poached egg. Oh dude. That is my absolute favourite.

When the egg yolk is still soft and creamy and it makes everything around it much better. Okay, maybe it doesn’t work on a chocolate cake, but that’s not the point.

And then I never dared to try, mostly because I was afraid of failing miserably.

Today I was craving for an avocado on toast with poached egg, so I thought this would be the perfect occasion to experiment.

Well. 4:1 to the egg. I failed miserably 4 times. I tried with vinegar, stirring the water, stirring the egg, breaking the egg into a ladle, and finally, cooking in cling film.

Cling film was the only thing that worked, and I managed to overcook it a bit. Probably the eggs were not fresh enough, and yeah, I am a bit disappointed.

Anyway. My guacamole is awesome, and all together they tasted very good. And at least I tried :) I will try it again. In around 4 years.

I wanted to do something with that minced chicken I had in my freezer for a while. Seriously - who the f*ck buys minced chicken? It just doesn’t make any sense. Obviously I was out of my mind when I did that, but today I gave it justice.

Indian food is always a good idea, and even though this one is closer to butter chicken in taste than to a regular curry, I don’t care. Yum.

The other thing I love to do in the kitchen is baking. I used to bake a lot of desserts a few years ago - cocoa rolls, scones, (salted) brioche and of course cheese cake, chocolate cake and so on. For a friend's birthday I made a snickers cake a few months ago, but I live in my apartment for almost two years now, yet I can count on one hand the occasions when it was something sweet and salty baking in my oven.

Flódni is a traditional Hungarian - Jewish cake, it used to be a popular Chanuka cake for Eastern-European Jewish families. It's a layered cake, with different types of (usually really sweet) fillings between the buttered dough layers. Walnut, poppyseed and apple. The recipe I found was made of a date-paste and a pineapple paste instead of apple, which I found very oriental, and decided to go with it. Fun fact - I never ate flódni before, so I literally had no idea what I was doing, only had some pictures of it in my mind.

It was a birthday gift for Mr. P, and apparently he liked it a lot. I was really worried, because I am not used to cooking baked goods in my oven, but I hoped for the best. And yes, it came out just perfect. This will be on the table for Christmas as well, that is sure.

I had steak twice in my life. The first one was at LA Prime, on the 35th floor of The Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles. We were there for a week for a conference, it was my very first trip to the US, and I was barely over my jetlag, working on taking in the whole experience. The fact that I was on the top of a skyscraper (well, probably the tallest hotel I've ever stayed in, and the highest floor I've ever had food on) blew my mind. The restaurant was fancy (we could only get in because we were staying in the hotel below, otherwise it was fully booked), the sea food platter we had as entree was excellent, and I had no idea how a steak looks like on a plate. And then I asked it with potato gratin as side dish. Bad idea. Obviously, I couldn't finish it. This is how I looked like when it arrived. I think the look on my face just tells all of it. 

And then I had one a few years later in Amsterdam, and even though I asked them to make it medium rare, it tasted like shoe sole, not so tasty, so for a while I completely lost my appetite for it. I didn’t even dare to try cooking it - it all looked like alien food. 

Then came Mr. P, who is a food nerd, just like me, and who actually knows how to make a good steak. So we agreed a few weeks ago that he's gonna make steak for me. And so he did. It was perfectly cooked for my taste, perfectly seasoned, served with steak potatoes, asparagus, zucchini and mushrooms. I am going to dream about it for a while... And can't wait to eat again.

When I decided to make 2018 all about food, I wanted to challenge myself. Cooking can be hard, if you don't know the basics, the materials you want to cook with, and also, if you are not brave enough to start experimenting. Even though I’ve been in and around the kitchen since I was a little girl, I was never really brave to do new things. I never really cooked pork or beef before, I wasn’t brave enough to try new spices. 

And here is something new again. Meatballs. I have to be honest, I have no clue why I haven’t done this before, it's very easy, and very very very good. The original recipe is from my fav Hungarian food blog, Street Kitchen.

The meatballs were seasoned with paprika, ramsons and parsley, cooked in the oven and then cooked further with cheddar sauce, served with bulgur. Happy food, happy people. 

I never liked cooked pepper and tomatoes. We have a Hungarian ratatouille called 'lecsó', which is made of these two, but I never liked it for some reason - the texture of these veggies when they are cooked is just nonono. Then I started cooking Indian food, and it turned out, I kinda like them. And then I made shakshuka. It's been the top trend dish to cook/eat this year, I saw pictures of it everywhere. First it made me think nonono again, then I realized with all the right spices it could be really good. Probably this is not the regular shakshuka, as I found various recipes online, so I tried to put together something that seemed to be the best for me - spices make all the difference. And harissa! OMG. I think I'm in love.

Yass! I was a sous-chef in my kitchen!

In the past few years I got used to cooking alone. My mum came over a few times and we put together the meal for the family, but this didn’t happen too many times - I can actually count it on one hand.  

And to be honest, I love cooking with company. Not just when I am leading the act, but also when I can be a help of someone who is taking over the chef's duties. I find it incredibly exciting when that person is making something awesome I've never tried. Seeing a meal coming together under their hands and helping in whatever I can makes me happy.

So this chicken fajitas happened. The chicken breasts got some awesome spices and were cooked to perfection, creme fraiche with garlic and chives, slightly cooked red onion and fresh veggies and some cheese. It made me cry tears of joy. I am grateful for the master chef, who has the perfect taste in food. Exciting food adventures are coming :)

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me present you the grilled chicken 'Óvári' style! This one has been one of my favourite dish when I was a little girl. My mum made it many times, but it was never enough. I was thinking about what I should cook today, and also wanted to clean out my freezer too. I had some cooked mushrooms there, which were perfect for this. And here it is. Grilled chicken, with mushroom, a bit of onions, ham and yummie cheese on the top. Still awesome. 

It's been a while since I last posted here, even though in my head I am cooking new things all the time. I just want to leave this here. Very quick, creamy cheesy broccoli-y chicken, with some roasted zucchini. 

Ok, so I didn’t really want to post this here, as it’s really nothing new or special. Mustardy creamy chicken and roasted mushrooms.  And while it’s nothing extra, I wanted to take a moment and praise the side dish. I literally fell in love with roasted mushrooms. For a long long time I wasn’t patient enough to make them the right way, and ever since I tried doing it correctly, it’s the best thing. So here it is.

I know this looks sweet. The chicken stuffed with prunes, the sweet potatoes, the bacon jam. And yeah, parts of it is sweet, but no, all together is not sweet at all.

I am one of those people who like cooking salty dishes with fruit, and one of my all-time favourite is chicken stuffed with prunes. Usually it’s wrapped into bacon, but I didn’t care much about that, mainly because I only had cut up bacon at home, so I wanted to bring something out of this combo. Sweet potatoes are just simply good, and I’ve never tried the hasselback version before (those tiny slices, yet not falling apart, creamy on the inside, yum). It wasn’t that sweet, as I added salt to the butter which it was baked in.

Oh and bacon jam! I don’t know who came up with the idea, but their name should be written in history books. Sweet and still, salty, crunchy and creamy at the same time. Awesome.

And then, because why not, I mixed some salty cream with herbs, which I should have put ON the potatoes, and not to the side, but I was too hungry and it overwrote the design concept :)

I wanted to cook chili con carne since weeks now, but I caught a pretty bad flu, and didn’t really feel that it would be good for my stomach. But now the flu is gone, and I decided to do this for the weekend. With cinammon, dark chocolate, beer and various spices - plus, a lot of chili paprika, at least for my taste. Served with tortilla and cheese, and it was cooking for at least 2 hours. It could have taken more, but I was really hungry. And yeah, it is really good.

I mentioned before that Hungarians have declared paprika a national spice, and let’s be honest - it is. Sweet, hot, smoked, we love it.

One of the most popular Hungarian dishes besides gulyás (or goulash) is chicken paprikash, or paprikás csirke. And then there is mushroom paprikás, which is one of my favourite food since I know how to eat with cutlery.

When I was still living in Szeged, sometimes we ordered food from a good restaurant, it was called ‘Tasty roast’, and was a remix of the regular paprikás, mushroom with pork medallions, in a mustardy creamy sauce - with a lot of paprika of course.

This is not the first time when I tried to recreate it, but this was the best one, for sure. And it looks great. Usually paprikás ‘something’ is served with dumplings, now I had it with some rice. It’s so delicious and full of flavours :)

And I know it doesn’t look like it, but these are the actual colors - no filter added.

I am sure you didn't know, but Hungarians have a family-favourite pasta dish called Macaroni Milanese, which is not even cooked with the pasta macaroni. We use bucatini for it, it’s called ‘makaróni’ in Hungarian. Plus, it has nothing to do with Milan, and Italians have never heard of it. At all.

Confusing, right? I know.

But it's really great. I kinda promised myself to continue with cooking something with less carbohydrates, but I just realized I've never cooked this one by myself before, and I wanted to try so bad.

It's easy: just toast some mushrooms, add onion and garlic, passata, salt, pepper, oregano, and mix it with al dente pasta, sprinkle with a fair amount of cheese and bread crumbs. The oven does the rest of the job.

It is just so good.

I never was a big fan of broccoli, I never really did anything with it, besides eating it as broccoli cream soup and the fried version, but yeah, these are rather boring. Besides the main resolution for 2018 (cooking things I’ve never cooked before) I have one other important goal - try and get to like things I never liked before, so it was about time to do something with this green weirdo.

But let’s take babysteps (because who knows, maybe broccoli is my true enemy, so the way it’s cooked wouldn’t make any change), so I thought I could try the roasted version first. And this was the main idea behind the dish for Sunday, and then I only had to figure out something to go with it. This time I wanted to do something light, so chicken was an obvious choice.

I have recently bought a bottle of special truffle balsamic vinegar cream, which I have been wanted to try ever since, so this sounded the perfect occasion to do so. I also had a lot of blue cheese at home (because why not), and the idea immediately became a plan. I mixed mustard, balsamic vinegar cream and a bit of sour cream with olive oil, poured some on the pre-fried chicken cutlets, added some blue cheese, and that's it. Then came the broccoli, with carrots (to save the day, if I realize broccoli is not my thing) and garlic, topped with roasted almonds, baked in the oven for 20 minutes, done!