#more garlic

Random Recipe Blog #1: Two cups oil, eight individual cloves of garlic

Me: This sounds disappointing. You sound disappointing. Your entire bloodline sounds disappointing.

Random Recipe Blog #2: Two cups of oil, three entire heads of garlic

Glancing sourly around at my mucous-laden family, I note: This house needs some chicken noodle soup.

This is a “what was available in the house” reduction from my personal goulash recipe, based on a combination of Gyorg Lang, Karoly Gundel, a few Hungarian things run through Google Translate and some tweaks by me. This version was put together “on the fly”, out of my head, but when a couple of @dduane​’s Twitter followers asked for the recipe, this is what they got: :-)

Ingredients

2 tbs lard (preferred) or sunflower/corn/ordinary olive oil. (Not Extra Virgin, you’re wasting it.)

2 large onions, chopped coarsely

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp caraway seeds, crushed (mince the garlic and caraway together with rocking knife technique – the sticky garlic keeps the seeds from flying about. A bit, anyway. See below.)

1 lb / .5kg stewing beef in 1 inch / 30mm cubes (which is usually how it’s sold)

3 tbsp Hungarian paprika, if possible 1 tbsp Hot, 2 tbsp Sweet (or 2 tbsp regular supermarket paprika and, cautiously, up to 1 tbsp Cayenne. Don’t use smoked paprika unless using European smoked sausage like kabanossi or kielbasa instead of beef, then go for it, the result is delish.)

2 tins chopped tomatoes and ½ tin water

1 green pepper, seeded and cubed

4 potatoes, peeled and cubed

You can zone out doing this chuckchuckchuck(scrape)chuckchuckchuck routine, especially if you’ve got music playing, and end up with garlic that’s almost a purée. Same goes for ginger and fresh herbs. Unless you need a bit more structure, like ginger matchsticks in a stir-fry, it’s not a problem. Just don’t involve any fingers...

Method:

Melt the lard in a heavy pot and sweat the onions until soft, glossy and turning golden. Add the garlic and caraway and stir-fry for a few more minutes. Add the beef and stir-fry until all the cubes have changed colour.

Remove from the heat and let sit for a couple of minutes, then add the paprika (paprika + excess heat = bitterness.) Stir well together, add the tomatoes and water, return to the heat, bring to a very gentle simmer, cover and leave for about 2 hours.

Check the beef for tenderness. It should be at the “a bit more will be perfect” stage, so add the pepper and potatoes and give it a bit more; about 20 minutes should do.

Serve topped with a dollop of sour cream (ours was 30%-fat Lithuanian from Eurospar, yum!) over buttered noodles, rice, mashed potatoes, tarhonya (Hungarian “egg barley”, a very small pasta similar to orzo)…

Or do what we did tonight: “Bratkartoffel” – potatoes cut into ½ inch dice and slowly pan-fried until crunchy outside and soft inside, then sprinkled with salt and pepper. We finished ours in the oven – 20 mins at 180° C / 350° F – for less greasiness; NB that this also makes a great snack by itself (try sprinkling with curry powder, spice bag mix, sea salt & cider vinegar, whatever) and using the oven makes them far less trouble than deep-frying home-made chips.

This goulash, like most of my one-pot dishes, has provided @dduane​ and me with a hot main meal for three days: Day 1, all by itself; Day 2, with tarhonya from the store cupboard (1 cup tarhonya, fried for a couple of minutes in butter, then cover-simmered for 10-12 minutes in 2 cups of water and stirred a lot near the end to keep the grains separate while the last of the water absorbs / evaporates), finished with a slosh of lemon juice and lots of black pepper; Day 3, with Bratkartoffel; after frying in three batches, all of them fitted in the oven at once.

When they came out and got their spicy sprinkle, we had to force ourselves to stop eating the side dish so there'd actually be some side dish left...

There’s still a bit of goulash left, but a pack of minced beef is out of the freezer and initial discussion suggests chilli con carne; we have plenty of rice, and if you’ve never tried chilli on a bed of Mexican pilaff (that’s fluffy rice with beans, chopped pickled jalapenos, toasted cuminseed, grated cheese and minced raw garlic) you’re missing out.  

This is the time to try all those aggressively garlicky dishes that you and the SO adore but which will get you not just a seat but a carriage all to yourself on the LUAS or any other public transport you care to name. Long ago I worked in an office - before smoking bans - opposite a woman who chain-smoked Gauloise cigs, which stink worse than most cigs.