Adventures in Hungarian Cooking....

I am so excited to post this recipe. As I mentioned in my last post, my friend Eszter and I are swapping cooking lessons, teaching each other how to make dishes from our respective cultures. This weekend she taught me the secrets of her incredibly savory and delicious beef stew. Oh my goodness, I can't describe how happy this stew makes me. You know that delicious onion taste that coats your tongue when you eat a French onion soup? That rounded taste that you just want to savor for a moment before you take your next spoonful? That's how this soup tastes. Serve it with some spaetzle like pasta, a side of crunchy, tangy cucumber salad and check off another country on your culinary repertoire.

Hungarian Beef Stew

1-2 onions, diced
3 tbspns. canola oil
2 tbspns. Hungarian paprika
About 3 lbs. stew beef, cut into cubes
Flour
2 tbspns. seasoned salt (Eszter tells me Vegeta and Maggi are her preferred brands)
1 jug of cheap wine, like Carlo Rossi Burgundy
Noodles/pasta (recipe follows, or you can use this)

Sautee the diced onion in the canola oil in a nice big soup pot until translucent. Add the paprika, stir. Add the stew meat and cook until lightly browned. Sift enough flour into the pot to lightly coat all the beef and stir. Add the red wine to the pot, enough to cover the beef and onion mixture, and the seasoned salt. Cook on high heat in a crockpot until the meat is tender, at least 3 hours and up to 6 hours. If you don't have a crockpot, you can prepare this stew in an ovenproof pot and heat it covered in a 350 degree oven for 4 hours.

Serve with fresh pasta and enjoy!

Pasta
2 eggs
1 cup of water
Salt
All purpose flour

Heat a large pot of salted water to boil. Whisk the eggs, a pinch of salt and water together. Start adding flour to the eggs-water until you get a wet shaggy mix, stirring the mixture with a wooden spoon. Add more water if you've added too much flour, add more flour if you have too much water. Once you've reached this consistency, start stirring pretty vigorously until you get a smooth, more doughlike mixture.

Once the pot of water boils, place a colander with large holes or a Spaetzle maker (like this) over the boiling water. Start pressing batches of the dough through the holes into the water, removing the pasta from the water once the bits float to the surface. You can toss the cooked pasta with some oil to keep it from sticking.

Cucumber Salad  (optional but tasty)
(for 2 servings)

1 long English cucumber
Salt
2 tbspns. white distilled vinegar
3 tbspns. sugar
1 clove of garlic, minced (you can add more to taste)
Sour cream
Hungarian sweet paprika

Thinly slice the cucumber using a mandoline and place into a bowl. Sprinkle 2 generous pinches of salt over the cucumbers and let sit for about 5-10 minutes. Pour out the water that is released after this time (Eszter doesn't). Add the minced garlic, sugar and vinegar. Toss the cucumbers in this mixture. Top the cucumber mixture with a generous amount of sour cream (like a 1/4 cup) and sprinkle some paprika on top. Cover and refrigerate until time to eat.