June 16, 2006
Csirkepaprikas, kérem
Tonight, my friends, we are celebrating the falling in of our dining room ceiling by attempting to make traditional Hungarian food. In Budapest, the food was, well, generally, kind of odd and not that great. BUT! I'm pretty sure that's because we failed to order what they tell tourists to order. They know what we'll like. They've been feeding us since 1989 or so. They know we'll like Chicken paprikas and goulash. I didn't try goulash, only because I had foolishly ordered venison and (canned, I'm pretty sure) mushrooms on our first night and we'd eaten too big a lunch to want dinner on our second afternoon. So, late lunch on Thursday(which also made us too full to want dinner later and so turned out to be the last real meal), and I ordered Chicken paprikas. And it was divine and creamy and paprika-y and served with deliciously carbohydrate-y nodleki (dumplings) and I was satisfied and could go home happy the next day. Joshua, unfortunately, had wanted some decadent goose traditional thing, but they were out of it and he got something not nearly as good instead. But we were agreed on the heavenliness of the chicken paprika. And we live in the year 2006 and so when i got home I looked it up on the internet and got a recipe. We will try it tonight, and if it is not up to par, we will look up more recipes and try again until we get it right. And when we do, I'll make some for you, my dear Internet. And you will be mine forever.
And I will offer it to Joshua in Hungarian, and he will say please and thank you in Hungarian. This, because for all my effort on the boat down from Vienna, everyone spoke English and i was unable to fully display my extremely limited, but awesome hungarian language skillz. Though I did make friends with the ferry boat man, who seemed impressed that anyone would even make the effort. Then he let me ride in the cockpit, or whatever you call it, when we passed the cool hilltop castle and everyone else was clamoring at the tiny doorway to get a view. (The regular windows were plexiglass and pretty scratched up.)
P.S. The photo is of the food in Budapest, not my version.
Posted by at June 16, 2006 06:24 PMSince Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language there was no chance of me deciphering any of it. So I would just pick a letter before I went into a restaurant, and order whatever had the most of that letter in the name.
Posted by: DG at June 18, 2006 02:19 PMMy guidebook had the names for each kind of meat - you know, chicken, pork, etc., so that was helpful. But in fact everywhere we went had English alongside the hungarian on the menu, so it didn't come up. Really, on our whole trip, the only time our menu didn't have English was at one neighborhood place in Vienna, but the owner had worked in the States for 17 years, so he just stood there and translated for us. I think times have changed in the old Austro-hungarian empire. It's a little sad because it feels so much less foreign and so much more geared to tourism, but it means not eating mystery meat. I suppose if we had gone outside the main cities, it would have come up more.
Posted by: Appalachia at June 18, 2006 04:05 PM