Paprikas Krumpli

Paprikas Krumpli (Paprika Potato) is definitely my favourite Hungarian recipe. How I got the recipe is innately tied to how I got to Hungary.

Coming to Hungary was at the same time both very easy and very difficult. As anyone who's ever tried to get a legal working visa in a European Union (EU) country knows, it's ridiculously hard. For American's its usually easier to try and request citizenship if your grandparents immigrated to the US. For those of us whose ancestors came over earlier, we're kinda screwed. The difficulties comes from a pact that the EU countries follow, in order to hire someone from outside the EU, the employer must prove that no one in the EU is qualified for the job.

While I was still searching for a job I became more and more aware of programs who could place you in Europe, however they usually came with pretty steep program fees. After a month of applying I found an opportunity to come to Europe through the Central European Teaching Program (CETP). The program fee was difficult, however I knew without a doubt that I wanted to go back to Europe and Hungary seemed like a fine choice.

Part of coming through CETP meant mandatory orientation. We stayed at a wonderful hostel near the Danube in Pest.

It came with wonderful wall art.

In the kitchen of the hostel, the recipe was written on the wall near the ceiling, circling the room. (Forgive me I seemed to have forgotten to take a picture of it). The recipe seemed easy enough and I decided it would be the first Hungarian food I'd cook.

When I moved into my apartment I was without internet or cable for about 3 weeks :-(  However it did give me time to perfect my Paprikas Krumpli. Here are pictures of nearly all the steps.

First chop up some onion, the recipe didn't actually give any quantities so I just guessed. Since I really like cooked onions I chopped up three small ones.

A fellow American expat told me that when cooking in Hungary you generally use one pot/sauce pan and just add everything to it. I can live with that, less dishes. While my onions where browning I chopped up the other ingredients.

The jar at the top left of the table is some paprika that my wonderful coworker gave me cause Lidl didn't have any. Next to it is a pepper mill, two chopped up sausage links, two chopped peppers & two chopped tomatoes, three medium potatoes sliced, and my phone with the recipe open. Also pictured are my tools! The cheapest peeler ever (yay IKEA!) and my only chopping knife.

 

After the onions were cooked, but not quite browned I added the chopped sausage. The recipe said to brown the sausage for five minutes.

Pretend this is a picture where 

the tomato and pepper has

been added and the sausage

is slightly brown. Then 

pretend there is another

picture with pepper and

paprika added.

After the peppers and tomatoes are added to the mixture it needs to cook for 15 minutes. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to mix it or not but I did cause it started to stick on the bottom of the pot. I added five-ish grinds of pepper and about two tablespoons (no idea what that is in metric) of paprika. The recipe did call for salt but I don't like salt, so I didn't add any.

After fifteen minutes I added the sliced potato and covered it with water. The temperature was then turned up so that the water would boil off, both cooking the potatoes and creating a sauce. This part takes forever.

Ta-da! Paprikas Krumpli! I did it! At least I think I did it, I don't have anything to compare it to. Maybe one day I'll get really ambitious and cook it for a Hungarian friend. Until then I'm going with: I'm awesome cause I can cook Hungarian food!

Mangalica Festival! Cause all curly haired pigs need to be celebrated!

I've been fortunate in so many ways recently. Particularly that I have lots of awesome new people in my life who've helped me get accumulated to this wonderful country. I also have a small but strong group of fellow foreigners who I've been able to work out cultural confusion with. For these reasons it wasn't until my fourth weekend here that I found myself wandering around the city on my own.

So I tired to live like the locals do, I went to a festival. It seems that Budapest and Hungary in general have a constant stream of festivals. My first was the Mangalica Festival, it celebrates the curly haired pig. Many of you, like myself might find yourself wondering, what is a curly haired pig?

These are curly haired pigs:

When I arrived at the festival I expected to see many stalls with pigs roaming about, however I found only one with the pigs sectioned off in different groups. The signs might have explained the difference but believe it or not, I'm not able to read Hungarian yet. 

Fortunately there were some random English signs.

As I continued to wander around the festival I had a serious of "damn, I just moved to Hungary" moments. I don't know how else to describe them. I think its common when you move to a foreign country, or at least it's common for me. They mostly occur when I see something that is very different from what I grew up with or when I see something that uniquely belongs to the culture I'm currently living in. 

 The festival took place at szabadság tér (Freedom Square in English) in Pest. As I was wondering I suddenly turned and saw the top of Parliament (the building I most strongly associate with Budapest) in the distance. I've also been learning a lot about Hungary's history, seeing the monument on the right helped me understand the history in a more personal way. Yeah books are great but sometimes I need to see something to bring home it's importance.

The more I wandered through the festival the more I realized the festival was like about the actual pig and more about the pigs' meat. Everywhere I turned there were stands selling bacon, sausage, fried pig fat (unfortunately I'm positive that's what it was), and a variety of hot pork dishes.

 In my research before I went to the festival I learned that the pork of the curly haired pig is supposed to be much better than regular pork. I worked up the courage to purchase some curly haired pig meat at one of the vendors. Unfortunately my Hungarian sucks and few of the meat vendors spoke English. I ended up with some delicious sausage and some not so delicious fried pork fat.

                              

I do have to admit fault in me ending up with a bag of fried pork fat. I was becoming embarrassed by my lack of Hungarian and decided that I'd just buy what everyone else was buying. After having luck in purchasing two links of sausage without saying more than köszönöm (thank you) I figured I'd just buy what everyone else was buying. I went to the stand and selected a small bag of what I thought was cubed bacon. I purchased it and eagerly tasted what I expected to be bacon, it was fried fat. What does one do with a bag of fried fat? Everyone around me was eating it, I was gagging. So I did what any expat would do, I controlled my gag, smiled at the woman I bought it from and quickly put the bag in my pocket.

Needless to say I was concerned about my ability to purchase food after the pig fat incident but I heard many different languages spoken near the hot food stalls and assumed someone there could probably understand me.

The choices were endless however it seemed most appropriate to eat some curly haired pig sausage since that's what I had read about before. And of course it would have been a travesty to pass up some dark Hungarian beer.

Lunch Time!

The sausage is one large link, sorry the bread obscures it. I still don't know why the guy looked at me weird when I asked for half. As for my beverage I found the best dark Hungarian beer. Really wish I would have written down the name.

All in all the festival was quite eclectic, with an emphasis on the random things that had nothing to do with pigs.

Cause nothing makes you think of curly haired pigs more than strangely colored brooms and children's toys. Still I look forward to many more Hungarian festivals. These people do know how to do it, I think for every toy stall there were two selling alcohol.