Tonight we enjoyed a dinner from Hungary. It wasn’t the first suggestion from our Hungarian friend as we weren’t prepared to sit around the bonfire keeping watch over the heat for three hours that traditional Hungarian goulash takes. No, instead we made chicken paprikash with galuska.
The chicken paprikash was made with sautéed onions, with tomatoes, peppers, and of course chicken and paprika. Looking at the ingredients now I notice we actually missed the dairy ingredients! Since we’d never had it before we didn’t notice and all thought it was pretty good! Thinking we should try it again though with all the ingredients and see what we think.
We started by browning the chicken and then sautéing the onions. All the ingredients were the added to a pot and left to simmer, including 4 tablespoons of sweet Hungarian paprika. This smelled great as it cooked away.
This was paired with galuska, a small egg noodle type dish. This was made by mixing egg, flour, salt, club soda, and milk. Normally it would have been made with a spaetzle tool, but instead we simply broke off small pieces and cooked it in salt water. I believe the pieces were bigger than they were supposed to be, but not having had it before, we are not sure?
Some kids liked the so- called brain food (due to the appearance) whereas some weren’t so fond of them. I didn’t mind them but would have liked them to be a bit smaller and less salty, but in all fairness I don’t like salt much.
https://tastehungary.com/journal/galuska-recipe/
Dessert was a Hungarian pancake, similar to a crepe, called Palacsinta. These were made with eggs, sugar, salt, flour, milk, and club soda. We forgot to look at traditional toppings and so looked in our cupboards. We did have the apricot jam often used, and also opted for Nutella. Another option would have been sugared nuts and/ or cocoa. These were good, though similar to crepes enjoyed for France.
Overall we enjoyed this meal and will definitely try it again, though I think we would try adding more paprika.
Did you know that in Hungary most people introduce themselves with their last name? Having invented the Rubiks cube and ballpoint pen, they also lay claim to the primary computer programming language, the telephone exchange, and the electric motor.
Hungary was founded in 897, making it amongst the oldest countries and communism ended only in 1989 after having falling to it after WWII. Their literacy is at 99% and they have won a gold medal at every summer Olympics except for Antwerp in 1920 and Las Angeles in 1984 when they didn’t compete.
Hungarians have the largest parliament building in the world and they love paprika so much that they have two museums dedicated to it and there are eight grades of Hungarian paprika. Finally, Hungary’s population density is 107 per km2 to Canada’s 4.