chicken soup for flavia's soul - and body

aaah the soup is not even done yet, and i am writing in our blog. i think almost the concept of chicken soup a la my mummy is enough to make me feel well! basically, i have come down with a cold. typical stuffy-nose, sore throat, i-don't-want-to-be-in-class sort of cold. last night while on the phone with my mum, i mentioned how all i really wanted was her csirke leves and nagymama's (my grandmother) borda csik (a type of small pasta that is really difficult to describe unless you've had it before. it's about 1/4 of an inch long and really thin and spiral. hmm. no real english equivalent.) she (my dear mum) then posed a very poignant question: why don't i make it? aah yes. so i explained how i have no time, how assignments are due, how tonight is senior pub night... all this stuff. but when it came down to it, this evening leaving frisbee practice, the only thing i could imagine myself eating for dinner... was chicken soup.

sometimes i wonder whether i'm the only one in the world who can mentally persuade themselves that life is in fact better than it might appear, simply because of what hypothetically lies ahead. as i biked down to morning glory to buy all the accoutrements necessary, i felt this way. i could almost breathe through my nose simply because of the thought of dinner. this is odd, perhaps. i was very spacey at morning glory, as i bought 4 potatoes, a bunch of celery, 3 onions, 4 carrots, and one local chicken. i think the cashier thought i was a nut, but we had a great conversation about whether i was on the "socially responsible" or "socially irresponsible" frisbee team (i was coming from practice and therefore wearing all sorts of funky clothes, and my cleats were hanging off of my bag. geez i look weird.) anyway, this is beside the point. i got home around 5:40, talked with dear gravling about "free-range olive oil" for a few minutes, and got to business. as a side note, in the last 1.5 hours that i've been making this soup, the only (crazy, i know) person i wish could be with me making it, is gravling. i don't know whether he's ever made chicken soup before, but somehow i think the process would make him very happy. all the little chopping involved... and more than anything, the smell. oh god, i hope he doesn't dislike chicken soup. this could be problematic. anyway, for the record, i wish he were here.

at exactly 6pm (i started then because i want to see exactly how long it takes, and i would never think of a timer, weirdo) i put my dear little chicken (all cleaned and patted dry) in a large pot with oodles of water and set it to boil. at this point in the entry, i should note that i have never before in my life made chicken soup. this is a bit terrifying, primarily because i want it so badly, but also because i don't want to waste a chicken. anyway, on the phone last night, mama reminded me of the process. what really amazes me, and is absolutely worth noting, is how (in the words of cornelia aihara) "the hands remember." in my case, a more reasonable quote would be "the eyes, nose, and mouth remember." but i am getting ahead of myself.

growing up, every summer my family would spend three months in my mother's village in hungary. there are too many amazing memories for me to recollect here, but one is particularly important. i remember making soup with my grandmother and great aunts. on of my most vivid memories is that of sitting outside peeling potatoes and trying to "teach" (and by that i mean i was probably 5 or 6 so i didn't know what i was doing) my grandmother english. those potatoes, if my memory serves, were going toward our chicken soup. so even when i say i've never cooked chicken soup (or more precisely csirke leves, since my method/recipe is decidedly from my hungarian side) before, some part of my soma knows what it is doing. :-)

place well-washed and dry chicken in a large pot, and cover with water. bring to a boil, and then reduce heat and simmer. for a long time. probably about an hour. in this time you can, 1) write about how much you love your mother's chicken soup, 2) chop potatoes, carrots, celery, and onions and 3) add to the boiling wonderfulness about 1/4 of a bunch of parsley (all tied up with string so it doesn't float around freely in the broth) to the soup. at about an hour, add the veggies and continue to simmer. by this point, the smell of chicken soup is filling your house, and your heart. i am very grateful for this chicken. i haven't felt this happy in a while, not to mention when i've been sick!

ah well, what a fun night it has been. now nearing 9pm, i have successfully tackled making chicken soup from scratch and eaten it as well (is this like having your cake and eating it too???). it was not difficult to tell when the soup was ready (my big fear going into this), the chicken was tender and easy to pull apart at the joints (sorry. eek!) my biggest criticism of this soup was that i put the potatoes in too early, so they were really soft. i should have waited longer. over all though, this soup is exactly what my body needed. *dinner (very late by my standards) was wonderful, and now i think it is time for bed. so many memories of mezoszemere and my family are tied up in the soup i made that i am sure to sleep well tonight!

simplicity & armand

this last week has been positively insane. i don't like complaining about classes because i know that it'll all be over way too soon, but sometimes i feel like there is a conspiracy among all the professors at bowdoin to assign oodles of work all at once. anywho. my housemates started getting concerned when i hadn't really left my room by wednesday, and every time they came in my room i was in the same place they left me, sitting in the middle of a stonehenge of books, type typing all day. haha. good mental image. anywho needless to say there wasn't much time for cooking. finally on thursday, i decided that enough was enough and went to morning glory to find vegetables. seriously though, vegetable hunting is a great mental break. especially w/ bows, arrows, and slingshots. apparently i haven't recovered from the week yet, this post isn't making much sense. somehow i found myself buying salmon (decidedly not a vegetable, and not at morning glory) anywho, right then armand called (armand never calls. i was elated.) to say that we should have dinner. it all worked out soo well!

it was a bit of a whirlwind dinner - i work at the olc gear room at 6:30, so the mission was speed chopping, speed sauteing, speed salmon baking, but it was a very happy dinner. the combination of broccoli and rice is very warming (i don't need to mention that garlic was involved...) and i made the salmon the same way i always do (salt, pepper, oven) so there was nothing confusing/fancy involving sesame seeds, etc. the sad (sort of?) thing i'm realizing though is that i have a tendency to cook the things i know all the time, so when it comes to cooking new and different things (which is the fun part of cooking with gravling... well, part of the fun hehe) i don't know what i'm doing. (the result of which is chewy fish and boiled butter. hmm.) it's good to know though that you can rely on recipes that take very little mental effort and still have dinner with a dear friend be hilariously fun!

if you can mentally dedicate a meal to someone after the fact, then i dedicate this to my sister, who after reading our blog asked if gravling and i could set up a delivery service to budapest. j- i hope your halasz le keeps you full & happy, and when you are back in the us we can make salmon together!!!

Mixing it all together
Originally uploaded by la_fleur.

it is not often enough anymore that flavi and i are able to get together for a meal- something about the distance between us and her work on an honors project that keeps her busy. regardless, when we do make time to meet and cook, it is just as splendid as always. for last friday (yes, 8 days ago... i am late in typing this), we made cod.

i am not so sure about cod- the name just sounds so drab and dreay. it is not flamboyantly playful like mahi mahi (or dolphin), solid like a salmon, or even exotic like tilapia. still, i would never doubt a selection by flavi!

the sides were the truly joyful parts of this dinner, though. collared greens with garlic and fresh red peppers, and orzo with an onion and yummy mushroom mix for a topping. these two were straight-forward and delicious. the fish presented more of a challenge, our estimation of cookig time being more than mildly too long.

our fishies were baked in the oven with a nice little garlic marinade before being briefly sauteed, and covered in roasted seasame seeds. overall the flavors came together quite well, but the fish was a little chewy. for leftovers, though, the meat broke down a bit more and was great and tender 2 days later. i guess the fishies just needed some time to decompress after that stressful bout in the oven.

in assebmling the ingredients for this dish, dear flavi had to go through quite a lot of, well, stuff. whole foods did their part in supplying most of the bits and pieces, except for something rather important: an onion. now, coooking with either of us, one will learn that there are a few ingredients that appear in practically every dish: garlic, olive oil, and onions. many times chicken is there too, just because flavi wants to appease my carnivorous stomach. for the cod and sides, onion was crucial. some consipracy to distract her at whole foods led flavi to depart the store with out any sort of lök, so her journey to my apartment carried her through the local shaws übermarket. of course, a mass produced onion shipped from who knows where was readily avaialble along with 3000 more hormonally altered mega onions, but the checkout proved a bit of a difficulty. anyone who has attempted the self checkout at a store will understand the myriad issues that pop up every time that make such an edeavour horrible at best. my hungarian friend decided to attempt this feat, but was heart broken when she told the computer she was buying yellow and not red onions. in her goodness, she wanted to correct her misstep so the red onion counting club, local 1769 of porter square did not chase after her. of course, voiding an item on the self checkout requires some sort of national pardon from the ceo of star market (parent company of shaws), and much discussion ensured over the potential alterior motives of the shady looking girl trying to buy just an onion. clearly she was a communist.

in the end, good prevailed and the onion was placed in the canvas bag for the final, rainy, walk to my apartment. though, i did forget to mention that the apple crisp i was trying to make needed butter- which meant a third grocery sotee trip later in the evening.

flavi took 3 lessons away from this cooking experienece:
"1) never come to boston again without an onion (? i'm probably not serious)
2) ask you if there are any other ingredients to get, hehe.
3) don't bake stupid fish that long. yay!"

as for me, i think i just need to remember to help cook instead of watching flavi be amazing at creating food :)

fall break with friends


i love squash. especially in the fall/winter, the smell of baking squash or pumpkin makes the kitchen so cozy! this morning at the farmers market on pleasant hill road, i found a beautiful butternut squash and a perfect little acorn squash. recently i've been just baking acorn squash and eating it plain (or with cinnamon mmm) but i had the imagination this morning to make stuffing for these particular squash (i feel like the plural of squash should be squish. hmm...) biking home then from the market, i started brainstorming what to stuff them with. when i was younger, my mum would stuff delicata squash with various combinations of spiced rice, apples, raisins, etc. so that is immediately what came to mind. more recently, i read a really interesting recipe in robin robertson's vegan planet cookbook for jalapeno-rice and chili stuffing. both sounded tasty, but what i ended up doing was some combination of both. :-)

the happiest part about this dinner (other than having holly, ben, maya, and nugget together at once) was that all the vegetables except the garlic came from the market this morning. anyway, more on the rest of the vegetables later. to start the squish, i cut them in half, removed the seeds, and lay them face down on a cookie sheet & baked them for about 40 minutes. side note: one of my most favorite smells is that of freshly cut squash. it reminds me of watermelon! haha my friends made fun of me this summer because i also like the sound of ripping watermelon (like when you don't cut it all the way and then tear the rind the rest of the way) anywho, you can do the same thing with squash, only to a lesser extent. good reason to cook squash - it smells and SOUNDS good! while that was baking, i made the stuffing.

1/2 a red onion from my scruffy looking friend at crystal springs farm, a large-ish amount of fresh parsley (from the guys with the hand-dyed wool), several cloves of garlic, about 2cm of this amazingly hot fresh red pepper mama brought (eek!), and 1 small peeled/chopped green apple were all sauteed together in a wee bit of olive oil. the only other spice i added (other than s&p later) were caraway seeds. for some reason, i associate these little guys with holidays, and i used a ton of them in this dinner (between this and the boiled beets, haha.) in the meantime, i cooked 1 cup of white rice. haha i forget that this all goes in some order. to the onion-y mixture, i added a cup of cooked black beans, salt and pepper. when the rice was done, i mixed some of it in, though i found that 1 cup was a bit too much. i probably used 3/4 a cup. the final ingredient i added to the stuffing was a handful of organic raisins. it may sound odd to have black beans, apples, and raisins in one mixture, but it turned out quite nicely! once the squash was thoroughly baked, i flipped them over (so shell side down now) and filled the scooped out section with the rice/black bean mixture. i found that the cavities on the buttercup squash had to be expanded, but such is life. :-) i put the now stuffed squash back in the oven for another half an hour.

to go with the stuffed squash, i boiled the two beets i found at the market and topped them with... more caraway seeds! another childhood memory for me involves eating oodles of deep red beets. i have always loved them, and i'd never realized that people generally don't eat a lot of beets in america. (understatement?) anyway, i love them and i was glad to discover that so do my friends! i also boiled a bunch of chard and sauteed it with a bit of garlic, olive oil, and soy sauce. it was nice to have something a bit saltier, because the beets were decidedly sweet.

i was happy to hear from holly that she enjoyed the texture of the butternut squash (generally too mushy for her taste). continuing the beet thought, she hadn't ever had one before, but determined that they are quite tasty. YAY! hehe another beet fan. i liked the little bit of apple in the stuffing, and i thought that overall the flavors went well together. the most important ingredient seemed to be laughter, however. during dinner maya had a very difficult time telling any kind of coherent story, but even her random attempts provided the levity and humor so needed after a long day of library-ing (or coastal studies lab-ing, for ben).

cooking bits

just a short post tonight. i didnt actually cook anything this evening- in fact i simply heated up some soup- and not very exciting soup at that. it was progresso chicken noodle. one only has so many soup options at the local Shaws. ill have to meander to whole foods and stock up on the tasty stuff soon.

the real purpose of this post is to highlight an item that has tirelessly served me for years. while looking at some of my recent photos this evening, i noticed a background character thatshowed up in almost evey food picture i have, but who never gets the recognition he deserves. he is undoubtedly the single most important item in my kitchen: my all-clad skillet/frying pan.

my mother, in her typical motherly way of insisting that i have decent things to cook with, bought me this pan back a ways. i, as always, opposed as i felt my $10 wal-mart pan would be just great for all my cooking needs. i was obviously wrong. this all-clad piece has recieved more compliments from others than any pan ever should. it frys/simmers/browns/sautees/whatevers everything evenly, thoroughly and, well perfectly! ive left it sitting in the sink (mom, skip this) for a week covered in grease and cheese and it has cleaned up in a few moments with mild scrubbing. it has survived moves, drops, temperature shocks and everything else i have thrown at it with aplomb. i am quite certain using this pan magicaly makes food taste better and look nicer. if youre ever looking for something for the kitchen, look into a stainless all-clad pan and youll be very happy indeed.

red wine pasta

to rival flavi in her cooking goodness is something to which i constantly aspire. my method to attempt such an ascension to greatness must come through finding absurd recipes on the great world wide web; i have not had the joy of building a mental cooking repertoire as flavi has. this week i received a nice little email from my wonderful sister containing a recipe involving an entire bottle of wine, and (dreadful) spaghetti. of course, i need to move away from pasta and chicken for every meal (but they are so good!), so this recipe needed to be quite unique to pass muster- but i think the full bottle of wine covers that.


the dish has most of my favorite individual ingredients: red wine, pasta(i chose rotini instead of spaghetti), olive oil, garlic, broccoli rabe (more on this shortly), and red pepper flakes. incidentally, that qualifies it as vegetarian, so all the hippy bowdoinites can be satisfied. :)

the broccoli rabe the recipe called for is this interesting plant that, despite resembling broccoli quite closely, is not related to it at all. it looks rather like a leafy form of baby broccoli. the taste is a bit bitter and it is quite pungent. i would be careful to make sure it does not over power lighter dishes. this recipe is quite strong though, so no worries.

to start, cut the rabe into 1 inch wide pieces and blanch. set aside. boil pasta in broccoli water, just 5 minutes (über al dante). in the meantime, start the bottle of wine boiling in another pot with a bit of sugar. reduce it a bit and then add the pasta. boil until the pasta soaks up the wine. while the pasta boils, saute lots of garlic and some red pepper flakes in a big skillet with evoo (aside: i dont think i like this abbreviation, but there is this enticing looking restaurant near my apartment that goes by it, so the restaurant has inspired me. to be proper, i should have sampled this establishment prior to including its moniker in my post, but alas, time dictates otherwise). once the garlic has permeated the room with its scent, and once it looks appropriately pale golden brown, add the broccoli, some salt, and pepper and cook for a minute or two. add 1/2 cup of the pasta water (which you obviously saved). boil it off for a minute and pour in pasta and remaining wine (there shouldnt be much wine left). toss the whole mess together for a few minutes with tongs. add some freshly ground black pepper and, of course cheese!!

serve the dish immediately- it is best served warm. i completed the meal with my usual baguette and oil/vinegar combination to compliment the purply pasta. official review from ryan: the best thing i have attempted so far. im sure attempted is the key word, but best is always nice to hear. if it stood a chance to rival a flavi-dish, i would be ecstatic, at the very least. i doubt such greatness was achieved, but the meals does begin my foray into the bizarre dish category. an entire bottle of wine is a lot to use on such a simple dish for two people, though if one reduced the amount of pasta used it should still work out. or, one could go for slightly less saturated pasta. the picture describes just how, well, purple, the pasta was. i suppose a lavender hue may work out.

in the end, the dish was great. the pepper offsets the pungent rabe and the flavors of the wine come out quite nicely when they have been absorbed so well by the pasta. i might choose a stronger wine next time (this was chateau haut peyruguet '03 bordeaux from whole foods), some strength in the pasta would be nice to go along with the pepper and the rabe. but the strong flavors all seem to fall together in an interesting mix- not quite a cacophony, but surely a lively combination.

ivy's favorite toad-fried-stir-fru

my housemate ivy knows how much i love tofu. all conscientious omnivore-ing aside, from elementary school through pretty much sophomore year of college, i was about as vegetarian as one can possibly be. my mum often cooked with tofu, sometimes as a main dish and sometimes as a dessert. anywho, while on kent island two summers ago, i realized how simple and wonderful toad fried stir fru can be! tonight (after a few hours of setting up a large white tent for pumpkin-selling) i decided to quickly make dinner before meetings, etc. the necessities:

1 package toad food (tofu), cut in half page-in-book style, and pressed for half an hour to get out excess water.
2 (or more) cloves of garlic, minced
red pepper flakes (oodles again, if you're gravling)
chopped scallion (around three-ish)
olive oil
a goodly amount (haha) of broccoli, steamed almost to done-ness. most important about broccoli, in my humble opinion... is NOT TO WASTE THE STEMS! i think this is the best part of broccoli. just take a nice sharp knife, and being careful so as not to chop your fingers off, cut off the hard outside layer. the inside is really light green. cut this into little circles like you are slicing a cucumber. aah so many people compost it, but it really is the best!!!
soy sauce
white rice
toasted sesame oil

hokay. so... you've pressed the toad food for at least half an hour. cut it into about 1/2 inch cubes. put z garlic and red pepper flakes in a bowl. add enough soy sauce to cover the bottom of the bowl and all the garlicky goodness. add the tofu and shake it to cover the tofu. let it marinate for a while. make enough white rice for who ever is eating. in a pan, heat olive oil. add the tofu/garlic mixture, but be careful that you don't pour any of the excess soy sauce in. if you do, your tofu will be uber soft, and crumble before you get to the broccoli. saute the tofu/garlic until it's done. by done, i mean cooked-ish (def. warm) but it doesn't take that long. like 5 minutes. add the scallion... then the broccoli... then the left over garlic soy sauce. in all it takes around 15 minutes. put rice in a bowl, and the toad food/broccoli on top, and add a tiny bit of toasted sesame oil. put your bright red chopsticks on the left side of the bowl (since EVERYONE is left handed!), and eat dinner with your housemate!(1 thing of tofu makes A LOT of stir fry. you can make extra rice and have it for lunch the next day. or just invite other housemates to eat with you!)

yay!

ps happy wednesday. :-)
pps mama brought me the braided garlic from the farmers market in seattle. isn't it beautiful!?

parents weekend... WHEEEEE! :-)

my lovely parents arrived in brunswick this morning (friday) around 12am, after a long-ish day of flying from seattle to manchester and then driving up to bowdoin. yay! this is the first time in my years at bowdoin that my mum has made the trip. in years past, she's been on our farm in hungary by this time in the fall. i'm so glad she finally made it out :-).

my father and i have a little tradition, since he always seemed to book his flights to arrive at really strange hours... i make dinner and deliver it to his hotel room. that way when he arrives he can have food-ish, but i can be happily sleeping. hehe, works well for me! this year i made couscous with curried vegetables (garbonzo beans, potato, squash, onion, garlic). i had such a fun time making it because all the colors were so... autumny, and the kitchen smelled of garlic. basically, utopia. anywho yesterday was a crazy day of classes, interviews, deadlines, and work @ the gear room, so i actually didn't get to cook dinner until around 11. just as i was getting ready to hop over to the hotel, i called to ask whether they'd arrived, and the little guy told me that my parent's reservation didn't exist. hmm!? haha i don't know how that happened, but the reservation was apparently for friday through monday instead of thursday through saturday, so they (m+p) ended up staying with us at spring street. it was nicer that way though, because i got to warm up the food, AND they got to eat part of their welcome-apple-pie!

(the pie incidentally, was inspired by gravling... sort of a funny story in itself. i mentioned how i was stressed and feeling rather like cinderella's carriage as the clock approached midnight, you know, on the verge of turning into a pumpkin. he suggested that the real question at hand wasn't anything related to whether turning back into a pumpkin was bad/good, but whether if i were a pumpkin, i would make pumpkin pie out of myself... interesting, odd, and thought provoking in the i-should-make-an-apple-pie for my parents sort of way. hehe.)

anyway, i didn't really have recipes for either the curry or the pie, i just sort of put stuff together. the curry was fun because i had all the component bits at home. spices like garam masala, turmeric, and black mustard seeds make dishes like this soo aromatic! i love potatoes so much though, that it was hard not to eat them before they made their way into the curry (since obviously they were cooked first. haha i once tried to persuade my parents that i was irish based on the fact that i love potato so much. hmm. :-P)

the weather is amazing here this weekend, nice and crisp. perfect weather for leaf-based tourism! tonight the chens and the gottliebs are scheduled to go on our annual sushi adventure (this year with BOTH our mums!!!). tomorrow my family is going to boothbay harbor (wheeee!!!) with ivy and kruiky... and then sunday, boston to see my lima and kafrine (and schedule permitting, perhaps even gravling!). it's funny how food-oriented this weekend is. such is my family, i guess. what i really really REALLY want right now though, is sleep.

******************

(multi-part post hehe in case the switching tenses wasn't enough of a clue...) it's actually saturday now, and we (meaning kruiky, ivy, m+p, and i) just got back from dinner in boothbay. it was amazing, as usual, and i'll have to write about it soon. last night was equally fun - the family sushi night was great. my father (the always experimental one) asked to try sea urchin. armand and i had a fun time talking of all the latin names of the sea life we learned about in spang's class at garfield... anywho. highlights of sushi: shitake-miso soup, reaallly good salmon sashimi, and ginger ice cream (YES!!! hehe ice cream!?!). next time i promise i'll talk more about the food and making it. now again, it's time for bed. :-)

fideo- hopping on forbidden ground

Fideo
Originally uploaded by la_fleur.

flavi and i agree on most food related questions; garlic makes everything better (even ice cream), you cant use too much olive oil, paprika, even if i can't say it "right" is great, chopsticks are super, and spaghetti is pretty much the worst sort of pasta imaginable. for my monday-night-need-to-feel-healthier dinner i decided to try a recipe i found on my allrecipes.com dashboard (http://chicken.allrecipes.com/az/FidMxicnSpghtti.asp). the challenge with this concoction is its call for spaghetti. now, little flavi and i surely love our pasta, but we arrived at the conclusion quite early in our friendship that spaghetti was wholly unacceptable. at first i dismissed such a recipe on the grounds of its noodly content, but the description sounded rather exciting- no boiling of pasta, rather toasted pasta that remained largely straight. the preview picture looked a bit like a starched up flying-spaghetti monster, flaling his noodly appendages about in a straight armed fashion. this comedic appearance alone appealed to me, plus i could use angel hair pasta, which bothers me slightly less than its thicker sibling. of course, after my cooking, i am still left with 3/4 a package of angel hair pasta, which i will need to find a good use for. perhaps some elementray school style art: construction paper and elmer's glue accompany useless spaghetti quite well.

the dish is simple: sautee chicken, set aside and dice, brown pasta in olive oil, add onions, tomatoes, cumin, red pepper flakes, salt, pepper and a small amount of water, return chicken to skillet and cover for 10 minutes, top with cheddar cheese and serve. quite a quaint little dish.

though, again i've made a meal filled with chicken... as has been the case pretty much everything i have made of late. i need the influence of dear flavi for some creativity in my food. pursuing svensk dishes is my best bet, though their reliance on herring has caused me to steer clear for the most part. a little b0rk in every persons life is good, though.

two items were notably absent in this dinner: bread and wine. truly, this was a dinner that sumbled astray of traditions for foody fun with flavi, but it turned out alright nonetheless. i was making too much food in the beginning and my recovering insides simply were not yet up to bread and wine standards, so i pushed off my two dinner staples until another time- despite having a lovely selection of wines from whole foods on the table and a nice baguette waiting for consumption. today is tuesday, though, so there is little doubt that i will return to tradition this evening.

when i finished the fideo, as it is called, i quickly served it up to my short-ish friend who was breaking her yom kippur fast and to my oft-hungry roommate who just slipped in under the dinner bell buzzer for some of my large-ish dish. they both seemed pleased, as was i. though, i was told some green needed to be added to the dish for appropriate color balance- it all tended a bit toward one end of the light spectrum. some parsely would set it off nicely- or a different sort of green-ish pasta might do the trick! if you follow the recipe i've linked to, undercook the chicken a bit, as it cooks more when you return it to the skillet with the pasta, unfortunately our kyckling became a bit rubbery after theexcess cooking- flavor was still spot on, but not as tender as i hoped. i used free range chicken to keep the greenies happy, so my karma points helped the dish taste better.

cooking without flavi is never as much fun, but i can experiment with some forbidden-type foods and see how they come out. i cannot wait until we wander our way together again for something else exciting, but until then, she will have to influence me from afar!

cooking with armand and becca...

armband and i have been playing phone/email tag for about a month now. we had a lunch date scheduled, and i proceeded to work through it at the library and somehow not notice until waaaay after lunch. so basically, i've been a rotten friend. but he isn't exactly easy to get a hold of either! becca and i run into eachother occasionally, and always mention how nice it would be to sit down and be lazy & cook, but again... never happens. so last friday, we finally made good on our phone/tag/laziness/cooking imaginations! both of them came over to spring street and we all cooked dinner together! sadly, taylor (another good friend) couldn't stay for long, as he was on the verge of keeling over from sleepiness. next time. :-)

the weather on friday was sort of braveheart-esque... very rainy, cold, glum. i had the imagination to make leek-potato (or potato-leek, if you're armand) soup, because honestly, who doesn't like soup on soup-ish days? we also made paprikas krumpli, or potato with paprika. waaay hungarian, hehe. whenever i cook with armband, i feel obligated to make something hungarian, since it's in his blood. though he often likes to deny it, he is distantly magyar, since szatmar decidedly counts. every time i make paprikas anything, i think of two people: my nagymama and my mum. nagymama's paprika is the brightest red, most fragrant, tasty paprika i've ever had. i guess i'm slightly biased, since she's my grandmother, and any paprika she grows undoubtedly must be the best, but it is seriously tasty. i think of my mum because whenever she cooks paprikas anything (i keep saying that because you really CAN make paprikas anything... csirke (chicken), krumpli (potato), goulash (essentially paprikas cow and potato), etc. etc.) she always says in her sweet little hungarian accent, "don't forget... loooots of good onion!" haha that was a tangent. anyway. our dinner turned out pretty happily - despite the fact that i started cooking late, so we ate rather late. gyuri brought tasty red wine that fit with all the paprika perfectly. :-)

in terms of dinner discussion, the wine made armand and i rather talkative hehe. armand derives great enjoyment from rehashing old arguments (and by old i mean old... like sophomore year of hs old!) it was lots of fun though, because becca was introduced to how petty armand and i can be... making fun of argyle socks, jumping on my toes to see if i really HAD lost my voice, t-shirt fashions, and chemistry presentations. haha i think becca got more than she bargained for! from becca and arbmand, i learned about summer physics presentations, and the glory (not) of teaching middle school physics. hopefully cooking with mokus and gyuri will be a more consistent event in the future!

leek-potato soup: 2 leeks, all chopped up (not the green part, just the white) - 3 peeled & diced potatoes - 5 cups water - salt - pepper - olive oil. you saute the leeks until they are steamy and translucent (in the olive oil, right) add the potato, saute some more... then add the water and boil the holera yasna out of it. put it all in a blender till its smooth... add salt and pepper. soo easy, and sooo tasty!!!

paprikas krumpli: 3 (or so) diced potatoes - loots of chopped onion - garlic - chopped portobello mushroom - chopped bell pepper - a tablespoon or so of red paprika - olive oil - tomato in various forms - salt - pepper - pasta. saute onion and garlic in olive oil, after a while, add the paprika, making sure that you stir quickly and don't let the paprika burn! stir in the mushroom & bell pepper and saute, then the potato and various tomtato products (like chopped fresh or canned tomato) pour enough water over to cover this all and cook until the potatoes are done. then keep cooking :-) i like paprikas best when the potato starch starts making the liquid-y part thick, and the potatoes start falling apart. add salt and pepper. oh, and i put a chile pepper in too. but that's only if you like hot things. cook the pasta (sort of wide-ish egg noodles?) and ladle the paprikas over the pasta!

both of these things are especially easy to cook if you don't have armand maliciously tickling you. right. he is good at chopping onions, though. :-)