Saturday, October 29, 2022

It's ben a long time

 Hello everyone!

I gained access to my blog again! Hooray!

It's been a very long time since I've posted here, 10 years to be exact. A lot has changed since then and there's so much to update you all on. I don't even know where to start honestly.

I want to start off by saying thank you to everyone that has visited this blog over the years. I'm amazed by the amount of subscribers and comments I've received, even if the latter is mainly spam.

I'm not sure what I want to do with this blog. I don't know if I want to continue it or repurpose it. It started out as something I was doing while still in high school. Now I'm approaching 30 and I still draw and I still love to cook, but I've shifted my focus.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Gulyás Soup With Review

Hi guys!
I'm almost done with my web design project, I'll actually be turning it in soon and I believe after that my teacher will provide a host for me to launch up the site. Pretty exciting even though my page looks basic and boring in my opinion, there's a lot of things I'd change about it but I'm probably not allowed to. Anyways, as I mentioned before the theme was popular food throughout the past century. Easy stuff. I chose French onion soup, Hungarian Gulyás /Goulash (as Americans call it), and molten cakes. I had cook all 3 of these, take pictures, and write a review on it. I briefly mentioned the French onion soup in my previous post so I'll move on to the gulyás leves.

My (now) ex, as mentioned before, is Hungarian so I made sure I got a fairly authentic recipe. Us Americans like to put our own spin on things and ruin it instead so I wanted to make sure I had a Hungarian recipe of it but obviously in English. This soup turned out great and it's now my favorite soup, before that it was egg drop soup.

Okay onward with it. The recipe I used is provided below:


Goulash/Gulyás Ingredients (for 4 persons)

Recipe from Budapest-tourist
  • 600 g beef shin or shoulder, or any tender part of the beef cut into 2x2 cm cubes 
  • 2 tablespoons oil or lard 
  • 2 medium onions, chopped 
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • 1-2 carrots, diced
  • 1 parsnip, diced
  • 1-2 celery leaves 
  • 2 medium tomatoes, peeled and chopped, or 1 tbs. tomato paste 
  • 2 fresh green peppers
  • 2-3 medium potatoes, sliced 
  • 1 tablespoon Hungarian paprika powder
  • 1 teaspoon ground caraway seed
  • 1 bay leaf 
  • ground black pepper and salt according to taste
  • water 



For csipetke (Pinched noodles added to goulash or bean soup in Hungary. Csipetke comes from the word csípni, meaning pinch in English, referring to the way of making this noodle):

  • 1 small egg,
  • flour,
  • a pinch of salt,
  • cc. 1 teaspoon water




Instructions


  1. Heat up the oil or lard in a pot and braise the chopped onions in it until they get a nice golden brown colour.
  2. Sprinkle the braised onions with paprika powder while stirring them to prevent the paprika from burning.
  3. Add the beef cubes and and sauté them till they turn white and get a bit of brownish colour as well.
  4. The meat will probably let out its own juice, let the beef-cubes simmer in it while adding the grated or crushed and chopped garlic (grated garlic has stronger flavour), the ground caraway seed, some salt and ground black pepper, the bay leaf, pour water enough to cover the content of the pan and let it simmer on low heat for a while.
  5. When the meat is half-cooked (approx. in 1,5 hour, but it can take longer depending on the type and quality of the beef) add the diced carrots, parsnip and the potatoes, the celery leaf and some more salt if necessary (vegetables tend to call for more salt). You'll probably have to add some more (2-3 cups) water too.
  6. When the vegetables and the meat are almost done add the tomato cubes and the sliced green peppers. Let it cook on low heat for another few minutes. You can remove the lid of the pan if you want the soup to thicken.
  7. Bring the soup to the boil and add the csipetke dough, it needs about 5 minutes to get cooked. 



How to make the csipetke: 


  • Beat up a small egg, add a pinch of salt and as much flour as you need to knead a stiff dough (you can add some water if necessary).
  • Flatten the dough between your palms (to about 1 cm thick) and pinch small, bean-sized pieces from it and add them to the boiling soup. They need about 5 minutes to get cooked. 
And I was nice enough to take some pictures while making it. :)



Looks good, doesn't it? I turned out really good in my opinion.

Review
I had a lot of fun making this but it did take quite a bit of time. Thankfully, I cut down some of my work time by buying pre-cut cubes of meat for stew. I had thought of cooking the meat cubes first a bit before adding them into the broth but I was afraid they would dry out and not capture the soup flavor, so I followed the recipe exactly and I’m glad I did because the meat didn’t dry out at all. Making this did require something new of me, using caraway seeds. I had never used any sort of seeds in my cooking and had never even heard of these ones or had an idea of how they would taste. When I bought the seeds they weren’t ground up, there were whole, so I had to take some time to grind the seeds a bit which didn’t work out too well because they were a lot harder to crush than I expected. The rest of the cooking process was pretty straight forward though, it was a matter of letting everything simmer together.

My sister tried the dish and this was her opinion of it, "The caraway seeds were a nice touch to the soup, they gave it a spearminty flavor. The meat is chewy. The noodles were very good, they were perfectly made; they were firm and not too smooshy." My mum’s opinion was, “Love it – very tasty. Meat was flavorful and veggies added good flavor.” My dad’s opinion of it was, “Big hunks of stew meat spiced and seasoned well. Potatoes captured the seasoning and were tasty.” My opinion of it was simple that I loved it and plan on incorporating into my family’s dinner more often. I loved the taste of the broth and I really enjoyed how the meat and vegetables really captured the flavor as well. What I was really fond of, though, was the csipetke noodles. I love eggs noodles in the first place so being able to make them and add them to the soup was a perfect little addition. The potatoes could have cooked for a little longer since they weren’t as soft as they could’ve been, but they were good nonetheless.

And the finished product:





Friday, June 15, 2012

Busy bee but have been cooking

Hi everyone! No new doodled recipes yet, I'm really sorry. Actually, I lie, I started the Mardártej one but only got as far as drawing out the cute little illustration for it.

My online classes started up a few weeks ago and I'm now in a web design class, one of my projects will be making a website based on the theme of food throughout different eras in the 1900's.
So part of my project was finding foods that were popular from three different eras, finding a recipe for them, and cooking them. So I've been busy cooking and baking this week but I've really enjoyed it because it also meant bringing new things into my family's diet, since my mum has a habit of making the same things over and over.
For the era of 1900-1939 I chose French Onion Soup to make: 
I took this one as I was caramelizing the onions. A little after this picture I did end up burning some on the bottom, I blame negligence and the fact my teflon pans need to be replaced soon.

And after the soup finished I cut up some bread (in massive pieces, I should've cut them smaller) and melted Gruyère cheese over it to make breadcrumbs for the soup.
It turned out really good though. :)

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Madártej - YUM!

Hi everyone!
So I got around to baking a few days ago, if you count making custards baking; not that I haven't made anything the past few months in the past but they weren't notable enough to be mentioned. My boyfriend is from Hungary and over there they have a dessert called "Madártej" (translates to "Bird Milk"), it's basically a Creme Anglaise/English Cream dessert with floating puffs of meringue-like dumplings. My boyfriend said it was very good and told me to give it a try, since I was interested in making it. So I went on to do so. It came out great, though I will admit that as an American working with the metric system of baking/cooking was strange to me but it worked out fine, I think I over-did it a tiny bit with the vanilla though and also my puffs didn't come out as puffy as I was hoping. Really, the puffs are just whipped egg whites and that's it, they taste great with the creme though. 
So here's how mine looked:

See? I even drizzled some caramelized sugar on it.
All in all, it turned out great and I definitely plan on doodling a recipe for this. :)


Thursday, June 9, 2011

Little Burger Cupcakes Recipes

Gah, sorry about the size...I had to make it smaller instead of using original size. Feel free to double-click it though if you have trouble reading it.
Hooray guys, it's finally done! I'm not sure why I took so long on it, well I am, but I still think it's ridiculous how long it's been since I've submitted an actual doodled recipe. I'm getting back into the swing of things so no worries.
Anyways, I'll be making these soon and writing a review so tuned for that and happy cookins!~

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

2 New Recipes Coming Up


Damn my inconsistency with this blog, I'm really sorry (hehe, broken record player syndrome). I seem to be doodling more and other things than doing recipes, I haven't even baked in forever. But I will be this weekend, my friend and I are going to be baking my birthday cake (Cake 2/3; I had one yesterday, will have one this weekend, and then the pedobear cake the following weekend).  Which, by the way, I had a nice 18th birthday yesterday, I spent my afternoon at the mall with my best friend, came home, had cake, and then another friend stopped by. Fun fun. I honestly don't feel any older though, despite the fact I'm 18, but meh, it'll probably set in eventually... 
Anyways, Past and upcoming recipes all in one canvas (no words on these, those get added on later with photoshop. x3) ; the new ones are a surprise even though one is fairly obvious (it is not a burger though, well...it is but it isn't :P) compared to the other. :D

Zero says (9:57 PM)
And what’s the other thing? Looks like a piece of crumpled paper. xD
This made my night. xD

I hope everyone's doing well and your blogging experience is way more successful than mine. Haha.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Baking sugar cookies

Well, good news. I'll be posting 2 new recipes up this week (probably during the weekend); I was able to make homemade chocolate and now I'm in the process of making homemade sugar cookies.
Warning: Excuse the messy bed-head hair, hehe. :3
Ta-da! A big bowl of cookie dough so far. This is a shit-load of cookie dough, funny story I was reading this recipe and didn't look at how much it yields (don't know what I was thinking). So I'm standing over at the counter (woo it's messy right now, sorry about that. ^_^;;) and I'm reading the recipe and it's asking for large amounts of sugar, butter, flour, etc. so I figured it would be big....I'm used to the normal 25-cookie recipes.
Well it turns out this one's supposed to yield 60 cookies. 60! And don't get me wrong, I love cookies but that is a bit too much for me and my family. Now I'm thinking of seeing if I can mail them to people (friends that live out of state) and give some to neighbors. If the mailing process is successful and they don't spoil maybe I can start up some home-business based on baking cookies and stuff. I think it would be a neat and fun way to make money. We'll see though.
But anyways, I'll let you know how it comes out. I've got this crazy plan to try and make them into shapes of my chibis and decorate them like so with royal icing. x3