I don’t have much time to write out these recipes for you today, what with planning for my occasional restaurant, Jack, taking up all of my non-lawyering time right now. We are busy making sure we have all the plates we need, picking up linens, and working out some menus for months down the line. It an incredibly exciting process for us!

So, yes, it takes up a lot of time. As Prince Humperdinck said in the movie version of the immortal S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride, “I’ve got my country’s 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I’m swamped.”

We are having a soft opening for which no reservations are available this weekend, and I’ll try to take a few photos then. Our real opening night is April 12th, and I’ve been really, really enjoying watching the reservations start to come in.

Life sure isn’t boring.

So, rather than leave you entirely high and dry, here are a few photos and recipes for some sausages I made earlier this winter. Dave’s holiday present to me this year was a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer, and these two sausage batches were made in my first bout of playing with my presents.

If you need some advice on the mechanics of making sausage, you can check out Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman, or just google around.

The basic idea is: cut up your meat and fat into small cubes and marinate with your seasonings in the fridge over night. Put your grinder, bowl, and meat into the freezer until quite cold. Grind into a cold bowl sitting inside a larger bowl filled with ice. Again, get the meat and your stand mixer bowl very cold, then beat the ground meat with cold liquid to bind and emulsify it. Cook sample patties to taste the flavoring until you’re happy. Stuff into casings or use as patties, whichever you prefer.

The recipes below have my notes on both the seasoning proportions that we actually used, and the way we’d make them differently in the future.

Lemon Sage Sausage
2.42 lbs pork shoulder butt and fat
19 g kosher salt
3 g black pepper, coarsely ground
20 g fresh sage, minced (we used 14, it wasn’t enough)
9 g garlic, minced
17 g ginger, grated
1 lemon worth of zest (we used 2, it was a little too much)

Hungarianish Sausage
2.42 lbs pork shoulder butt and fat
10 g edes paprika
10 g csipos paprika
2 g black pepper, coarsely ground
41 g roasted garlic (roasted in lard)
19 g kosher salt
3 g allspice (we used 4, it was just a little too much)

First things first. I would really appreciate it if you would go vote for me in Culinate’s Death By Chocolate contest.

Also, I heard today is crepe day, so we made a Hungarian crepe cake!

My grandmother says that she used to make this with a different filling in each layer – jam, ground walnuts, chocolate cream, cottage cheese, poppy seeds, whatever she was in the mood for. When I told her that I made mine with just a walnut filling and chocolate on top, she huffed a bit, then said, “It’s okay, I make it with walnuts sometimes too.”

If you trust Ima more than you trust me (probably wise, when we’re talking about Hungarian food), you should make a smaller portion of the walnut filling I describe below, and use layers of jam, chocolate, and cottage cheese as well as walnut layers between the pancakes.

But if you trust me, well, believe that my way of making Rakott Palacsinta (which Ima tells me translates to ‘Raising Palacsinta’) is very delicious, too.

Rakott Palacsinta (Hungarian Pancake Cake)

Layer palacsinta (recipe below) with walnut filling (recipe below), then cover with chocolate rum sauce (recipe below).

Palacsinta
2 C milk
2 C all-purpose flour
6 eggs
A splash of seltzer or ginger ale
Butter for frying

Blend or whisk together all ingredients except the seltzer until you have a homogenous batter. Add a splash of seltzer or, if you prefer, ginger ale, until the batter reaches your desired consistency. A thinner batter means that it is easier to create very thin and delicate pancakes, but may be harder for them to retain structural integrity. I suggest thinning the batter more as you grow more confident in your ability to maneuver the pancakes.

You want a light pan, a pan you can easily lift and move around with one hand. I keep the batter in a blender with a good spout, and a stick of butter with the wrapper pulled back halfway in a small bowl near the stove.

Heat the pan, then just run the butter stick across it to coat it with sizzling butter. Coat the sides as well as the bottom. Hold the pan away from the stove, and pour in a dollop of batter – how much will depend on how well and how quickly you can move the pan. You want to start swirling the batter around in the pan immediately, before it has time to cook and set.

The motion is all in the wrist. You want to keep the pan moving in a sort of circular motion so that the batter runs around that central dollop in a spiral, creating the [connected] concentric rings of an ever-widening circle. This gets much easier with practice. Once that’s done, return the pan to the heat.

As soon as the pancake looks entirely dry, it is ready to be flipped. After the pancake is flipped, it is just a few moments before it is completely done – wait to see the surface begin to bubble, then flip it out of the pan and onto the plate.

Do butter the pan before each and every pancake. It is not healthy, but you can really tell the difference in flavor.

Walnut Filling
(adapted from The Cuisine of Hungary by George Lang)
1 1/3 C heavy cream
2 C granulated sugar
1/2 C rum
2 lbs. walnuts, ground
1 C chopped raisins
4 tsp fresh grated lemon zest
Milk to taste

Bring the heavy cream to a simmer. Stir in the other ingredients (except for the milk) and continue to simmer for a minute. Stir in milk to thin it for spreading if necessary.

Chocolate Rum Sauce
(adapted from The Cuisine of Hungary by George Lang)
4 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1 C milk
3 egg yolks
2 tbsp granulated sugar
2 tbsp cocoa powder (not Dutch process)
1 tbsp melted butter
2 tbsp rum

Melt the chocolate into the milk in a small saucepan. Whisk in the egg yolks. Remove from heat and whisk in the other ingredients.

My grandmother has congestive heart failure, which means that she is restricted to a low-salt diet. When she gets sick in the winter this goes straight out the window, because she tends to order in salty soup from the local take-out Chinese food place on the corner. I try to stave this off by delivering homemade chicken stock to her whenever we make up a batch. All she ever cares about is broth, anyway.

(She also has diabetes. No sugar and no salt, can you imagine? We work very hard to make tasty things for her, and she always appreciates that we go out of our way to make even desserts that she can eat.)

Point being, when I stopped by with soup earlier this week, she insisted that I take some her Hungarian sausage in exchange. Hungarian sausage is just about the best stuff around, spicysavory with paprika and all sorts of other tasty stuff going on.

When I was in Hungary, I spent a lot of time going into supermarkets and butchers’ shops, trying to order my favorite kind of kolbasz (sausage). People would smile and have whole conversations at me that I could not understand, and I would resort to simply pointing at the hanging meats and asking, “Edes? Finom?” (Sweet? Delicious?)

“Edes! Finom!” they would affirm, and pack me off with my meats, happy as can be.

My fridge also happened to be stuffed with extra baby bok choy this week, because Dave picked up a pound and a half of it when all I needed was a handful for a bowl of Barbara‘s amazing Kimchi Noodle Soup.

What to do, what to do? I decided to adapt Smitten Kitchen‘s recipe for Sweet Potato and Sausage Soup to use up the greens and meats that just happened to be filling my fridge. I made a few other changes to the recipe along the way, too, reducing the fat and adding in a few shallots.

It turned out fantastic!

Okay, listen. Most of the flavor in this soup comes from the sausage. So if you’re going to make this, use the tastiest sausage you can get your grubby little paws on. If you live in NYC, that means getting up to the hentes (pronounced hentesh, this is the Hungarian word for butcher) on the corner of E. 81st St. and 2nd Ave and buying a selection of Hungarian sausages to mix and match into the soup.

Just smile at them and ask, “Edes? Csipos? Finom?” (Ay-desh (‘ay’ like ‘hay’ without the h), meaning sweet; chee-poshe, meaning spicy; fee-nome, meaning delicious.)

They will take good care of you there.

And suddenly it occurs to me that this post would make an excellent entry for Apples & Thyme, a food blog event celebrating our relationships with our mothers and grandmothers.

Hungarian Sausage, Baby Bok Choy, and Sweet Potato Soup
(adapted from Smitten Kitchen’s adaptation of a recipe from Bon Appétit, October 2007)
12 oz Hungarian sausage, cut into 1/4″ thick round slices
2 medium onions, chopped
2 shallots, chopped
2 large garlic cloves, minced
2 lbs. red-skinned sweet potatoes (about 2 large), peeled, quartered lengthwise, cut crosswise into 1/4″ thick slices
1 lb. white-skinned potatoes, peeled, halved lengthwise, cut crosswise into 1/4″ thick slices
6 C chicken stock
12 oz. baby bok choy, cores cut out and discarded

Cook the sliced sausage in your soup pot over medium heat, stirring often, until they start to look done and a decent amount of fat has rendered out of them. Transfer the sausage to a plate covered in paper towels to drain.

Add the onions to pot and cook until they just start to brown, stirring often. I usually suggest browning your onions very deep and dark, but with this recipe to do so would make the whole thing too sweet. So, just go until they are translucent and just barely getting golden.

Add the garlic and potatoes and cook, stirring often, until the potatoes begin to soften (or it looks like it’s about to burn, whichever comes first).

Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil, scraping up the tasty browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Then reduce the heat and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are soft. This should take about 20 minutes.

Partially mash the potatoes with your wooden spoon (or other stirring implement) against the side of the pot, leaving them pretty chunky. Stir in the sausage. Stir in the baby bok choy and simmer just until wilted. Salt and pepper to taste.

When I think of cucumber salad, I think of all the love and sheer stubborn energy that only your grandmother can bring to the table.

My grandmother, my Ima, makes very classic Hungarian cucumber salad, with vinegar and (again, you guessed it) paprika. Alanna of A Veggie Venture learned to make cucumber salad with sour cream from her grandmother, her Nana.

Incidentally, Dave made the red bowl shown in these photos, and I made the clear bowl with the dramatic lip (I like to call it my Elvis bowl). We are still as exuberant about glassblowing as ever.

I was about to make Alanna’s Nana’s cucumber salad when I suddenly realized that I had never asked my grandmother to tell me how to make our family’s version. I called Ima immediately and asked her to tell me what to do. (We call our grandmother Ima, the Hebrew word for mother, because that’s what my mother and my aunt always called her when we were growing up.)

Ima sure was pleased to hear my voice, and even moreso to hear that I had called because I needed her advice. Sometimes I think that she takes her greatest pleasure in life in my admitting that there are still things left for her to teach me.

There always will be, I’m sure.

Both cucumber salad recipes start the same way. You mix thin cucumber slices with some coarse salt, and let them sit for an hour or so. The salt draws a lot of water out, and the cucumber slices become somehow soft and pliable without losing their crispness.

It’s a lot like preparing cabbage for many Hungarian dishes, in fact. That also starts with a step of salting and setting aside, to draw out the moisture and change the texture of the vegetable.

Don’t worry, you rinse the salt water away and press the cucumber slices dry before going any further with either of these recipes.

From there, their paths diverge.

Ima’s cucumber salad is a Hungarian classic, sharp with vinegar and pulled together with the hefty sprinkling of paprika that she throws into almost everything she cooks.

Alanna’s Nana’s cucumber salad is a gentler creation, sweeter, luscious with sour cream and vibrant with chives.

I made half a cuke of each, to test them against each other, and I still can’t tell which I prefer. I guess I’ll just have to keep eating them both until I can figure it out.

This is my second entry for Salad Stravaganza, assuming I’m permitted to enter twice.

My Ima’s Cucumber Salad
1 English cucumber (these are the huge ones, usually plastic-wrapped and marked ‘seedless’)
1 onion
1 tbsp coarse sea salt or kosher salt
Water
White vinegar (anything but Heinz, says Ima)
A large pinch of sugar
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Sweet Hungarian paprika to taste

Peel the cucumber and slice into thin rounds. I use my mandoline for this job, because I like how delicate the cucumber slices become. Thinly slice the onion as well. Mix the salt in with the cucumber and onion, and set aside for about an hour.

Rinse and squeeze out what water you can. Add enough liquid to just barely cover the cucumber and onion. It should be about 2/3 water to 1/3 vinegar, though you should adjust that to taste. Mix in the sugar and black pepper as well, and sprinkle some paprika on top.

Let it sit for about 20 minutes before serving, to give the flavors a chance to meld.

Alanna’s Nana’s Cucumber Salad
(recipe originally posted by Alanna of A Veggie Venture)
1 English cucumber
1 tbsp coarse sea salt or kosher salt
1/2 C sour cream
Generous bunch of fresh chive, snipped with scissors
1 tsp sugar
Salt & pepper to taste

Slice the cucumber into thin rounds. Combine with the salt and let sit for about an hour. Rinse, press out what water you can, combine with the remaining ingredients, and serve.

I hate shelling chestnuts. I always end up with sharp bits of shell poking the tender flesh beneath my fingernails until it hurts and bleeds. This is unappetizing, but true.

I love eating chestnuts, though. I was raised on chestnut puree as a snack food of choice, after all.

So when I came across this recipe, I hunted around until I found pre-roasted, pre-shelled, vacuum-packed chestnuts. Sound terrible, don’t they? Thing is, they were wonderful, just perfect, and I couldn’t tell the difference when they were cooked into this goulash.

Pork and Chestnut Goulash
(from this recipe)
2 lbs pork (shoulder or butt), cut into 1″ cubes
1 lb chestnuts
3 onions, thinly sliced
3 tbsp sweet Hungarian paprika
3 tsp all-purpose flour
3/4 C hard cider
3/4 C chicken stock
Pinch of dried thyme
1 bay leaf
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

First, roast your chestnuts. (I cheated – I bought pre-roasted, pre-shelled, vacuum-packed chestnuts. This goes against everything I believe in, aside from my belief that it is best to avoid shelling nuts until you bleed underneath your fingernails if at all possible.)

Sear the pork in a bit of oil in a hot pan until nicely browned on all sides. Remove from pan and set aside. Brown the onions in the same pan, adding butter if necessary (it was, for me). When they’re done, add the flour and paprika (and still more butter, perhaps) and cook for a few moments.

Either transfer everything to a Chinese sand pot (my favorite cooking vessel), or add all the other ingredients to the pan. Remember to reduce the quantity of liquids if necessary such that they don’t come up higher than halfway up the meat. Simmer, covered, for an hour or two, or until sufficiently tender. Stir in the chestnuts.

Now that I have my new camera, I figure I should post older recipes that have been sitting in my drafts folder with photos taken with the old camera, just to get them out of the way. This is one of the first meals I made after returning from Hungary this past summer.

Pancakes were the first things I learned to cook as a child, watching my grandmother carefully swirl the batter around the pan to the create the perfect coating, waiting for the bubbles to indicate that it was time to flip them. I filled them with jam and sour cream, or the mix of cottage cheese, cinnamon, and sugar that my grandmother insisted was the way she used to do it back home.

In my world, pancakes are always palacsinta (pronounced pah-lah-chin-tah; in Hungarian, they are pluralized with a -k suffix, but we always used the singular as a mass noun). Palacsinta are basically Hungarian crepes, filled with whatever you please and rolled up into a long tube. Growing up, I only ever had thick, fluffy American pancakes at diners and friends’ houses.

When we got to Hungary, we found that palacsinta were only eaten as dessert. The Tarpa hotel cook thought we were insane, the way my family kept ordering palacsinta for breakfast.

The exception to the dessert rule is found in Hortobágyi palacsinta, where pancakes are filled with a meat stew and served with a sauce made with paprika and sour cream.

What I have for you here is one recipe for a variant of the stew that fills the Hortobágyi palacsinta and the sauce paired with it, and a recipe for the palacsinta themselves. The same palacsinta are used for breakfast, dinner, and dessert. They are delicious and versatile. They are what brought me into the kitchen in the first place.

Hortobágyi Palacsintak
Palacsinta (recipe below)
1 1/2 lbs. chicken breast, finely chopped
2 medium onions, finely chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 C sour cream
1/4 C flour
1 tbsp sweet Hungarian paprika (for the sauce)
Sweet Hungarian paprika to taste (for the filling)
Salt to taste

Brown the onions in the oil, then add the chicken and salt and saute for about 5 minutes. Cover and cook for another 5 minutes or so. Remove most of the liquid and reserve.

Stir in 2 tbsp sour cream and paprika to taste (I really do just add it until the food looks red enough). Simmer for about half an hour.

Fill the palacsinta with the filling and roll as described in the first method here.

Return the reserved liquid to the now emptied pan, and mix in the remaining sour cream, paprika, and flour. Bring to a simmer. Pour over the filled palacsinta and serve immediately.

Palacsinta
1 C milk
1 C all-purpose flour
3 eggs
A pinch of salt
A splash of seltzer or ginger ale
Butter for frying

Blend or whisk together all ingredients except the seltzer until you have a homogenous batter. Add a splash of seltzer or, if you prefer, ginger ale, until the batter reaches your desired consistency. A thinner batter means that it is easier to create very thin and delicate pancakes, but may be harder for them to retain structural integrity. I suggest thinning the batter more as you grow more confident in your ability to maneuver the pancakes.

You want a light pan, a pan you can easily lift and move around with one hand. I keep the batter in a blender with a good spout, and a stick of butter with the wrapper pulled back halfway in a small bowl near the stove.

Heat the pan, then just run the butter stick across it to coat it with sizzling butter. Coat the sides as well as the bottom. Hold the pan away from the stove, and pour in a dollop of batter – how much will depend on how well and how quickly you can move the pan. You want to start swirling the batter around in the pan immediately, before it has time to cook and set.

The motion is all in the wrist. You want to keep the pan moving in a sort of circular motion so that the batter runs around that central dollop in a spiral, creating the [connected] concentric rings of an ever-widening circle. This gets much easier with practice. Once that’s done, return the pan to the heat.

As soon as the pancake looks entirely dry, it is ready to be flipped. After the pancake is flipped, it is just a few moments before it is completely done – wait to see the surface begin to bubble, then flip it out of the pan and onto the plate.

Do butter the pan before each and every pancake. It is not healthy, but you can really tell the difference in flavor.

Ivonne from Cream Puffs in Venice and Orchidea from Viaggi & Sapori are hosting a one-time event called Dishes of Comfort. They ask us to write about something we consider comfort food, one of the special dishes that meant a lot to us when we were young.

My grandmother has a fairly limited culinary repertoire. She makes a set of Hungarian dishes, and little else. But what she does, she does well, and this is the food I grew up on. Ima (we call our grandmother by the Hebrew word for mother) lives less than a mile away from the house where I grew up, and she was our default babysitter when my brothers and I were kids. Her food is comfort food for me, and stuffed cabbage is what she has made the most of over the years.

When I spent a summer in Israel during high school, I got to visit a set of our cousins that I had never met before. When I arrived, it turned out that Ima had called up her cousin Hugocs, who lives in Netanya, Israel, to tell her to make stuffed cabbage for me because she knows how much I like it. The stuffed cabbage Hugocs made for me in Netanya tasted just like the stuffed cabbage Ima has always made for me in Brooklyn, and eating it was like coming home.

As my father pointed out, they probably learned how to make stuffed cabbage at the knee of the same old woman back in the old country. They grew up together in the same little village (Tarpa) in Hungary, after all.

When I went to Hungary last August, I found that the food more and more closely resembled my grandmother’s cooking as I traveled north to Tarpa. Down in Pécs and Szeged, I found no stuffed cabbage at all. In Debrecen, the stuffed cabbage was mysteriously lacking in tomato paste, but was otherwise very similar. Finally, when we got to Tarpa, Ima’s friend Szaz Anna made us stuffed cabbage that was very delicious and very similar to Ima’s, except that she used lecso instead of tomato paste, and it was a bit spicier than Ima’s version. Anna gave me her recipe, but I prefer Ima’s stuffed cabbage, and it is my take on Ima’s recipe that I am sharing with you here.

To this day, when I call my grandmother to see how she’s doing, she usually tells me, “I made some stuffed cabbage if you want to come pick it up. It is too much for me to eat, you have to come take it. I made it for you.”

I called her before I started to steam the cabbage myself, even though I wrote down her recipe a while back. I think she enjoyed the call, though, and the reminder that there are still things she does far better than I. I couldn’t possibly rely on just my notes when trying to make stuffed cabbage on my own for the very first time, after all.

Well, in the great tradition of my maternal ancestors, I have made far too much stuffed cabbage. It is here if you want to come pick it up.

Töltött Káposzta (Stuffed Cabbage)
1 cabbage
For the filling
1 lb. ground beef
1/2 lb. rice, rinsed
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp édes paprika
A little olive oil, just to help bind it together
Salt and black pepper to taste
For the sauce
1 15 oz. jar sauerkraut
Water
Oil
2 tbsp all-purpose flour
1 tsp édes paprika
1 tbsp granulated sugar
Salt to taste
2 6 oz. cans tomato paste

Take off the most wretched outer leaves of the cabbage, and rinse the whole thing off. Steam the cabbage for 5-10 minutes, or until the leaves are pliable enough to bend easily. I find that after removing all the pliable leaves I can, I end up having to re-steam the still hard inner leaves. If I steam it so long that even they are pliable from the start, the outer leaves are easier to accidentally rip.

Peel off the leaves. Hold each leaf rib-side up, and pare the thick rib down to get rid of that tough vein and make it about as flat as the rest of the leaf.

Prepare the filling by mixing all the filling ingredients together by hand. The rice:meat ratio varies, though I have suggested using a 1:2 ratio here. Ima initially told me to use 1 part rice to 1 1/2 parts meat by weight, but when I tried it that way, there was way more rice than I’m used to when she cooks it. It may be that the type of rice used affects this – I don’t know what sort of rice Ima uses (Uncle Ben’s would be my guess), but I use basmati. Szaz Anna also uses 1 part rice to 1 1/2 parts meat by weight.

When I called Ima to ask her to clear this up for me, she explained that it is really based on what you can afford – if you can afford more meat, use less rice. If you want to stretch the meat further, use more rice. The rice also serves the purpose of keeping the meat from binding into nothing more than a tough patty; like the bread in meatballs, the rice here keeps the meat tender and good.

To fill each cabbage leaf, set the leaf on the table rib-side down, so that it naturally curves into a sort of cup waiting to be filled. Roll small handfulls of meat into oblong patties that fit the size of the leaves, and place the filling on the cabbage leaf, near the bottom of the leaf. Fold the sides of the leaf over the filling, and roll the cabbage around the meat, being sure to tuck the bottom end of the rib around the filling to keep it all snugly wrapped.

Cut the center out of the cabbage that remains, and discard. Chop up the rest of the cabbage into small pieces.

To fill the pot, start with a layer of that chopped up cabbage mixed with sauerkraut. Then place the stuffed cabbage in a flat layer on top of that, starting by lining them up around the circumference of pot and then filling in the middle. Add another layer of chopped cabbage and sauerkraut on top of that, then another layer of stuffed cabbage. Keep going like this until you run out of stuffed cabbage, and add a final layer of chopped cabbage and sauerkraut on top. Add water to just cover the contents of the pot.

Bring it to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Simmer, covered, for about 30 minutes.

A few minutes before your kitchen timer goes off, make a roux by browning the flour in a bit of oil in a separate pan. Stir in the paprika, then remove from heat. Add the sugar, salt, and tomato paste, and mix well. Ladle some of the water out of the cooking cabbage pot and mix in with the paste, just to thin it out. Add the thinned paste back into the pot with the cabbage, and carefully stir it in to dissolve it in the water. My grandmother instructed me to the shake the pot to get the paste mixed in, but my pot was too full for me to risk that.

Simmer for another 10-20 minutes, or until done.

These are the rest of my photos from Hungary. They were taken in Tarpa, the town where my grandmother grew up.

Above is Josh Sucher, holding out some grapes for me to try.

We were in the grapery at the top of the hill, as my grandmother called it, belonging to her friend Szaz Karcsa (pronounced sahz karcha).

My grandmother used to babysit for him when they were both young, before the war.

She sees him just about once every 35 years. She saw him when they were young, and again when she visited in 1972, and again this summer.

He looks a little bit like my grandfather, who died when I was fairly young. He was extremely kind to us, tromping through the mud to cut a variety of grapes from his vines for us to try. He gave us far more than we could eat during the few days that we were in Tarpa.

He told us the story of how his grandfather was killed by the communists. Karcsa was just a child then, and his grandfather rejected him and never allowed him to enter the main house, because his mother was unwed and he was illegitimate. (My grandmother’s mother used to take him in sometimes and treat him like a part of her family.) Nonetheless, at a certain point Karcsa became his grandfather’s main caretaker. He would bring the old man his meals every day, and leave them right outside the house.

One morning, when Karcsa was about nine years old, he had just left his grandfather’s breakfast at the house and walked away when he heard gunshots. He ran back to the house, just in time to see his grandfather die. Someone had told the communists that this was where they could find good wine, but they did not want to pay for it, and Karcsa’s grandfather did not want to permit it to be stolen. So they killed him.

Karcsa showed us where he died.

Dave says that he did not obsess over photography as much as I did during this trip. As you can see, he is wrong.

My youngest brother, Jordan, looking very smug over his grapes, with our grandmother in the background.

Jordan followed Karcsa up and down the aisles of the vineyard.

Eating fresh-picked fruit all the way. Those peaches you can see on the tree in the top left were perfectly ripe and wonderful, too.

Everyone we visited just adored Jordan.

And why not?

Karcsa explained that he always keeps two pigs in the shed by the house. Every winter, he slaughters one, and then buys a new one to raise.

He and his wife were delighted to bring out some of their smoked ham from last winter for us to try. It wasn’t quite smoked enough for my tastes, but it was very nice, and they were very generous with it.

I had my grandmother translate for me, telling them that I would love to come back and learn to butcher a pig with them if I could. Karcsa said that if I want to return some winter to help with the butchering, they would be glad to have me.

In this next photo, we were in his wine cellar, and he was draining small cups of homemade wine from his barrels to share with us.

My father believes that it was the love my great-grandmother shared with Karcsa, back when she welcomed him, a child unloved by his grandfather, into her home, that Karcsa was reflecting back at us with such warmth and delight.

I did not get any good photos of the homebrew plum brandy, the szilvapalinka, that everyone we met shared with us. The streets in Tarpa are completely lined with plum trees bearing small, sweet plums unlike any I have ever tasted before. Everyone in town collects and ferments them.

After the rain, they line every ditch.

I took a few pits home with me. I want to grow plums like these someday.

This last photo was taken by Dave. It is perhaps my favorite of this set. Plums still ripe and beautiful on a fallen branch.

While I am still on my Hungarian cooking kick, I offer you two desserts: one traditional, the other, not so much.

This my entry for Sugar High Friday 23: Surprise Inside, which is run this month by Alanna of A Veggie Venture. Finding cabbage inside a dessert strudel is not surprising to Hungarians or their descendants, who are used to the strange versatility and fabulous flavor range of that particular leafy green, but it sure seems to surprise everybody else. Paprika ice cream, well, that surprised even me.

Paprika Ice Cream
1 1/2 C heavy cream
1 C milk
1/2 C sugar
1 vanilla bean
1/4 C sweet Hungarian paprika

Pour the heavy cream into a saucepan. Slice the vanilla bean in half, the long way, and scrape the seeds out into the heavy cream, then throw the rest of the bean in after them. Add the paprika and sugar and bring almost to a boil, then let steep, covered, until the flavor is strong enough for you. Chill, then whisk in the milk and put through your ice cream maker as per its instructions.

Cabbage Strudel
Phyllo dough
1 medium cabbage
3 tbsp sugar (or more to taste)
2 tsp cinnamon (or more to taste)
olive oil
salt
black pepper

The cabbage is prepared much the same way as it was for my cabbage-stuffed peppers, but with more cinnamon and sugar, and more focus on caramelizing the cabbage when sauteing it.

Pull off the most wretched outer leaves of the cabbage, and rinse the rest. Chop it up into chunks that your food processor can handle, but remember to remove and toss out the core. Grind pretty finely in your food processor.

Mix the ground cabbage with plenty of salt and leave covered in your fridge for at least two hours. The point here is to allow the salt to draw some water out of the cabbage. Once that’s done, you rinse off the salt and squeeze as much water as you can out of the cabbage.

Saute the cabbage in a saucepan with some olive oil, along with the sugar, cinnamon, and salt and black pepper to taste. You are basically trying here to caramelize the cabbage. Be patient, it will all work out.

Lay out a few sheets of phyllo, brushing melted butter on each before laying the next on. Spread a line of the cabbage on it, the long way, and roll up as in the first method described here.

Bake at 400º for about 30 minutes or until done.

Sugar High Friday, SHF, SHF23

I was so excited when I saw cabbage-stuffed peppers on a menu in Hungary. How wonderful, I thought. But when I ordered them, they turned out to be pickled. I’m sure that is delightful to some of you, but personally, I do not like pickled anything. (Oh, all right, Japanese pickled ginger. And mango slices pickled with habañeros very briefly in a jar of salt water in the fridge, used later in making sauces.)

When I got home, I decided to try making cabbage-stuffed peppers the way I had originally imagined them to be: cabbage sauteed with sugar and cinnamon, almost as if you were making strudel, stuffed into fresh bell peppers, then roasted to perfection.

These end up soft and sweet, very richly flavored, and sometimes with a touch of bitterness depending on your peppers. If you are concerned about that last, you may want to throw together a tomato sauce to serve them in. That would reduce their finger food managability, but I imagine it would appeal to some palates.

At some point, I may have to post my family recipes for more traditional stuffed peppers and stuffed cabbage. If only I could get over the fear that my mother would never forgive me if I did.

Sweet Roasted Káposzta Töltött Paprika (Cabbage-Stuffed Peppers)
Cut tops off of sweet bell peppers, and remove their innards. Stuff them full of the cabbage filling (recipe below). Place in a lightly oiled roasting pan and roast at 375º for an hour or so, turning them over halfway through if necessary.

Cabbage Filling
1 medium cabbage
2 1/2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
olive oil
salt
black pepper

Pull off the most wretched outer leaves of the cabbage, and rinse the rest. Chop it up into chunks that your food processor can handle, but remember to remove and toss out the core. Grind pretty finely in your food processor.

Mix the ground cabbage with plenty of salt and leave covered in your fridge for at least two hours. The point here is to allow the salt to draw some water out of the cabbage. Once that’s done, you rinse off the salt and squeeze as much water as you can out of the cabbage.

Saute the cabbage in a saucepan with some olive oil, along with the sugar, cinnamon, and salt and black pepper to taste.