By: Blonde Two
As you can imagine, I returned from Budapest with quantities of Hungarian paprika and the intention of making authentic goulash. As luck would have it, my sister’s birthday party was set to include cooking stew on my Mum’s (rather posh) fire-pit-table-thing.
The ‘stewlash’ ended up being a communal event with three sisters and one mum all adding ideas to the pot (I love it when a metaphor comes together!) The ingredients for real goulash are rather more simple than the ones that ended up in our brew, but the resulting taste was deep, rich and wind inducing (obviously not me!)
Beef, Hungarian paprika, onion, garlic, sweet potato, potato, leek, carrot, beer, dark chocolate, more beer, olive oil, water, fire, jam pan.
There was lots of stirring, lots of bubbling and lots of adding extra liquid; but at the end of two hours, we had ‘stewlash’ with dumplings and baked potatoes. It was delicious, we were reminiscing about Guide camps and sailing trips, and the fire was blazing!
A couple of little points: Did you know that if you smear the bottom of a pan before you put it on an open fire, it helps to remove the blackness after cooking? Did you also know that Ecover washing up liquid is not as good at this as Fairy Liquid? You might also be interested to know that a pressure washer is an impractical but amusing tool for pot cleaning.
Of course, Blonde 2 meant to say that the washing up liquid should be smeared on the OUTSIDE bottom of the pan! When I was a Guide, in ancient times, we used a paste of Vim or Ajax & water smeared on the outside of the cooking pot. I wonder if one can still get Vim? I agree with her that we had a most scrumptious feast. Did she mention that the fire pit table has a bar round it underneath to put your feet upon while you are cooking? Very cosy! B2’s GM