Category Archives: Food

Hungarian Noodle and Cabbage, Ultimate Comfort Food

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Over at Aliette de Bodard’s blog, we were talking about egg noodles. She describes her perfumed egg noodles as a “bland” dish that can be served alongside dishes with a stronger flavor. However, the noodles have no less than six seasonings added. I couldn’t help comparing it to one of my favorite egg noodle recipes, a dish my family calls Halushka. Halushka is seasoned with salt. That’s all. My Hungarian grandmother would have fainted at the idea of adding ginger, chili-garlic sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil, garlic, AND onions to a noodle dish. She might, in fact, protest that it is impossible to digest such a dish.

(Now, don’t get me wrong. Aliette’s perfumed noodles sounds delicious, and I fully intend to try it out. Do visit her site, by the way, because it is full of wonderful Vietnamese/French cooking deliciousness and would appeal to all people who love food.)

Now, my egg noodle dish is delicious in its own way. The simple mixture of cabbage, egg noodles, butter, and salt is one of the most comforting and satisfying meals in my cooking repertoire, and it brings back many happy memories, to boot. All of Hungarian food is comfort food, really. But Halushka is the ultimate–the epitome of comfort in food form. It is comfort food for people who get heartburn from macaroni and cheese, and find mashed potatoes unsatisfying.

Now, we call it Halushka, but it is eaten throughout Eastern Europe and known by many names. The word Halushka, actually, is generally used to refer to a noodle or dumpling. Hungarian dumplings are not those fluffy things you get at Cracker Barrel. They’re more like German spaetzle on steroids. Complicating things further is the fact that my maiden name is Haluska, which in Slovak is pronounced Halushka. (Slovak and Hungarian food and culture bleed into each other extensively, and I’m not an expert on either.)

So my family name is the name of a dumpling or noodle, which is also the name of a tasty dish we make with noodles and cabbage. Essentially, or family crest is something like this:
001

So now that all of that is out of the way, here’s the recipe.

Halushka

One head of cabbage, shredded finely

1/2 stick of real butter (please don’t make me cry by trying to use margarine or some kind of vegetable oil)

One pound dried egg noodles (It’s ok if you want to use an egg-free pasta or even a gluten-free pasta. It should be a short, wide noodle, though.)

Cook the cabbage in the butter over low heat until it’s soft and translucent. I usually put it in an electric stock pot and leave it on low for an hour or more. You don’t want it crunchy or crispy brown. Meanwhile, boil the pasta in salted water. (If you’re on a low sodium diet, you probably won’t enjoy this recipe, as it doesn’t have a lot of flavor to replace missing salt. My grandmother used to make unsalted Halushka for Grampa when he was having his heart problems, and it was always disappointing.)

Drain the pasta and mix it with the cabbage. Salt to taste. Yum! It goes with anything, and keeps well in the fridge. My family uses Halushka like Italians use pasta–serve it with everything!

This is a participating post at Real Food Wednesday by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

 

Beans, beans, magical fruit

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Several months ago, my husband and I were presented with a very interesting mystery. When Glen went to school, he forgot the thermos that contained his lunch, a home made white bean chili we’d had for dinner the night before. The thermos remained on the table, and I gave it a sad glance as I left the house to go to yoga and run my errands.

 

I returned around 2 PM and was immediately greeted with a very pungent smell. The first thing I saw was bean chili all over the floor surrounding the thermos. The dogs looked rather excited, but then again, don’t they always? Of course I blamed them, and cleaned up the mess, but then small details started nagging at me. For one thing, the thermos was still sitting upright on the dining room table. It was filled with a frothy goo that I initially identified as dog sloober. (What, you thought I was going to spare you the details?) If the dogs had gotten into it, wouldn’t it be lying on the floor? And wouldn’t someone have eaten the lid? (For values of “someone” equaling Courage.) Furthermore, there was the question of how they had removed the cup and unscrewed the cap.

 

I put it out of my mind until Brent came home, and we puzzled over it together. He mentioned the same inconsistencies I did. Could two mastiffs eat bean soup from a Stanley thermos sitting on a dining room table without so much as tipping it over? Perhaps. And also perhaps the beans had somehow built up pressure, causing the lid to work its own way open.

 

“What if the beans fermented, releasing gas, causing the lid to pop off?” Brent asked.

 

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “If that had happened, there would be beans all over the—”

 

We both looked up. “Oh, God.”

 

Here’s the science explanation. It seems that whoever (ahem) warmed up the chili had not warmed it piping hot, which we usually do so that the meal holds heat until lunch time. As a side benefit, this tends to sterilize the food, preventing spoilage. Instead, the soup was just warm enough to encourage fermentation, which did, indeed, release gas (no snickering) causing the thermos to explode, spraying beans all over our dining room, including the ceiling. The dogs were excited because, dude, the thermos exploded spraying food all over the house. The thermos was still upright, because no dog had touched it.

 

It’s fortunate that Glen forgot this meal, after all. It had already blown shortly after I arrived home, so by lunchtime it would have either exploded in his backpack, or at least been truly foul. Maybe we have reinvented some kind of rare, Asian fermented bean delicacy, but to my mind, it was toxic waste, and I’m quite certain that Glen’s lunch would not have earned him any lunch room status points that day.

 

Even worse, considering the anxious atmosphere in schools nowadays with regards to terrorism and food allergies, I am quite certain that a fermented, weaponized bean stew would have gotten Glen suspended for life. Or, at the very least, the next time a student brought in a Stanley thermos, they’d have the bomb squad out to blow it up. Once it hit the wire, there would be the inevitable security procedure changes at TSA, and you would have to open all of your thermoses and food containers to prove that you didn’t have any beans. They might even have to employ bean-sniffing K-9′s to check your shoes and underwear for bean bombs. The worst part? You are not allowed to crack even one joke about it.

This is a participating post at Real Food Wednesdays, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop, a blog about healthy food and traditional cooking.