day 13

Topic 13 - goulash. it's what's for dinner.

I'm trying to find some new recipes to try out for dinner. I always feel like I'm making the same cotton pickin' things all the time. I get soooooo bored. It makes me want to quit cooking all together, and that would make my husband really sad. I actually have two new recipes picked out to try this week. One's a copy cat Olive Garden pasta fagioli soup recipe and the other was goulash. As I think about it now, they're really kind of the same sort of thing, so maybe I should hold off on the soup til next week. Anyway, tonight, I went with the goulash.

I can remember my mom making goulash when I was a kid. Once I remember she made it to take to my grandma's house. Probably my dad and grandpa and uncles were doing something on the farm the whole day and she had it in a big crockpot, ready to feed the men-folk. Funny part to this story (and she'll probably be so mad I wrote this) but we turned into grandma's driveway and the crockpot tipped over. It was the first and most likely the only time I have ever heard my mother cuss. My mom does not have a potty mouth at all. In fact, her cure for potty mouths back then was a big bar of soap grated onto the back of one's teeth. Anyway, if I think about that moment hard enough I can still feel my eyeballs bugging out of my head when she said it. And I probably turned to my sister with that look that said, "Did you hear what our mother just said?" But not uttering one word for the fear of what could happen.

Back to the goulash. I have never made it. When I was talking to my mom on the phone yesterday I asked her how she made it. She told me she used tomato juice as her base. Well, I didn't have tomato juice, and I've already been to the grocery store, but I did have some marinara sauce that I froze last month so I used that instead. I kind of followed this recipe, even though my husband says that true goulash must have Hungarian paprika in it. He added plain old paprika to his second helping. And you know what second helpings always say, "He must've liked it."