BURKE BLOGGED!

Okay folks, here it is: Burke's first blog entry! Spawned by intense TV and internet deprivation, here is the first installment of the guest blog feature, with a heavy focus on food and drink. It's a long one, so enjoy!

BURKE’S FIRST CONTRIBUTION TO ANNA’S SZUPER Jó EFFORTS OF BLOGGING…and naturally I want to talk about food and drink (keep in mind I’m not a ‘foodie’ but I do love to eat.)…

Well, we’ve been eating and sampling and picking all over the place for about four weeks now. Very surprisingly, neither of us has gained a pound yet. Despite the high fat, high starch cuisine that we were expecting, we have found that you can eat as healthy or unhealthy as you want. We have made a very conscious decision to offset every meat pancake covered in a paprika sour cream sauce (one of our favorite Hungarian foods, called hortibagy) with a fresh vegetable wrap filled with lettuce, cabbage, carrots, peppers, cucumber, covered with a bit of balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Decisions like that combined with the hours of walking we do every day have helped us stay on the slimmer side.

We’ve tried quite a few things pretty blindly (mainly because we left our phrase book at home, or sometimes it’s simply impossible to find the root word in the name of a food because this language is so wacky). By and large, we’ve been quite successful thus far. We’ve also been doing some strange ordering and buying of food. While in Budapest, we ordered a random fish dish, garlic soup, lamb sausage, körözött etc. In Szeged, we’ve had a saddle of venison, fish soup, some weird fruits, turkey steak with spicy butter, etc. None of these things would be something either of us would choose on a menu in the US. Being in a foreign country completely overwhelmed by the complications of the language, more times than I can count Anna and I look at each other and say, “well, let’s try it, if we don’t like it, let’s just throw it away”. The positive thing is that we haven’t thrown anything away yet. In fact, some of these blind or strange choices have given us some of our weekly favorites. We eat körözött every other day on bread at lunch. We order garlic soup (a delicious cream soup that is definitely garlicky but not overwhelmingly so) every time we go to a restaurant. We also will not shy away from eating venison or other random meats.

Another change when it comes to food is that we are eating things we never would’ve eaten at home or eating them more often than we ever would of at home. One major development on that front is that Anna now eats and somewhat enjoys cucumber. In the US, Anna took cucumber off of every salad and would’ve never ordered something that had cucumber in it. The other day at the store, she actually decided that she wanted to buy one. While her first attempt to buy a cucumber was a failure (she came home with a zucchini instead and was quite disheartened by the fact she didn’t know the difference), she does in fact now like cucumber. One thing that we consume a lot of here and rarely did at home is ginger ale. Everyone loves a good ginger ale but it’s one of those things that you don’t have every week. There is a brand here called Kinley and it is awesome. We both love our Kinley on a weekly basis. We also eat a lot of figs because quite a few teachers bring in figs from the trees at their home and force-feed them to you. I quite enjoy a few figs a day. Anna not so much, but she politely takes one and eats it anyway.

We have mainly been buying food at Tesco, Spar, little markets, bakeries and vegetable/fruit stands. In the European tradition, there are very few preservatives and things seem to go bad quite quickly. You cannot plan meals more than a day or two in advance for this reason. The fresh baked bread we eat every day from the little bakery by our flat is really great, but you have to buy it the day you are going to eat it. Sometimes it’s annoying to run around to a few different places to put a meal together, but it also forces us to venture out and face the language and cultural differences even more than we already do (we are learning all the time). I do truly enjoy buying a carrot or a peach from the crazy old ladies at the vegetable stand. They always love to chat and the short conversation is always very silly (it begins with me saying ‘nem beszelek magyarul’ meaning I don’t speak Hungarian and leads to them guessing my country of origin while laughing with a cigarette hanging from their lip). To make that experience better, the carrot or peach came from their own little garden and is super cheap. The massive carrot I bought yesterday cost me the equivalent of $0.15.

Naturally, we are missing quite a few things from home. The most obvious is the coffee. In Hungary, every kave is espresso. I was expecting something like London, where I could get a Café Americano, which was espresso with lots of water filling a full cup (it was almost coffee). In Hungary, they do add milk to it if you want but it remains in a tiny Dixie cup. It has plenty of caffeine, more than a normal Italian or Spanish espresso actually, but doesn’t satisfy the need for a 20-ouncer from Wawa. Additionally, I am definitely missing a good hoagie and Anna is missing her sushi. We both are definitely missing salmon, tuna and other fish (they only eat river fish here). Mexican food, a staple of eating for Anna and I (and something that we were very worried we wouldn’t have for a full year) is quite interesting in Hungary. The store brand salsas are oddly sweet and the tortilla chips aren’t too great, but at least they have them. They also have taco seasoning, hard taco shells and soft tortilla shells that are very good. Sadly, black beans do not exist here though. We have made some pretty kick ass beef tacos and vegetable quesadillas already. The sour cream here is incredible, much better and creamier than in the US, and we mix it with some super spicy and salty hot paprika. It’s awesome. Also, Tesco and only Tesco, has avocadoes! We have been making pseudo-guacamole with onion, garlic, olive oil, and paprika flakes. It’s missing cilantro, which doesn’t exist here, but satisfies our desperate need for guac. Boy could we go for Vick or Whole Foods guac…but we will survive!

Generally we skip breakfast because we have to wake up at 6. A pastry or mini cheese scone usually does the trick if we need something. Kave is essential though, even if it’s in a tiny cup.

For lunch, we usually have a smorgasbord of any combination of the following: fresh rolls, salami, trappista cheese, egg salad (Anna’s dad’s recipe), korozott (a yummy orange cheese spread that has paprika and caraway seeds in it), peanut butter, apricot or berry jam, crackers, bagel chips, almonds, vegetables with tzaziki, fruit, yogurt (Rostokkal is the best flavor, it’s a yogurt with honey and little flakes of wheat in it, so good), chips, salsa, guacamole, etc.

For dinner, we have made the following: grilled chicken with my mom’s lemon pasta (which turned out great even though we didn’t splurge and buy parmesan cheese, it’s too expensive), tacos, quesadillas, mushroom ravioli with pesto and garlic bread, soup, kobasz or hot dogs (sometimes there’s a wrapper around each individual hot dog that must be removed before cooking! I now understand that minor detail after one time cooking them in the plastic…oops) with french fries, vegetable stir fry, breakfast dinner consisting of bacon and eggs, and with every meal, we always have a salad topped with carrots, red pepper, sprouts, and salad sajt (which is a delicious soft cheese that bridges the gap between feta and goat cheese).

***I’d like to note, mainly for Vick’s sake, that in the preparation and cooking of these meals, Anna has been incredibly helpful and has improved her cooking skills significantly since we’ve been here. I’m not lying.

Dessert here is especially fun. Pastries are everywhere and they are very very good. They have any combination of chocolate, poppy seed, apricot, berries, cream, pumpkin seed, cheese, etc that you could ever imagine. Anyone who comes to visit who likes sweets will be very impressed. It blows Italian bakeries in NYC away. The other big sweet is ice cream. The ice cream in Szeged is absolutely incredible. There are a few beautiful and delicious places right in the same part of the pedestrian-only downtown area that are amazing, all of which have outdoor seating that is always packed. It’s a point of great contention here about which one is best. We have made a decision and we believe that A Capella is the best in town. They probably have 30 different flavors that constantly rotate, ranging from grapefruit to chestnut to Tokaji (which is a famous Hungarian sweet wine). All of them are made with real cream and I dare say that it’s my favorite ice cream in the world.

Restaurants are plentiful and while we are on a major budget, we have been trying to eat out once or twice a week just to sample. Prices are reasonable and the food has all been very good. Outdoor seating is everywhere and when it gets chilly at night many restaurants provide you with a blanket. Restaurants typically serve Hungarian cuisine, but fortunately menus are commonly in English. Most dishes have some form of pork, chicken, venison, turkey, sour cream, paprika, potato, dumplings, cabbage, fruit, etc. Not low fat, but always delicious. The cost of Anna’s chicken stuffed with ewe-cheese and mushroom last night was about $7…definitely affordable. We’ve also eaten pizza (which was very good, and the place we go is one minute away from our flat), gyros, sushi in Budapest for Anna’s birthday, Chinese food from the food court at Tesco (great Chinese), and McDonalds (because we feel guilty using their wireless internet without buying something).

Drinking here is a very enjoyable and affordable experience as well. The wine is incredibly cheap and very drinkable. I don’t claim to know much about wine but I think they have something for everyone. White, red, sweet, dry, etc…they are very proud of the many varieties they make in this country. We tried quite a few last weekend at the wine festival, including some of the famous ones. Bulls Blood from Eger and Tokaji are the two most famous. Louis XVI of France declared that Tokaji was the king of wines and the wine of kings. Hungarians love that saying. Beer is good, usually in a pilsner or lager style much like in Germany or the Czech Republic. Borsodi, Arnyi Aszok, and Dreher are the most common. I can get a Guinness or good English ale at the one pub in town but I definitely miss my IPAs and stouts. I have tried a few kinds of palinka, which is a homemade clear, fruity spirit (think vodka meets a fruit, but stronger). Every farmer in the country makes his own palinka, flavored with anything from apricot to plum to berry, and they are all very strong (about 80 proof or so). Anna wasn’t a fan but I love them. They burn a bit going down but there is a nice sweet aftertaste. My brother Dan will love the bottles I am inevitably going to bring home. Unicum is the other famous Hungarian spirit. It’s like Jaeger and for that reason, I haven’t wanted to try it yet. Give it time. There are nice pubs and also some neighborhood pubs that aren’t so classy (when I walk past them, they remind me of the beloved Grand Central Taproom in downtown Fleetwood). Beer gardens are all over the place, as well as bars with open courtyards (in Budapest there are a lot of courtyard bars in old abandoned apartment blocks that are very off-beat and artsy, we’ve been to three or four like that so far).

There are food and drink festivals all over the country all spring, summer, and fall. We had the halaszle festival a few weeks ago in Szeged, the wine festival in Budapest last weekend, and we might be going to the paprika festival in Kalocsa this weekend. They also have big beer festivals and the weekend Anna’s uncle Marty visits us, we are going to the kobasz and palinka festival (what is more fun than alcohol and sausage!). At all of these festivals, food and drink are very reasonably priced and high quality (it’s certainly not carnival food!)

All and all, we are not starving and really have enjoyed eating and drinking so far. When family and friends come to visit…you will eat well. I promise!