Winter's End and Goulash

Sorry Latvian readers but you'll have to bear with my English for couple of posts since I'm trying to make this blog a wee bit bilingual (or trilingual in future, I hope). So it's today- the 10th of March. Finally some sun, melting ice and snow that we have in abundance here in Riga, Latvia.

I don't know why but when I woke up, I had an idea that today I most definitely want to make Hungarian goulash. It's a dish- not exactly a kind of soup like some say and I wouldn't really call it a stew too... or a sauce of some sorts.... I don't know what it is but it's delicious (if someone doesn't know that already). Basically if you have some sort of meat, few onions, carrots, paprika, a little bit of flour you can make it easily. Different kinds of recipes are all over the internet.

But... I didn't have any carrots or onions...or paprika or some great spices... So I needed to get my lazy ass up and go to the local shop. And, as I thought that winter officially ends today, I decided to lose my winter jacket and wear my light leather jacket instead 9another reason, I look so much cooler wearing it).

Anyway, i ended up with some carrots, one paprika, some garlic, ground black pepper and some other stuff not really needed for goulash. I forgot onions but I believe the goulash didn't lose much from not having them. Anyway, the process of making the dish can be seen in the following pictures...

Firstly I cubed a chunk of pork that I had in my freezer, adding some garlic and spices... by spices I mean the ground black pepper, salt and some dried vegetables, one can probably use some more advanced stuff too.
Now, according to the recipe I found in some local Latvian internet site where women exchange recepes and men comment on how terrible or delicious the dishes are, I shouldn't have done that but... I added paprika and carrots to the mix and just started to brown pork a bit... but since pork should've been browned before the vegetables were put into the pan, I just started to stew the damn thing together... following the advice given by "How to Stew Anything'' internet site

Stewing can the best way to make something good out of foods that don't do too well with other cooking methods.

After some time the carrots and paprika lost their bright colours... thankfully pork got a wee bit brown... I tasted it and thought (surprised that something good came out of this whole mess) "Holy cow, maybe I'll be a Chef de Cuisine someday!"- it was good.
Adding a bit of flour and water to the mix didn't make it look delicious... Actually it stated to look like shit (literally), but I wasn't going to give up and adding tomato paste and a bit of sour cream made it look more acceptable. It tasted good too but I wanted to make it spicy- I don't really know if Hungarians like it spicy but here, in Latvia, when people make it they usually make it as sweet as any other Latvian food. We don't really like to spice up our lives here, I guess... So I used the pepper, salt and... added a bit of garlic again until I felt that I've reached the goal.

Of course, you usually eat your goulash with boiled potatoes so I boiled them too.
In the end it all looked like this. Not bad actually, for the first time. Though, I used a bit too much pepper and in the end my goulash was a bit spicy even for me. It was ok but I can imagine my mother wouldn't be happy about that if she had to taste it. But, as I usually oversalt dishes I prepare, it was a nice change.

In other news,unfortunately it wasn't the winter's end here. In the evening, going home from the university I wasn't really freezing but still... deeply regretted my decision to wear leather jacket to school today. The solid plusses in the morning had disappeared somewhere...