szilva túró süti

Has it really been two months? It doesn't seem possible, but my current (second) 30 day metro pass expires today (so I need to remember to get a new one tomorrow morning), so it must be true. It is strange how fast I manage to settle into a place. Budapest really does feel like home. It feels natural to catch the bus to the metro to get to school in the morning. Signs in Hungarian no longer inherently look strange. I still can't read most of them (though the number I can is ever increasing), but they at least look as though they have reasonable words on them. I know my way around the city well enough that I am frequently able to give directions to tourists and only have to pull out my map if I am trying to find some place in a part of the city I have not yet explored. Life is definitely good.

This past weekend Chelsey threw another dinner party - this time with our attempt at creating traditional Hungarian food. She made a vegetable stew called lecso that we served with rice as the main dish, which was quite tasty. For appetizers we served lots of bread with a Hungarian cheese spread called körözött and "egg foam" (fried whipped egg whites with yolk spooned over them and then baked) as toppings. And then there was desert... Tom made cookies, which were quite tasty, though it was questionable whether they counted as traditional Hungarian, and I decided to go crazy...

My host mother had made a delicious curd cheese and plum cake as part of the huge lunch she made on St. Stephen's day, so I decided that would be a good candidate to make for desert for the party. But I needed a recipe. I asked google for a plum and curd cheese cake...and it did not come up with the correct recipe...so I googled the phrase "szilva túró süti" and was directed to a recipe. A most definitely Hungarian recipe and the picture is definitely what I was looking for. The only thing on the ingredient list I did not recognize was "darált mandula" (which I now know means ground almonds) and I figured that I know enough about baking that I could probably pull something off, so I saved the recipe to my computer and attacked it with the dictionary. It took quite a while and some amount of guess work, but I eventually extracted something that looked like a reasonable set of instructions. Now just this was crazy enough, but we add to it the fact that the only measuring implements I have access to is a set of three funnels labeled 8oz, 4oz, and 2oz. The whole process was quite exciting, but the end product came out quite amazing, it slightly over browned on top. I have to admit that successfully baking a cake from a recipe in Hungarian is very satisfying. I got no HW done on Saturday - but I definitely practiced my Hungarian.

I will add pictures later when I remember to extract them from my camera...