Friday, May 4, 2007

Adventures in Eating





If there's one thing we're all good at, it's eating. And the food here in Budapest is downright delectable. Last night I dined on cold fruit soup and cheese-stuffed, breaded chicken breast served over rice and fries (obviously not pictured, I'll explain the photos in a minute). Our bill came to about 3,500 - but it was in Hungarian forints, so we actually came out pretty good. The money here is confusing, for sure. We feel like high-rollers carrying around wads of bills marked with 5,000 and 10,000. (With the current exchange, around 186 forints = 1 U.S. dollar.)

But back to food . . . along with the good, we've sampled our share of not-so-tasty as well. For example, Katie and I have both had our turn accidentally ordering pizzas topped with sardines and other questionable sea creatures. Sometimes, even the food we make for ourselves doesn't end up quite like we expected. European meat departments can be rather scary - chickens with the beaks and feet still attached, mold-cased salamis, mysterious skinned creatures, etc. One night, we thought we had purchased a tube of ground sausage for our spaghetti sauce. It ended up being a bologna substance, but we still fried it up and added it to the sauce. It's not a recipe I'll be duplicating at home, but it actually wasn't bad.
The photos illustrate a night in Austria when Mark made his specialty - ramen noodles with pretzels prepared in the bag so that you don't dirty an extra dish. Now that's a recipe I might actually use again - and teach my brother.

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