What's for Dinner?

Dining in Hungary has been an adventure thus far. We have an apartment style hotel room, so I had high hopes of cooking frequently and avoiding eating out all the time. With the kids, it is hard to eat at a sit down restaurant, especially in Europe where meals are much longer and begin later than in the States. In the two weeks we have been here, we have eaten at only 2 Hungarian restaurants. Good goulash at both! We have, however, eaten at McDonald's at least 4 times and fast pizza places several times!

Cooking has been hard for a number of reasons. So far, I have cooked dinner only twice - chili and spaghetti. The first problem we ran into is that we only have a convection microwave and a stove. The microwave is smarter than we are, so all we know how to do is push the +1 minute button. The bigger problem is grocery shopping. We have been to many grocery stores - I go almost daily for one thing or another. I am good at buying bread, fruit, and milk. After that, I begin to run into problems. Many items only have words on the package, and those words are not in English. It takes so long to stare at items and try to figure out what they are. It is mentally tiring to see row after row of packaging that you can't read!

The meat department is especially challenging. Yesterday, Larry was excited to cook bacon for breakfast...only it didn't really look like bacon, or have any grease like bacon...hmmm. He finally tasted it and decided it was salt pork. Yuck! Thankfully we he had his Blackberry at the store later that day, so we googled different items to try to get translations. Many times nothing came up, so we took our best guess! He was excited to successfully find bacon - much better results this morning! Mystery meat keeps things interesting!

Meat is, of course, not the only challenge. Even simple things like spaghetti require other ingredients. We found tomato sauce, but it is a little different in some way than what we're used to and just wasn't quite the same.

Back to the grocery store last night...we ventured to the outskirts of town and found a giant grocery store. It was like a Super Walmart. I was so excited with the variety and selection of items, although I still had a hard time identifying many things. Familiar items were more available, but pretty expensive. For very small jars, soy sauce was $5, peanut butter was $6, and barbecue sauce was $8! The plan is to cook more this week. First two items on the menu - chicken stir fry and vegetable soup. Hopefully no more McDonald' s for awhile!