When I started spending most of my time in Cape , Wife Lila was sure I would starve to death and perish in my own filth. The latter is still a possibility, but I’ve turned into a passable cook.
I saw a picture the other day of something that reminded me of one of our frequent family meals – something Mother dubbed Hungarian Goulash. I’m not sure where she got the Hungarian part – maybe she was thinking of Hungry Goulash.
Anyway, I looked up several recipes, extracted the common elements, and started creating my own version.
This contains two pounds of ground beef, five strips of bacon cut one-inch long, onions, peppers, and garlic, all prepared on my Blackstone griddle. When the meat and veggies were ready, I moved them into my 6-quart Instant Pot because that was a convenient place for everything to come together.
I added beef broth, water, two cans of tomato sauce, two cans of Rotel diced tomatoes and green chilies (instead of just plain diced tomatoes), a bunch of seasonings that just happened to be in front of me, and three bay leaves (what they do, I’m never sure).
I’m a memory cooker – meaning that I remember having something extra on the shelf that needs to be used up. That caused me to add a package of frozen corn.
Once everything was well-mixed, I let it bubble for about 25 minutes.
The next step was to throw in a box of elbow macaroni. I thought that stuff was sort of small (it eventually expanded), so I remembered I had a box of Zatarain’s black beans and rice sitting on a shelf.
After that was well combined, I added a whole bunch of cheddar cheese (abut three times as much as the recipe called for), then about the same amount of Mozzarella cheese.
You can never have too much garlic, onions, bacon and cheese, after all.
About 25 minutes later, the cheeses had melted together nicely, and the noodles had expanded. I was ready to see how my 6-quart experiment in culinary time travel went.
It turned out well enough that I wasn’t ashamed to farm out most of the pot to friends and family in town.