Sweet Hungarian Paprika

Day 15 of Spicemas

To begin with, dear reader, this isn’t really a post about paprika. Which is not because we don’t love it. We do. I buy paprika sweet, and hot, smoked, and by the pound. We use a lot of paprika.

A nice bowl of gulyas with cotija cheese and fried onions.

There’s not a recipe today because there was an urgent need for me to clean out my utility room. To my annoyance, the washing machine stopped working. Fair enough - there were signs. About a year ago it stopped working on all but one setting (I think, I didn’t try all the variations) which was one I could live with, and I was busy, and I didn’t think about it. I’m not fussy about laundry in general. Except that a couple of weeks ago I needed the delicate cycle for something and it didn’t work, and then the setting I usually use wasn’t working, and then… well, I spent more time than I want to think about trying to diagnose what was wrong, in hopes I could repair it and move on with life. Except what was wrong could have been any one of three things. By the time I went through buying parts seeing if that worked, cussing, and discussing, until I’d done all three we could replace it new. The washer was not new when I bought it a few years ago. “Honey,” my husband said. “Just get a new one.”

Tomorrow they deliver the new one. I horsed out the old one, which leaked all over my floor as I disconnected it (pretty sure it shouldn’t have been half-full of water as I know it was draining, I heard and saw that in the diagnosis process). So I mopped, swept, and mopped again. I disconnected the dryer, cleaned out the vent, took the back of the dryer off, cleaned that out, put it all back together and reconnected the vent and while I had it out of place, put up a couple of shelves and a light so that’s no longer a dark corner. I cleared off my seed-starting shelves, added the grow lights I’d bought to supplement the existing ones, and set everything up for the next wave of gardening in a month or so. Cleaned the rest of the utility room while I was at it. A surprising amount of ‘stuff’ migrates in there from elsewhere when I’m not looking. Put a bunch of that away in various places not-there and installed the lights my husband reminded me I’d bought to replace the decrepit fluorescent on the ceiling. I have All the Light. I love it.

It’s not a beautiful room and I don’t want it to be. It is utilitarian. I do a lot of potting and planting in there, the laundry, cleaning prep, and so on and so forth. You can’t see it in this angle but there is a huge pantry off to the side which holds any number of essential and rarely-used items only a few steps from the kitchen. As these sorts of rooms go, it is a good’un.

All that wore me out, and my dinner plans floundered. I poked at the freezer, which yielded up a quart of gulyas, frozen some time ago in anticipation of just such a day. If you’d like the recipe, you can find it over on my website. This is one of those rich, hearty stews I make a few times every winter because it is lovely on a cold day when you just want to feel warm and comforted as the gray closes in outside. Red with paprika, if you make it with both hot and sweet paprikas, it will clear your head and leave you sweating!

Prepping meals ahead is a very handy thing to do. With stews, it’s easy enough to simply make a large batch and freeze a quart container (or three) to pop in the microwave and heat later when there’s a day when cooking just isn’t going to happen. I really like these deli containers for that sort of storage and much more. You’ll want to leave out any noodles, potatoes, or rice, and add those in on reheating. Or just accompany it with a roll or slice of bread if you have that handy.

I cook from scratch as much as possible, because I was raised that way, and the habit of decades means that instead of grabbing the car keys and running out for a meal, I’ll look into what I have stored in the freezer (we have two in addition to the fridge freezer, and it’s well worth the space) or pantry. You could can this gulyas, as well, if you can’t make room for freezers. Simply follow the directions for canning meats under pressure. However you put up your make-ahead meals, it will save you money, time, and stress when you have a day where your plans go awry.