Hungarian Goulash and #localmeat
Okay, there’s a lot going on here.
Let me start with a quick recap. In bulleted form because, trust me, you do not have time for my Fall.
- ✌🏼 I spent a chaotically incredible summer country hopping in the Balkans ending my solo sojourn in Budapest with strong ambitions to learn how to make authentic Hungarian goulash. The trip itself was transformative and catalyzed the #measurelesslivemore mentality, launching Merigold Analytics in earnest, and what is already an equally epic Winter season.
- 👻 In early October, a super tragic Old Fashioned-related accident put me in the ER for some variation on the theme of hand reconstruction and I have been one handed ever since. Cooking has been limited, writing has been impossible, and I credit every post developed this fall to really good friends who came over and did most of the chopping.
- 🥩 What better place to source beautiful, local meat for goulash experimentation than Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, VA? Let me tell you about them.
As it turns out, Whiffletree Farm and OneandahalfSlices have a lot of shared food philosophy. That philosophy is rooted in local and sustainable agricultural and farming practice, home cooking (meatballs!), and a preference to stay out of grocery stores and away from processed foods. There are several fad diets floating around (think Whole 30 and Paleo) and when I hear them described, I always think: Isn’t that just eating real food?
Michael Pollan kept it simple.
“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Dan Barber took us a step further and connected food, nutrition, health, and the world of the chef back to the soil.
“When you are chasing after the best flavor, you are chasing after the best ingredients and when you are chasing after the best ingredients, you are in search of great farming.”
Both quotes appear on the OneandahalfSlices homepage and both are also resonant with Whiffletree Farm’s philosophy for raising local, grass fed beef, pork, and poultry.
When Jesse Straight, owner and lead farmer at Whiffletree, first introduced me to The Weston Foundation, the name was new to me but the practices and principles were not. Eat whole grains. Eat fresh produce. Eat locally sourced, pasture raised meat. Natural fat and fermentation are good for you. Make things like salad dressing, sauces, and stock instead of buying them (they aren’t difficult).
But I don’t get it. Why are processed foods so bad for you? Why shouldn’t we eat refined food items?
Let me tell you a short story. It’s about flour.
what you need
1 2-3 pound Whiffletree Farm chuck roast, cubed, salted, and browned
1 yellow onion, sliced and lightly caramelized
2 bell peppers, finely diced
3 cloves fresh garlic, finely minced
3 oz tomato paste
2-3 small potatoes and/or carrots, cut into hefty chunks
1 tablespoon cumin
2 tablespoons authentic Hungarian paprika
1 cup red wine
2 cups beef stock
2 cups water
2 bay leaves
Greek yogurt and fresh parsley for garnish
how to make it
In a Dutch oven over medium heat stovetop, brown the cubed chuck roast for approximately 6-8 minutes. Remove the meat from the pot and set aside. Now add the sliced onion and caramelize, which takes approximately 20 minutes.
Once the onion is caramelized, add the diced bell peppers and minced garlic, tomato paste, cumin, and paprika, and stir until combined and fragrant. Deglaze the bottom of the pot with one cup of red wine scraping any burnt bits up off the bottom.
Add the meat back in along with the bay leaves, the beef stock, the water, and an optional dash of Worcestershire sauce if you feel so inclined. Cover and simmer for 60 minutes.
Add the potatoes and carrots, and simmer and additional 45 minutes. Serve hot with a dollop of Greek yogurt and a few sprigs of parsley.
I will not attempt to nail the dates or the history because the details escape me, but the gist of flour goes something like this. We take a whole grain harvested from a field and we mill it into flour. We put that flour in bags and within weeks or sometimes months it is crawling with bugs (think 1920s). So the ingenious world of American food capitalism comes up with a way to make the flour last longer and keep the bugs out. (World War II had a lot to do with this). We decide to mill the grain finer and eliminate the hull, the bran, and the germ, leaving only the starchy endosperm, which we then bleach. This is what makes flour white.
See, the thing is, the reason bugs got into the flour in the first place is because the whole grain wheat was alive. This is what makes it healthy for us to consume. We are living organisms that are meant to consume other living organisms — plants and, yes, sometimes animals. Think back to second grade biology class and the lesson on the food chain.
We, as organisms in an ecosystem, are meant to eat living things, not dead things. We are not mushrooms. Does this clarify the difference between a Dorito and a blueberry? I think it does.
🍄
The fact that we would bleach our flour or introduce pesticides into our soil to kill everything living within it is the most counterintuitive process I can think of when it comes to nutrition. But you see how we got here… Wanting, and to some degree needing, to make food last longer so it can be shipped worldwide and sit on shelves for longer periods of time. This facilitates one-stop-shop grocery stores where people can do all of their shopping at once, especially in rural areas (and, artificially sustaining and promoting overpopulation – but that’s a separate topic). (By the way, I’m not making this up — read Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat if you want a more eloquent and comprehensive explanation).
Now here’s the kicker. What are we going to do with bleached flour and pesticide-ridden (dead) soil? Well, there are no nutrients left in the flour and nothing will grow in the soil, so, naturally, we are going to enrich or fortify them. We are going to enrich soil with fertilizer (Michael Pollan covers this in Chapter 4 about the potato in The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World). And we are going to enrich the flour with synthetic vitamins and minerals that are introduced to replicate the natural vitamins and minerals we eliminated in the first place when we removed the hull, the bran, and the germ.
This is why doctors and dieticians advocate eating whole grains like barley, steel-cut oats, bulgur wheat, and rye. What is meant by whole grains is consuming the actual whole grain — all the parts. It is healthy because those other parts contain more than just empty starch — they contain protein, vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber. This is also why the sprouted-grain-and-legume movement is a thing.
Now, what does this have to do with goulash meat and Whiffletree Farm? This is the food philosophy to which local farmers like Jesse Straight subscribe and why I elect to support these local farms in the recipes presented here on OneandahalfSlices. In many ways, their efforts are better for our bodies, better for our communities, and better for our world. Eating healthily is not a challenge and it is not an exercise in restriction and self control. It is, however, a conscious choice to go against what the majority of other people are doing — and in this case, what the majority of other people are eating. Drive the extra mile to Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton. They have a farm store, local neighborhood delivery, and they sell Thanksgiving turkeys every year.
But most importantly, they understand the implications of the story I just told you and the fundamental principles outlined in the Weston Foundation and among other chefs, authors, agriculturalists, and conservationists that understand the magnitude of the mistakes we have collectively made regarding the global food system and our general population. (If you are looking for a more esoteric and philosophical interpretation of this topic, invest the 300 pages in Ishmael).
#sorrynotsorry for the unrequited philosophy
Happy Cooking!
Mushroom Lentil Stew
This stew has all the body and personality of a meat-based stew conceived of French lentils, soy sauce, white wine, hearty greens, and an unabashed serving of mixed mushrooms. (and yes, I sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on top for good measure) It is beautiful, hefty, hearty, vegan, locally-sourced, healthy, easy, and autumnal! WELCOME TO FALL! 🍂🍁🍄
Tomato Soup
Everyone needs a good, solid, simple tomato soup recipe because, let’s face it, if you’re past the age of 5, Campbell’s just doesn’t cut it. I don’t claim that this will be the best tomato soup you’ve ever tasted, but it is very straightforward and easy to whip up during the summer months when there is an excess of tomats. So get your grilled cheese ready (recipe to follow), turn on the oven, and slice up your beautiful reds. 🍅
Creamy Sweet Potato Stew
Coming out of Vegan October, we were a little tired of lentils and were looking for something to do with copious amounts of sweet potatoes. Hence this little gem was discovered. Creamy with coconut milk, almost like curry. Spiced with flavors of the same. Hearty with sweet potato and flourished with kale. Yes, there are still a few lentils, but they are hardly the stars of the show. This soup is light enough for any season and feels perfectly at home here at the end of October. 🧡
Rabbit Cassoulet
Here we are with Protein #2 in our Protein Trio and it’s a bit of a non-standard one. We don’t often cook rabbit but… we totally should! It is more delicate than chicken with more flavor, but still not too gamey. Cassoulets are bean-based stews with a protein that can stew all day or come together quite quickly. They are hearty and Fall-ish, and I am thrilled to have this one on my table. You can make this with roasted chicken or a sausage if the rabbit is a stretch for you.
Pot Roast
This is the main course for the Whiskey Pairing Dinner and, my, what a deep, flavorful pot roast this is! Let me start by saying that I sourced a 4.6 pound chuck roast from the Spring House Farm Store to feed the four of us and had no regrets. A simple pot roast is easy enough to pull off especially if you have a slow cooker, but this really takes the flavor profile up a notch to make this velvety, sinful, fall-off-your-fork roast with plenty of fall veggies.
White Bean Chorizo Soup
As we enter into the longest winter months with January barely having come to a close, it seems like it will never be warm again. These are the months for soups, stews, and roasts; hearty and cozy. This is one such soup. It is creamy (without any cream) and I hereby dub it my Winter Soup, topped with spicy chorizo, salty pepitas, and a dash of oregano.
