Vegetarian Goulash

Well, that sounds funny, doesn't it? This recipe takes quite a long time, so this time it's not a quick post-work meal.

This was actually Kerstin's idea. My goulash is pretty good, and one day she told me she had quite an appetite for it, but didn't like any meat right now. Since I'm doing the goulash with a lot of different vegetables, we thought we'd try to just leave the meat out and prepare the remaining bits just as usual. The experiment went well and makes a perfect sauce with dumplings or spätzle - sorry, I couldn't find any translation for this.

The difficulty with goulash is IMO that it's really controlled overcooking. Basically, you'll throw ingrediences into the pot, leave them alone for some minutes, add just a tad liquid, stir everything around and let the liquid vanish again. This procedure is repeated again and again, adding the next ingrediences once the previous one become saucy.

The camera batteries got empty during the cooking, so the pictures are incomplete. Sorry for that...

Ingrediences

• Lots of onions - dunno, maybe 1Kg
• 3-4 paprica peppers of different colours
• 1 large or 2 small aubergines
• 1 large zucchini
• 1 carrot
• 1 leek
• 1/4 celery
• 200gr mushrooms
• 2 peppers, red and green
• garlic to your taste
• 1 beef cube
• Salt and black pepper
• 1 pack of dumpling dough or spätzle

Preparations

Actually, there's no big need for preparations, since you have plenty of time chopping the next ingredience while the previous one is cooking.

The Cooking

Start with the onions, peel them and chop them into not too small pieces. Put your largest stew port with a good lace of oil on the stove. Once it's hot, throw the onions in and stir them around, proceed as described above, in the short pauses you have, chop the carrot and the celery into small cubes - smaller than 1cm³. They are the hardest ingrediences and thus require the longest cooking time, so once the onions are soft and brownish.put them into the pot.

Chop and cleanup the paprica peppers into medium size pieces . Cut the hot peppers into little pieces while still stirring the by now brownish onions, the carrots and the celery around. Once the previous stuff gets soft, put the peppers in.

Clean up the leek and slice it along its full length into halfs, then cut the halfes into one finger wide pieces. Put them into the pot when the paprica peppers are done and continue stirring and chopping...

Next come the aubergine and the zucchini. Cut them into cubes and stir them under. Keep adding water and stirring. Due to their volume, you have some more time now. Chop the mushrooms and add them to the sauce when their time has come.

This whole procedure should have taken about ¾ of an hour. Now add some more liquid and the beef cube, then turn the heat down and let everything braise slowly...

If you decided to use the dumplings, a nice touch is to cut some slices of bread into cubelets and fry them with a bit of olive oil . Then put some 2 or three of them into every dumpling. Eat the onces that are left, they're great!

Again, take it slowly. If you're done under 1½hours you're doing too fast.

Once you're nearly starving, taste it to check if you like the seasoning. If it's not hot enough, add a spoonful of Sambal. Black pepper gives a nice touch too.

Too bad the recharging of the camera took so long... :-)