Káposztaleves olasz galuskával

Yesterday, I applied to Yale's Directed Independent Language Study program. Since I'll be learning Hungarian again, I now have an excuse to write titles that nobody can understand.

I had chicken stock and bok choy that I needed to use up. They, along with my pangs of reminiscence for Hungary, led to this soup, which involves weird Hungarian/Italian dumplings that were good but still need some work.

• 6 cups of stock/water
• 1 onion
• 2 carrot
• 5 little bok choy heads (maybe 1/2 pound in all)
• 1/2 cup flour
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup milk
• parsley (not too much)
• Parmesan cheese
• nutmeg
• salt, pepper, olive oil

Chop the onions, carrots, and cabbage. Cook them with the olive oil over medium-low heat in a big pot, and add a little bit of salt and pepper to them. While you're doing this, bring the stock to a boil. When the vegetables are soft (about 20 minutes), pour the stock over them. After this simmers for 5-10 minutes, start making the galuska by mixing 1/4 cup of flour with a lot of Parmesan (details at the end for this), salt, nutmeg, and pepper (lots of pepper). Add the parsley, minced very finely. Add two eggs and beat them a bit. Then add the 1/4 cup milk and about a tablespoon of water, and mix as little as possible while still mixing everything up. Then, add more flour until the dough is quite thick--it should still be liquid, but about as thick as a liquid can be. Before you add this to the soup, turn the heat up so that it stays at a boil when you do. Put the batter into your soup by pressing it through a galuska tray, which all good cooks keep around (well, in Hungary they did--you could push it through the back of a grater, or just spoon it into the soup in chunks). Cook this for about four minutes and then remove the pot from the heat. Add more pepper to the soup, and more salt if it needs it.

This soup was hard to screw up, since my chicken stock was good enough that I could have just heated it up and called it soup. The vegetables were nice, but I couldn't taste the Parmesan in the galuska at all. Part of the problem is that my Parmesan is not from Parma and is not very strong (or very good). I think I used about 1/3 of a cup, and next time I'll double that. I could taste the nutmeg and pepper, though, and they were good (though completely non-Hungarian).