Meal: pork goulash and dumplings
Cost: about $3.25 each
Time: 30 minutes prep, 1.5 hours simmering, 15 minutes for the dumplings
Leftovers: a small lunch portion
Local ingredients: pork, butter, milk
Organic ingredients: tomato puree, spices, sugar, onion

I’ve found myself lately, as we faced a 90-degree-plus heat wave (it has since cooled off a bit, thank goodness), craving a hearty, rich stew. There is no accounting for taste buds. Thus, last Thursday we did another new recipe, and another recipe from Simply Recipes: Goulash. We used pork instead of beef and tomato puree instead of paste. Also, I didn’t use quite the quantity of onions specified; Jeff loves the taste of onions but not the texture, so I grated an onion on a box grater and then chopped it up more finely from there. The result was tiny bits of onion that disintegrated into the sauce and tasted delicious. I made a half a batch, which was enough for 2 generous dinner portions and 1 small lunch portion the next day.

Jeff’s only quibble with the recipe is that the dumplings soaked up a lot of the sauce; he loves sauce. However, he’s not normally big on dumplings, but loved these - they were light and fluffy, not heavy as dumplings often are. If you like sauce, you may want to make more to account for the dumplings soaking it up. Otherwise, this was something new and very tasty, and the recipe was every bit as good as it looked. We’ll be doing this again.