Always Hungry in Hungary: Cooking Class

We drove out today to a small Hungarian town called Szentendre (St Andrew) where we planned to take a cooking class with the chef and owner of Aranysarkany Restaurant.  All we knew going in was that we would be eating what we prepared and we would be cooking native Hungarian dishes.

 We met the chef, washed our hands, donned plastic aprons and got ready to work for our meal!  Here we are with Chef Attila.  

 We all got a caffeine boost before the real work began.

We prepared three courses beginning with goulash soup followed by the main event, paprika chicken and cheese dumplings with strawberries.

Everyone had a job to do.

The tables were already set but I enjoyed looking around the restaurant kitchen at all the cooking accoutrements!

We were given tastes as each dish neared completion and then we had to wait for everything to cook.  While we waited, our guide took us around the old little city.

An orthodox church with its fancy "hair-do" top.  The churches are easy to recognize in this town because we were told the orthodox has this kind of top, the Catholic churches have a flat tower with a clock, and the protestant churches have only a flat tower with no ornamentation.

The entrance to a little Catholic church courtyard

Hungary has a very sad Jewish WWII story, as have all the countries we visited.  This is a little Jewish synagogue that was rebuilt in memory of all those lost in the war.  Especially sad is the date on the memorial, July 9, 1944, when many of the town's Jews (women, children, and the elderly...the men were in labor camps) were deported to death camps.  On July 12th the Hungarian dictator regained power from the Nazis and stopped the deportation of the country's Jews.  Small stones are left as a memorial; we saw this in the Jewish cemetery in Prague also.

 A Serb population lived here in this town and this old house is one of theirs from the 1200s.  The man in the mural is St Nicholas (aka Santa Claus).  Notice the house has no windows or doors on the outside as a protective measure; they are found only on the front side.

And then it was time to eat!  No chance anyone will quit his/her day job but it was dang good if I say so myself!