Gomba Leves (Mushroom Soup) with Rustic White Bread

For my birthday I received 2 cookbooks!
One of them is a Hungarian Cookbook, and I tried out the Gomba Leves (Mushroom Soup)!

I think a good cookbook should be used a lot and "loved".. that is to say, it's cool by me to have things written in the margins, highlighted, food splatters here and there.. it's great character!
Needless to say, I took my pen to this recipe, not that it's bad, just when you have a real live Hungarian in the kitchen with you (who is an excellent cook by the way!), I tend to take his many years of advice!


For starters I forgot to pay attention to the recipe and went out and bought 2 pounds of mushrooms when the recipe called for just 1/2 a pound!  For some reason I had trouble adapting the rest of the recipe to my mushroom indulgences and probably added too much onion... too much oil to start, not enough roux, maybe too much sour cream.. but the end result was marvelous!! 

 The recipe called for beef stock or canned beef broth and water, but instead I just used water!  Perhaps the broth would give it a nice flavor but I didn't miss anything myself, by using just water.

I also had to make a roux (in Hungarian it's a rántás) - my first one ever!  Luckily Gabor was there to guide me and I did it a bit differently than the recipe said.  It turned out well, but I was a bit frantic about it, having seen enough roux's go so wrong in the past.....

While cooking the soup, I made a loaf of Rustic White Bread.
 I find it strange that I'm not a very big fan of eating bread, but I have a certain affection for baking it, I always have.  Every time I bake bread it feels like I'm doing a really special thing, and I try to pour my heart into it.

In our household, when we buy bread, we get "the good stuff".. you know, loaves that are from 2, 3, 4 bucks a loaf...  it gets pricey but it's better for you and better tasting..

In a perfect world, I can envision myself baking some bread every Sunday to eat for the week ahead.. that is, after I get lots better at baking it!  I suppose I could just start now, however, baking some bread each week.. I'm sure to get better soon enough!  And the bread that doesn't turn out well, we'll eat anyways!

I got some good kneading tips from this movie "How to Cook Your Life" (I'll write something about it today!)

I don't think I'll make this specific recipe again, it's different from the way I've done it before and turned out too sweet for our taste... I will continue my search for the best bread recipe though!  I have a few more in my pocket, but I gained some great tips as always, from baking it!


Ingredients for the soup:  mushrooms, onions, lard or cooking oil, beef stock or canned beef broth and water, salt, pepper, flour, parsley, sour cream
Ingredients for the bread: bread flour, all-purpose flour, instant or rapid-rise yeast, salt, warm water, honey or sugar