The City's Coast

We've arrived in Croatia, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the city of Zadar. It has a history-rich Old Town set on a promontory, jutting out right into the crystal clear Adriatic. Crowds of tourists enjoyed the Roman and Medieval architecture inset while we took a stroll around the perimeter. It's taken us this long to reach the sea, after holding fast to rivers and lakes and whatever bodies of water we could find. So, upon arrival, we were a little clingy.
It's about an hour walk from our rental to the city center and, aside from the first 15minutes or so, we can hug the coast the entire way. There's the marina and the sailing club, which is in full prep-mode for this year's Youth Sailing World Championship, the fishermen and the friends and family that keep them company. A cluster of yachts floated on the only bit of murky water we've spotted so far and then a turn around a cove brought larger yachts and internationally license-plated cars parked in a row.
I guess because of my beach experience being mostly Jersey/Miami-based, my visions of the Dalmation coast naively included lots of sand. So, I found the stone boardwalk, its steps that descend right into the water, the pebbled beaches and this concrete island stunning. This coastline is all rock and people are more than happy to make do with what they have. Yoga mats and water shoes are carried around to aid in comfort. There's something really bizarre about bright beach bags and towels against the gritty gray backdrop of concrete.
Down in the center, children were splayed across the boardwalk, laying in foot traffic with their ears to holes in the ground. A 'sea organ' built beneath the platform whistles and hums with the breath of the waves. Ambient music at its best, it's mesmerizing. Crescendos are hit when a boat or jet ski goes by. A little further along was the Sun Salutation, above. It's an enormous solar panel, basically, which collects rays of sunlight all day and then uses the energy (and the tide below) to create a neon light show from sunset to sunrise. It also powers all of the boardwalk's lighting. Added bonus.
Raised high up above the water, the walkway has sporadically placed ladders. It seemed a little dangerous to me, to be honest, when I first looked down at a lone swimmer so far below dry land. I hadn't yet seen the next ladder, which would offer him a way out if needed. Once my American safety-first instincts subsided, I got to enjoy it for what it is. How many times have you been able to walk around a city, think 'boy, it's hot, i could go for a swim right now,' and were able to jump right in from the sidewalk? No hot-potato barefoot walk across sand necessary. For this man, no change into a bathing suit.
At the base of this promenade, stands offered information (and, of course, tickets) for excursions out to islands. Grilled corn stands and ice cream carts were far more popular with the tourists and locals, alike. There was something about the bathers on this flat, hard surface that was so romantic to me. I think after the commercial baths and thermal springs of Hungary with their lockers and keycards and turnstyles and menu of water options, this just seemed so wonderfully simple. Just put down your purse, lay on down and take in the seaside.
Shady lawns give some respite from the sun and softer surfaces to lay on. No one seems to, though, preferring the firm hotplates. I'd imagine more people shift in the heat of August. For now, the grass appeared to be used mostly for soccer and cartwheels.
As we walked home later that evening, we were overwhelmed with just how beautiful it all was. The places we find ourselves. Zadar has over 75,000 people. It is the fifth largest city in Croatia and, yet, it feels like there's enough coast for everyone. There's some pile of pebbles or rock or cafe table suspended over the edge of a stone wall especially for you. At least that's how it felt that night, even though we've only yet seen a small, popular chunk of Zadar's coastline.
Croatia has sort of been this beacon in our itinerary, calling out to us in celebration and warning. Summertime! Tourist High Season! We've been referring to it as our "European Vacation," mostly because it's every European's vacation, but also because sunning and swimming immediately infuse your life with a sense of aaaaahhhhhh. Before turning right, away from the water toward our street, we skipped some stones.

Thermal Nation

Hungary is famous for its thermal activity - over 1,300 thermal springs feed some one hundred and twenty baths and hot pools around the country. Budapest alone has 118 springs and 40 spas and baths. "Taking the waters" is popular with tourists, but is also a normal part of many Hungarian's week. The first bath we visited, in Eger, was almost entirely local, and was mobbed with an after work crowd from five until closing, at eight.
As with most bathing complexes in Hungary, there were a variety of pools and temperatures to chose from. The baths ranged from very hot to cool, with the warm pools probably the most popular. Older men and women in particular liked soaking in the 85° to 100° water, sitting together in little bobbing huddles to talk and relax.
The cooler pools were generally less crowded, and were more popular with young children. We noticed a definite correlation between the temperature of the water and the girth of the bathers bellies, with cooler water swimmers being much thinner than warm water floaters.
Around the eight or so pools at Eger, a meadow for sunbathing and picnicking was dotted with blankets. Families packed food to eat, younger and older people filled the bars and food stands that lined one edge. If soaking in thermal baths is supposed to be good for you, eating at them certainly is not. Fried foods and sweets predominate; mugs of beer and soda slosh plentifully.
Lake Hévíz was an entirely different experience. Just off the south-western tip of Lake Balaton, a separate, much smaller body of water sits. Though it's undeniably diminutive (perhaps it would be better described as a pond), it's actually very big for what it is: Hévíz is the largest thermal lake in Europe by surface area (about eleven acres) and by volume (it is one hundred twenty five feet deep at it's deepest point). Radon and sulphur rich waters filter up from the rock beneath in astonishing volumes - the water in Hévíz is replenished approximately every 24 hours.
Platforms and bathing stations fan out over the surface, and people sunbathe or float amongst the waterlillies. The temperature of the water is generally only about 85°, which doesn't feel all that warm - more tepid than hot. Rebecca described our swim as being like "a dip in old person soup," which was astute. It's really quite peaceful, with far fewer screaming children and no loud music. In winter, the water never gets below sixty five degrees, so it's possible to swim here surrounded by icy trees and snowbanks.
Two enclosed areas are built over the deepest point of Hévíz, so that people can swim indoors. I think the purpose of these enclosures has more to do with the juice and beer bars than anything, but the water is slightly warmer there, where the surface is covered. It's possible to swim right under the containing walls, but putting my head under this warm, sulphuric water didn't seem appealing.

Gypsy Kitchens: Meggyleves, Hungarian Cherry Soup

Hungarians eat a lot of sweet things at dinnertime. Not just desserts, but sweet appetizers and pastas too - we have actually seen noodles served with a sugar dispenser. A favorite of Magyars, and something we've come to really like, is "meggyleves," or cold cherry soup. It's generally treated as a pre-dinner course, but would be just as good as a post meal treat. It's also good at breakfast time, and would be delicious on a hot afternoon, served alone.

Our version was created from the two most popular Hungarian fruits of the season: in addition to the cherries, a quarter of a watermelon provided a different layer of flavor.

The preparation is either incredibly simple or a little less simple - you have to decide if you want to pit your cherries. If you do, more of the juice will escape into the broth, the soup will be free from cherry stones and your fingers will end up stained red. Deciding not to pit them is fine - we didn't, because it's common here to leave the fruit whole and because it seemed like a lot of work. Stemming them is mandatory, however.

For the broth, use about a pound of nicely ripe sour cherries, boiled for twenty-five minutes in a quart of water. Before cooking, add sugar and a cinnamon stick to the water; if your tastes run in the direction of sweetness, add about 1/2 cup or more of sugar or honey. Many other cooks use 3/4 cup of powdered sugar, but our soup had only 1/3 cup of honey. It's not really important, as long as you're comfortable with what you're eating.

Let the broth cool to room temperature, then put in the refrigerator for a few hours.

Meggyleves is most often made simply with cherries, but we've had it with a whole host of other ingredients throw in - blackberries, raspberries, red currants, even plums. In effect, there isn't much that can't be added. The crucial thing is to recognize which ingredients should be cooked with the cherries, and which should be added once the meggyleves has cooled. Blackberries or watermelon, for example, are probably better as they are, uncooked, whereas red currants can stand up to the process and will impart more flavor if they're boiled.

Watermelon is very easy - just cube the flesh in a way that avoids as many seeds as possible. The final ingredient is sour cream - about a cup. Creamier soups call for more, of course, and are just as good.

Blending the sour cream into the broth can be a little difficult - one might try combining it in a bowl with a little bit of the soup's liquid before adding it to the body of the broth. Persistence is key, though a few floating bits of cream are really more displeasing to the eye than to the tongue.

Avoid the temptation to substitute yogurt for sour cream. Meggyleves is sweet enough as it is; yogurt would only make it syrupy. Some restaurants and cooks serve their soup spiked with red wine, added just before serving. It's probably very tasty, but that's only speculation.

It's a refreshing bowlful of fruit, with soft cherries and crisp melon and a nice undertone of honey. As the weather heats up and summer intensifies, it's easy to imagine craving this for an appetizer, just to cool down before eating!

Here's the recipe:

Meggyleves

Ingredients:

1 lb. sour cherries, de-stemmed

1 lb. watermelon, cubed with seed avoidance in mind

1/3 - 3/4 cup honey or sugar, depending on the chef's taste

1 cup sour cream

1 cinnamon stick

A pinch of cloves

-Bring the cherries, sugar, cloves and cinnamon to a boil in 1 qt. water. Boil gently for 20 - 30 minutes.

-Remove from heat and let cool until room temperature, then refrigerate for 1 - 24 hours.

-Add watermelon and sour cream, stir or whisk until smooth.

-Decide if you'd like to part with a cup or so of red wine, which can be added too.

-Serve cold, with a warning about the cherry pits and the possibility of watermelon seeds.

Things Hungarian People Like

Poppy Seeds and Paprika. Remember these two, they will be a trend. In Hungary, my favorite bagel topping found its way into most desserts and a few savory dishes. You could buy 'mákos' loose or as a paste. Hungarians' affinity for paprika was more expected, but was still surprising. I mean, two paprika museums in one small town is pretty impressive - being as there's only so much one can say about these two seasonings, let's move on.
Setting Up Shop in Unlikely Places. There was a go kart raceway set up in a supermarket parking lot, more melon and fruit stands than you can count on the roadsides and this pop-up bakery on a corner in Baja. She sold strudel, savory scones, small pizzas and tarts. The fold up table out front gave customers a place to enjoy their purchase and a very official receipt of purchase dispelled any question that she wasn't fully licensed.
Of course, our rétes was filled with poppy seed. A few black cherries were added in for variation, but mostly it was just a billion mákos stuck together with honey. Neither one of us would have passed a drug test after sharing just one.
Bogrács, Traditional Goulash Cauldrons. We saw these first in Slovakia, nearing the Hungarian border. Once over, into Magyarország, lawns were filled with shiny, new ones for sale. Silver and black, they stood next to garden gnomes and other figurines. In Eger, the public parks had fire pits with cauldrons hanging above them. Benches were pulled into a semi-circle around them. At a campsite in Csongrád, we were awoken by the smell of a morning goulash stirring. This picture was taken in Baja. We camped next to a large group of kids on a kayak trip. They were all lined up with bowls and pots in hand, clanging their spoons against the bottoms in excitement like a scene out of a revisionist Oliver Twist. The ladling chaperone seemed nervous that he may run out and was horrified that we may want a taste. "No, no, just a picture," we assured. We wondered if the bogrács were available for rent from reception. What makes the gulyás so red? Paprika.
Bibs. Poppy seeds may get stuck in your teeth, but paprika stains. There's really no getting around baby-ate-spaghettios mouth when slurping bright red halászlé and gulyás, however it's pretty easy not spill spoonfuls on yourself. This was not the opinion of at least two restaurants, where Merlin and I were handed bibs. It made me crave lobster. I guess a slightly embarrassed diner is better than an angry, stained one.
Hamburgers. Just one week before Hungary, in Slovakia, Merlin couldn't find ground beef to barbecue hamburgers. Ground pork, yes, but cow, no. Then, we entered a country that loved beef patties. That's not to say that it wasn't still behind goose, duck, chicken and pork in abundance on menus, but beef in hamburger form was incredibly popular. In fact, we saw the word 'hamburger' in every town and city, at every snack stand or roadstop. They were always microwaved, thin patties with varying multitudes of condiments, but hamburgers all the same. We've seen a lot of hot dogs in Europe, but this was our first hamburger-crazy country and we were happy to be here for the fourth of July.
'Live Gypsy Music.' These three words were scrawled on chalkboards and printed on posters just about everywhere we went. If a restaurant declared anything in English, it would be this and you could hear some four or fivesome's tunes travel through the air from somewhere on a still weekend evening. The use of the word 'gypsy ' was off-putting to us, so we never actively sought the entertainment out. However, we found ourselves serenaded over dinner more than once by a string instrumented band playing lively folk music. This young band had a particular pep and drew an adoring, mostly female, crowd of listeners on a street in Eger.
Wearing Overalls. This was a strictly male thing and extended beyond the neon variety worn by construction, maintenance and sanitation workers. Denim and khaki sets were popular all around the country. Shirt underneath, optional.
Seltzer Bottles. Between the fiddles, overalls and seltzer bottles, sometimes scenes felt downright vaudevillian. Seriously, though, seltzer bottles caught my attention early on. They were in every refrigerator and on ever bar or cafe counter. Okay, I thought, people like to make their own seltzer here. Then, I began to notice them outside antique shops and in pieces of art. It turns out, consumable soda water was actually invented by a Hungarian scientist named Ányos Jedlik and the Hungarian invention of wine spritzers quickly followed. So, you can say that seltzer bottles have a good deal of cultural iconography.

Honorable Mentions

Saying "Hello" as Goodbye. This is popular slang and was confusing at first, but we got used to waving farewell while smiling and saying 'hello!'

Lemonade. At first, I thought they must be spiked. Bars and restaurants had entire menus made up of lemonade. We were often surrounded by people sipping pale, yellow liquid through colorful straws. Most people seemed to opt for traditional lemonade, as opposed to the kiwi, mint, cherry or other variations.

Fallen Idols

On our way out of Budapest we stopped at a curious place. Szobor park, or "memento park," is a wasteland of rescued statues off a desolate road in the borderland between urban outskirts and fields. Collected here are some forty-five relics from communist-era Hungary, monuments to a time that has largely been swept aside and left behind.
The statues of Stalin and Lenin that once stood over countless squares and boulevards have been cleared away from most of eastern Europe, replaced with new figures or with advertising billboards. They were generally melted down or just discarded, but some of them were saved and relocated. It's difficult to tell, at Szobor park, if the statues have been saved as curiosities or because the owners really cared about them.

The monuments are larger than they seem, using visual tricks to play with perspective. This running man, titled "Republic of Councils," is one of the larger pieces - the back of the brick stand is about five feet tall, to give you some idea of the size of him.

The replica of Stalin's grandstand, once located in central Budapest, is interesting because of its lack of a figure - only the statue's boots were left in place when the original monument was torn down in 1956. The enormity of the thing is actually clearer, I think, without the rest of Stalin attached.
In a small exhibition hall, a life size reproduction of the boots stand almost humorously in a corner. The original statue was twenty-six feet tall, and its toppling was one of the most remembered moments of that early revolution.

It's possible, at the park's store, to buy t-shirts and knick-knacks that are (half-jokingly) emblazoned with communist images and slogans. Entrance to the park costs 1,500 huf per adult, which is maybe a little expensive for a place like this - very capitalist.

Garden Parties

In Hungarian, the word 'kert' means 'garden.' In Budapest, kerts (or 'kertok,' when pluralized correctly) are outdoor bars, which usually also stretch indoors through an abandoned building and almost always include some sort of performance space. These are not the beer gardens of Austria, with planted rows of picnic table and constant, uniform watering. These are overgrown and wild, like ivy that's overtaken a fence rusted closed a long time ago. It's that bed of wildflowers in someone's backyard, high purples and yellows, that you wish your mother had planted. When you discover that it's more a case of the owner not tending to their land than tending to it, you skip around just the same wearing a crown of dandelions.

Szimpla Kert ('Simple Garden') began the garden/ruin bar trend almost a decade ago and is one of the only spaces open all year and filled with perennials. Counteracting a movement to fill Budapest with sleek, trendy nightlife spots, they went organic. The city is loaded with old buildings, a lot of which are abandoned or not livable. Szimpla moved on into one and filled its multiple floors like squatters with a keen curatorial eye. A compost of odds and ends was laid down in the courtyard, an old pommel horse and gutted jeep amongst other things, and a garden quickly grew. More people began to do the same.
Now, each year, kerts pop up in new places. Most do not stay in one place for more than a season - which may or may not have more to do with licensing than with the hide-and-seek aspect. Some people wait to see a posted list of kert locations at the beginning of the season and others stay loyal to owners, following them wherever they move whether publicized or not. There's a large emphasis placed on art and music and many locations host concerts, film festivals and parties that run well into the night. They're just as much performance venues as they are bars or cafes and some cross the line into nightclub. This is Europe, after all.
We thought we may be a little too uncool for a kert, too young or too old or too foreign. However, the 'come as you are' attitude that we encountered all around this fantastic city extended to the gardens. There was no prescribed fashion, lifestyle or drink choice. People sat alone with a book, in couples with wine and beer, tea, coffee or nothing at all. When we visited Szimpla before dinner one night, it was fairly easy to find a spot in a corner to Skype my father for his birthday. Three men in suits stood at the bar and a group of teenagers huddled around a hookah on a busted spring of a couch. It's the only place I've ever been where the smell of cherry tobacco and hamburgers mixed in the air.

At night, Szimpla is pretty crowded - and we fell in love with this smaller kert close to home, in the VIII district, called Gondozó. We never went inside, where there is a larger bar and a stage, content to sit on the small courtyard under a single strand of Christmas lights. There was a scrap of a sign outside the unused house its located in. It's Gondozo's first year and, quite possibly, the only summer it will be here.

We wondered if the mural will be painted over by the next inhabitants or if it will chip away for years, the courtyard remaining empty. Vibrancy and decay seem to mix so well in Budapest that the idea that a space could transition seamlessly from abandoned to popularized and back again in the course of year is unsurprising - and charming.
This kert, the first we visited, felt more familiar. A lot like Brooklyn. A curt (ha!) woman served us our drinks and then went back to sit with her friends. One of the many rainstorms during our time in Budapest had just stopped as quickly as it had started. We sat on our raincoats under a beer branded umbrella and sniffed the greasy air wafting from a grill in the corner. It's called Mixart and, apparently, hosts some of the longest garden parties- though, they are said to be less-than-raucous affairs.
Its bar had prayer flags hung across the top and a chalkboard spelled out the daily specials, which included hot dogs and tofu curry. An English child ran around while three dreadlocked 20somethings drank coffee and a pair of women in twin sets sipped beers. Then, there was us - happy to be outside in this moment of dry weather. Happy that we were in a city that let you feel like you had a backyard to lounge around in. Each kert felt like it belonged to nobody and everybody at the same, which made us feel - for that moment - that it also belonged to us.

The Duna, an Old Friend

Geography is a strange thing. It reveals itself in layers, never all at once. National and political borders can be completely different from population boundaries or religious areas. Some regions are fluidly peopled but rigidly contained. Driving from place to place, topography becomes more interesting than it might be when looking at a map. Forested land, open expanses, the edge of a sea, the point where snow falls, the altitude where houses change from stone to wood, the dryer parts, the rainy seasons, the light and dark of latitudes - it's never a simple chart on a piece of paper. That's why some landmarks stick out and come to feel like constants. The Danube river - called the Duna, here in Hungary - is a long, solid, comforting stretch of water that is both physically geographic and part of the space of our memory.
We met up with the Danube again in Baja, after wandering away from its waters to the north and east. The river originates from two smaller tributaries in the German highland, and marches eastward through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine and Romania before emptying into the black sea, some 1,800 miles later. In Hungary, not so far along this journey, it is making a quick southern jag, heading down from the Tatra borders to the north, and is already impressively broad. We swam in this side eddy between Petőfi island and the mainland, where the water is shallow and slow. On that stretch, kayakers and sunbathers cluster in the lee of the swift, plains wind.
There are four capital cities along the river's banks - Vienna, Belgrade, Bratislava and Budapest - which is more than any other river can boast. In Vienna and the Wachau, we had heat and blue skies along the river banks. In Budapest, our experience was of wind and rain. The river flowed through the heart of the city in a businesslike way, without swimmers and grayer than we remembered. The embankments along the edges were high and protective, the bridges grand, the water swifter than downstream in the flatland.
The Duna reminds us of other places, of course, but it's also its own entity - an international waterway, but also a ribbon of seafaring culture in landlocked parts of the continent where ships are as incongruous with the land as horsemen are with the sea. There are sailors who spend their whole life on the water, but make their way only through the heart of a huge landmass. The waves are small and their territory confined to a wandering line, but there is a separate rhythm to their movement: against or with the current, swift water because of rain, lower shallows because of drought. Cruise ships are ever present - long, squat and narrow, they are able to fit under bridges and maneuver through shallows and curves. They dock in droves on Budapest's piers, and let out hordes of sightseers into the city streets.A monument to the jews who were shot along the riverbank during the Nazi occupation, these iron shoes line one stretch near the cathedral in Budapest. This length of pier remains emptier than others, perhaps because there are no docking spaces, perhaps because it is difficult to reach by land.
It is interesting to come across the river again and again, and to know that it will snake its way into our life in other places. It carries along something of our old experiences as it flows, reminding us of Germany and Austria and of Slovakia, though we didn't see it there, and of Moldova and Ukraine, though those are both downstream and in our past. In Budapest, it has made itself into a solid and borderless thing, belonging to nobody, setting off from the mountains into the heart of the plains, crossing from "western" to "eastern" Europe.

Gypsy Kitchens: Hungarian Fish Paprikas with Mákos Metélt

Two Hungarian dishes that have excited and pleased us are paprikas (which is not plural and is pronounced "papri-kash") and mákos metélt ("mak-osh met-ult"). Paprikas is, not surprisingly, an earthy preparation of meat or fish with copious paprika and sour cream. It's a popular lunchtime special at low-key "etterems" - maybe even more common than goulash.

Mákos metélt is an interesting lemon and poppyseed pasta that typically is sweet enough for dessert, but can be toned down to main-plate levels very easily. It has a great textural quality, a crunch of seeds against the stretchy softness of egg noodles.

Usually not served together, they are perfectly good on the same plate.
As with many Magyar dishes, mákos metélt is usually a lot sweeter than it needs to be. Most recipes call for about half a cup of powdered sugar, which is excessive. One dripping tablespoon of honey was plenty, and gave the dish more depth than sugar would have. The highlights of the dish are really the lemon and the poppyseeds, not the sweetness. To accentuate the lemon flavor, add some zest or a few slices of lemon peel. We used the traditional flat egg noodles, called “szélesmetélt,” but any kind of long pasta could work – vermicelli, spaghetti, linguine.
It’s a very simple preparation, with almost nothing to do beyond the initial boiling. After melting a pat of butter in a pan, add the juice from two lemons, some lemon zest, honey (say, one to two tablespoons) and a pinch of salt. Bring the liquid to a light simmer, stir in the pasta and distribute the poppy seeds through the dish – which is best done gradually, because they do tend to clump together. Pour in about a third of a cup of white wine, cover and let cook until done. It shouldn’t take more than two or three minutes, but cooking pasta is never as exact as it should be.
A note – undercook the pasta initially, boiling only until limp, not until done. The real cooking process happens in the pan. Don’t be afraid of taking it out too soon, you can always add more wine and steam longer if it’s not ready yet.
Paprikas is almost always made with chicken, but we decided to cook it with fish. Shrimp – the most prominent fish in our dish – don’t lend themselves well to heavy cooking and saucemaking. To give a more flavorful fishiness to the paprika roux we started with carp, which has a lot of fat and can be abused in a pan better than other seafood. If they’re available, the often discarded carp “tips” are cheap and fatty and break apart into the sauce. Think of this process as being similar to starting a dish with pork fat or bacon, where the meat adds a complimentary background more than it does a focal point.
Cook the onions in oil until just beginning to brown, then add the carp (but not the shrimp!). Throw in the paprika at this point, and mix everything well. Continue cooking over medium heat – not letting it burn – until the fish has begun to disintegrate and the paprika has darkened and become fragrant. Make sure to add more oil if the pan gets dry or if anything begins to stick. Add the shrimp and garlic. Cook until the shrimp are barely done, then remove from the heat and stir in the dill and about a cup of sour cream. Make sure to mix it up vigorously so that the carp is as mashed and smooth as possible. Serve immediately.
One thing to note about this recipe: not all paprika is the same. If it’s available, try getting two types – hot and sweet – so that one can temper the other. If all you have is the mild kind, use a full four or five tablespoons. With spicy varieties, it might be better to scale down to two or three tablespoons, unless you’re really craving heat. After tasting them, we decided to use two tablespoons of hot paprika and three tablespoons of sweet. The advantage of a mixture is that you can tailor the spice to taste and still add more flavor using the sweet type.

Here are the recipes:

Mákos Metélt

Ingredients:

1 pound pasta

1/3 cup poppy seeds

Juice from 2 lemons

Lemon zest (however much you want)

1/2 cup white wine (or however much you need)

1-2 tablespoons honey

Butter

-Undercook the pasta in salted, oiled water, then drain. Make sure it is at least two or three minutes away from being done.

-Melt as much butter as you are comfortable with (within reason) in a large pot or pan. Add lemon juice, zest, wine and honey. Stir until honey has dissolved. Bring to a light simmer, then add pasta and some salt.

-Sprinkle poppy seeds into the pasta, stirring. Attempt to distribute all the ingredients evenly.

-Cover and cook until pasta is done, about 1-3 minutes. Add more wine if absolutely necessary.

-Remove from heat and serve.

Paprikas

Ingredients:

1 pound shrimp

1/2 pound fatty carp, deboned and cut into small chunks

1 onion, minced

2 cloves garlic, smashed

3 tablespoons (or more) fresh dill

2 tablespoons hot paprika

3 tablespoons mild paprika

1 cup sour cream

Olive oil

-Lightly brown onion in oil in a large pan.

-Add carp and paprika, stirring until everything is bright red. Cook over medium heat until fish has fried and begun to break apart and paprika is fragrant and darkened (ten minutes, give or take). Stir and scrape the pan as it cooks, and add enough oil so that the mixture doesn't dry out or stick.

-Add shrimp and garlic. Cook until shrimp is just done.

-Remove from heat. Stir in sour cream and dill. Serve