Late summer is the time for pizza. Nothing says summer like a nice slice on the street or waiting for the pizza to be delivered. We love pizza. We adore it. We worship at the temple of the Great God Zza, He of the dripping cheese and crusty perfection. It's not enough to eat pizza, one must
know pizza: one of my favorite food blogs is
Slice, the pizza blog. Of course, on a more realistic level we live in Budapest, which is not one of the world's great pizza towns. Sure, we have pizza in Hungary, in fact we have a lot of pizza - after 1990 pizza became the substitute for most Eastern European medium-fast foods. Before 1992 the late night munchy target of Hungary used to be the
meleg szendvics, a toasted slice of bread with melted cheese and ketchup dreamed up in imitation of the bakery pizzas which were the only thing Hungarians could ever afford to eat when they visited Italy back in the days when you could only leave Hungary with a limited amount of foreign hard currency. The
meleg szendvics is the default mode for Hungarian pizza, and the reason that Hungarians always like to squirt ketchup on top of pizza. After the first Yugoslav civil war, Hungarian refugees from Serbian Voivodina began introducing the vastly superior Yugo pizza, and since then pizzerias sprang up everywhere. The problem is, most aren't very good. Most of the few decent pizzas -
Okay Italia,
Trattoria Toscana, or
Terzio Cerchio - are too expensive to eat in the New York manner, meaning downing one or two a day. The only option left: make it at home.
This is where having an obsessive baker living in your home helps. Fumie bikes across town in search of flour with the proper gluten levels, and she will get up at two AM to check on how her sourdough culture is doing. Pizza dough is a cinch for her. For some reason, Fumie loves to bake on those days when the thermometer breaks record highs and everybody else heads to the beach. But nothing beats pizza on a hot summer day, right?
At least we can get the basics: marzano tomatos for homemade sauce, basil we grow on our balcony, and for some reason locally made mozzarella cheese has become reasonably cheap and good lately. I've learned to go light on the toppings: basil, red onion, italian salami, anchovies... Last week we tried adding sliced
mangalitsa bacon to the pizza. Utter FAIL.. the result was slimey... the mangalitsa basically just melted into tasteless pools of lard and dripped off the slices.
Kids, don't try this at home!
Mangalitza (a local breed of curly haired pig) is one of those products Hungarians laud as branded local "Hungaricums" within the EU, and not long ago we bought some mangalitsa pork chops to try with a friend who is a wine importer. Well... maybe it was just our pig, but the curly haired pig is bred for its fat, not for its meat. You can eat it, but... textureless, insipid, bland, entirely without character. The regular Hungarian pork that we get at any butchers is far superior for meat, so we'll be giving the curly hired pig a pass in the future.
August 20 is the Hungarian National Holiday. It's a combination of holidays, actually, St. Stephen's Day, New Bread Day, and Constitution Day all rolled into one big do which culminates with fireworks over the Danube at night. The crowds along the Danube banks downtown are huge, and a couple of years ago a freak storm broke out just as the fireworks were beginning, flooding the streets, blowing giant fireworks into the city, and stampeding the crowd, causing injuries and several dead from boat accidents in the river. So, to avoid any possible apocalyptic destruction, we just biked up the street to the highway overpass here in Zugló for a clear view of the show going on downtown a few kilometers west of us.
The overpass bridge was packed with people, who had brought out lawn chairs and bowls of popcorn for the event. Cars parked along the bridge, taxis waited for fares, and lots of the local Gypsy families were out enjoying the evening - this part of Zugló is considered to be the residence area of choice for better off Roma in Budapest.
There was also an air show over the Danube during the afternoon, but scandal erupted when it turned out the sponsors, the Austrian makers of the putrid Red Bull Energy Drink - a vile sugary brew that tastes like bubblegum with caffeine - had paid off the city council to cancel the usual flyover of the Hungarian Air Force. So in the morning I got to see a formation of frustrated fighter planes angrily zipping past my bedroom window.
Since we traveled to Bucharest on the overnight train, we had to bring the small portable cimbalom, and I borrowed a cobza from Beatrice Iordan of the band Trei Parale, whose husband and band mate, Florin, actually works at the museum as a folklorist. The Museum Club was a great venue - Romanian folk furniture, tables, very cozy, a great bar. There doesn't seem to be a huge traditional folk music scene in Bucharest - apart from Trei Parale, who focus on flute and historical ballad traditions, and often present their music at early music festivals and rennaisance fairs. When we played within the Moldavian and Transylvanian styles of Jewish music it was pure joy to watch the faces in the audience. They don't often get much Transylvanian string band music down in Oltenia, it seems. 
Bucharest is being reconstructed from whole cloth these days, with a lot of major road work disrupting any attempt to get from point A to point B. Bucharestians can be seen carefully dancing their way around all manner of obstructions as they attempt to navigate the streets and sidewalks. if you have to get anywhere, take the Metro. Bucharest traffic at evening rush hour is horrendous. But Bucharest itself has come a long way from the urban hell hole we remembered from the early 1990s. The shops are smart, lots of trendy bars and cafes, good restaurants, definately not the Bucharest I remember from fifteen years ago when all was grey and dreary. Believe me, in the 1990s Bucharest was one of the least attractive cities in the world. That's changing, but it takes an awful big heart to love Bucharest. The dreariest building of all is the former Palace of Nicolae Ceauşescu , now the Palace of the Parliament. 
Started by order of the increasingly unstable Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1984, the construction of the Palace required demolishing much of Bucharest's historic district, including 19 Orthodox Christian churches, six Jewish synagogues, three Protestant churches (plus eight relocated churches), and 30,000 residences. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Palace is the world's largest civilian administrative building most expensive administrative building, and heaviest building. But the newer Bucharest is a series of surprises, especially if you knew the old one. On the up side, I found Europe's best hamburger in a small "French" bistro on Piata Romana, a place that advertised itself simply as "Soups and Meats."
The bun was a bit tough but the meat was perfect... good beef, medium rare. Hungary doesn't have a single eatery that can produce a burger anything like this... none of us know why... it is so sad... but Bucharest definately takes the blue ribbon for east European burgers.
There were non-burger items to try while I was in romania, but more on them later... I never rush a post when discussing tripe soup and ground spiced meatwad products like mici. 
