Old Fashioned Goulash Recipe

Today I did something I rarely do. I cooked. The wife helped. It was a two person job.

Unfortunately, we can not dine out every day. In fact, we are about to feel a financial pinch, so we are starting to see what we can do to stretch our dollars.

I saw a recipe the other day (I think I saw it on FaceBook) and it called to me. My mom was not a very good cook. She’d bake hamburgers into hockey pucks in the oven, never made a lasagna, fish, a decent potato or a normal pancake. I could go on, but I don’t want to be mean.

I actually learned to like everything, even bad cooking. I am the one in the house now who will pretty much eat everything, though I use too much extraneous salt and condiments.

Anyhow, one of the very few things my mom used to make that I really liked was goulash. My wife’s mom was a great cook, and she made goulash as well, but when I tried it, I actually preferred my mom’s. My mom’s goulash was tomato based. My mother-in-law’s goulash was some weird brownish gray thing.

She may have been a great cook (rest her soul), but her goulash was some kind of acquired taste, I guess.

They really shouldn’t both be allowed to be called goulash. They are nothing alike.

When I saw the picture on FaceBook of a meaty, tomatoey macaroni dish called “Old Fashioned Goulash”, I knew this was a recipe worth saving for those days when we don’t know what to make for dinner.

Now I’m kind of weird about social media. I didn’t actually share the recipe. I just copied the text of it for myself.

Yesterday we were at the grocery store, and I remembered to check my recipe. We got the ingredients (except for the adobo seasoning) for pretty cheap.

My son always comes home from school essentially starving. My plan was to have something simmering when he got home, so he wouldn’t just make himself a microwaveable—4 min—Nongshim Premium Tonkotsu Ramen bowl as soon as he walked in the door.

It worked. He did have a banana while the goulash simmered, but I’m good with that. Bananas are not only healthy, but cheap.

I didn’t really remember where I got the recipe from, but I googled the text and found it online at Tivav—OLD FASHIONED GOULASH – Tivav

Partially cook 2 pounds of ground beef or turkey. I used 85/15.