Vegan Szegedin goulash and amaranth with vegetables

Today we take you on a culinary trip, this time exploring the Hungarian city of Szeged through one of the nation’s most famous dishes: Szegedin goulash. This special dish involves a combination of sauerkraut and paprika, and often contains meat. Obviously we opted to make a vegan version of this cultural meal! Rather than using vegan meat substitutes, we chose to drop this element of the dish. To keep the dish flavourful and high in protein (and since we at Hungry Pumpkin love it) we decided to add in some peanut butter!

For a side, we decided to prepare a vegetable risotto-like dish, but we used amaranth instead of rice. Amaranth is an interesting plant that accounted for 80% of the caloric intake of the Aztecs before the Spanish invasion! Amaranth has small, round seeds that are similar to millet or quinoa. That being said, amaranth is not related to millet, as it is not in the grass family and thus not a true cereal. Amaranth and quinoa, however, are more closely related, both belonging to the Amaranthaceae. Their history is also quite similar, with quinoa having been a staple further south among the Inca of South America. You can read more about quinoa in our previous article.

Recipe, preparation, and price

For our amaranth dish, finely chopped onion is cooked in olive oil with diced celery root and carrot. After we had cooked this in the oil for a few minutes, we added in the amaranth seeds as well as some water and salt; we cooked this for half an hour.

In addition to our goulash and our amaranth, we also had a green salad seasoned with pumpkin seed oil, apple cider vinegar, and salt.

Even though our amaranth was a bit of an exotic ingredient (and thus more expensive), the price of our lunch was still less than €5 for 4 people, so only a bit over a euro for each person! If you need further proof that a vegan diet can be done on a tight budget then look no further! If you wanted to save more money, the amaranth could have been replaced with millet, which is three times cheaper and the celery root could have been replaced with more carrot, which is four times cheaper! Using a different oil (for example sunflower oil) could also help cut down on costs, but so little is used that it doesn’t make much of a difference.

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Nutritional value

If you have questions about today’s meal or suggestions for a future one, email us at hungry.pumpkin.blog@gmail.com and we will gladly get back to you!

Have a great sunny week!

The Hungry Pumpkin Team