It Can't Always Be Caviar – part – Lecso

One of K's favorite books ever since finding it on the bookshelves at her grandparents in her early teens is the classic spy novel with the daring, handsome, clever Thomas Lieven as the protagonist. 400+ pages written by Johannes Mario Simmel that brings Thomas Lieven through Europe during and after the 2nd world war. A must-read!!!
Not only is it an excellent spy novel but Thomas Lieven also excels in cooking for his lovers, friends, and enemies.... and the recipes are quoted. Now T has gotten under the Lieven-spell as well and what better way to celebrate this wonderful novel than to recreate the meals.
The Danish edition has had Inge Lotz to edit the cooking. She is a home economics teacher of the old school. One of her remarks on beef soup is: Every housekeeper knows how to make a clear beef soup, so I will not repeat the recipe here.....
The recipes clearly reflects the post-war kitchen and may seem old fashioned and some of the ingredients are not up-to-date and so we will take some liberties in recreating the meals.

Anyway today it was Hungarian Lecso - with which Thomas Lieven gets a brilliant idea!

We used:
3 red onions
3 cloves of garlic
100 gr salsiccia
100 gr bacon (raw)
500 gr lamb (the recipe call for castrated ram, but where do you get that these days????)
1 kg red bell peppers (it should have been green bell peppers, but we couldn't get any)
paprika
s/p
wine
vinegar
1 cup of rice


simmered for about 1 1/4 hour. Served with bread.

It turned out very rich, good and satisfying.
A wonderful meal after a hard days work in the field.....

Since we were a little hungry we had started the meal with a little toast, canned food and sweet wine; i.e. foie gras and left over Sauternes from Saturday.

... we did not need dessert....

Food 8/10

We had a bottle of Targum 2005 from Ribera del Duero with the Lecso. 
The wine was still very fruity with lots of oak. T recalled it less so when tasting it in the spring and believes it will do better than tonight where we must rate the wine as 7,2/10 and the wine/food matching as 6,5/10



K later googled Lecso and found that it is basically a traditional vegetarian dish that you can add whatever meat you have in your back yard – or refrigerator.