An Ode to Goulash

My husband is Hungarian. This is important to know because once every blue moon he becomes very proud of his Hungarian heritage and talks about it for a couple of days.  Tonight we celebrated his Hungarian ancestors by eating goulash.  If you've never had goulash before, its a type of Hungarian meat and vegetable pasta/stew.  It kind of defines a category, like Spam.  BUT unlike Spam, goulash is YUMMY.  I paired it with a glass of Malbec my friend Sara left at my apartment this weekend.  Honestly, it wasn't the best pairing in the world but it was good all the same.  Jordan never even had heard of Goulash before we were married, but I grew up eating it all the time at my Grandma Coco's house.  I would sit between Grandma and Grandpa at their little kitchen table and talk to them about school.  Grandpa would always have canned pears while Grandma and I would eat canned peaches.  It was our little tradition that the girls always got peaches, but I don't know why.  Anyway, my Grandpa passed away several years ago and my Grandma is on her way to joining him.  She's been in the hospital for a couple of months fighting leukemia.  We rarely saw eye to eye, but when I made goulash tonight the memory of eating it with my Grandparents almost made me cry.  I wanted to call her to tell her about the food I made but its too hard to carry on a phone conversation with her because her ability to remember things has pretty much disappeared.  So this meal was for you, Grandma.