Potato Goulash, Japanized

Yesterday, I didn't feel like cooking anything extravagant (and going shopping for that purpose), so we made one of our quick fixes.

 

As far as I know, this is a Hungarian dish. Once, I was able to eat a more original version on a train which was coming from Budapest. This particular version was born out of necessity. Normally, you need a tablespoon of tomato paste (tomato purée). But one day, I started with preparing the potatoes and the wieners, and then noticed that we didn't have any more tomato paste in the house. So what did I do? I had bought ready-to-use Japanese curry sauce at my japanese grocer's. I used that and a little less liquid (300 ml for this version, half a liter for the original).

This is the curry sauce I used:

It also works well with the medium hot version of the sauce. I haven't tried the hot version yet. I like to be in control of the spicyness myself, so I use shichimi togarashi:

 Ingredients for 2 servings:

500 g potatoes
300 ml water
2 teaspoons of instant kombu dashi
2 round onions
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
4 wieners, Western size (about as long as one adult hand)
1 bag (1 serving) of ready-to-use Japanese curry sauce
Salt (to taste)
Shichimi togarashi (to taste)

As Ben and I both don't eat meat (anymore), we use these vegetarian sausages:

Quorn is an industrially produced meat surrogate. Wikipedia will tell you more about it. Tofu wieners will work as well, I presume. (Of course, you can use *real* wieners if you like!)

Directions:

Peel the potatoes and cut into 1.5-cm-thick cubes. Peel the onions and finely dice them.
Dissolve the instant dashi in the water. Cut the wieners into rather thin (4 to 5 mm) wheels, like this:

Heat the oil in a skillet. Sauté the onions until they turn translucent.

Squeeze out the bag of curry sauce into the skillet and heat for a few seconds, stirring. Deglaze with the kombu dashi and stir. When the liquid returns to a boil, add the potatoes and turn down the heat to medium to low (we put it between 3 and 4 on a scale from 1 to 10).

 

Cover and simmer until the potatoes are almost tender (for us, this takes between 15 and 20 minutes, depending on the potatoes we use). Then add the sausage wheels and heat them in the goulash for a few minutes until hot.

Add salt and shichimi togarashi to taste. Serve in a deep dish and eat with a spoon.

Yesterday, Ben said I was too generous with the shichimi togarashi. I told him that he got this impression because the last time we made this dish, I forgot to add it.