on Romanian food & culture and more
This can happen to you too, if you keep a tomato too long on the counter. My wife cut one open and bingo! The seeds started to hatch!
What looked like a perfectly fine tomato, soon proved that was in fact that it was a pregnant tomato with all these seeds starting to germinate inside of it!
I wonder what would have happened if we would have left it uncut!
Curious thing…
In days when the inspiration muse doesn’t strike, it is always helpful to fall back on some good old recipes you know and tried before. One of them is my mushroom sauce.
A humble sauce but not with a humble attitude, my universal mushroom sauce makes many dishes happy, such as pastas (linguine in my case), stuffings, etc.
The one discussed here is a fresh linguine pasta I made with Semolina (Durum) flour.
It has a fantastic texture, aroma and taste using simple but excellent ingredients such as garlic, plum tomatoes, mushroom and olives.
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It’s Halloween here in Chicago. And since Romania is (generally speaking) widely known in the U.S. for its orphanages, sometime the televised Revolution of 1989 when the dictator Ceausescu was overthrown, but most of all for Count Dracula of Transylvania, I thought of at least clear off the smoke of confusion for some.
Well Ladies and Gentlemen,
What looked like a failed cooking afternoon turned around unexpectedly into a success story. The Sarmale (stuffed cabbage rolls) turned out as it should - the rolls didn’t fall apart, they remained stiff, retaining their initial shape, the taste was full of cabbage flavor with a flagrant tomatoe aroma. One thing that I should have added more was salt. But better less than over-salted.
No, I am not your typical Romanian. I never ever made sarmale in my life! In fact my wife who is American made sarmale and they actually tasted better than in Romania! Heck, what is wrong with me?? They are known in the West as cabbage rolls or stuffed cabbage.
As a result, I decided to start a quest by making my first sarmale ever! Meaning that today I will go to our favorite grocery store Valli Produce, with a shopping list in hope of finding the right ingredients! In the mean time I will need to make a couple international long distance calls to a couple Mamas in Romania there to try to compile a recipe that’s very close to the origins.
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It was time to switch over to some deserts. I remember as a young boy, going with my Grandma for a treat at the “Cofetarie” (means “pastry shop” in Romanian), and getting Choux à la Crème, a delicious desert, commonly found in the same choux pastry family with cream puffs, Eclairs, Profiteroles. The common thing is that all of these are using the same light pastry dough called pâte à choux.
While growing up in Romania for 33 years I got to assume certain beliefs as being undoubtedly right and incontestable. It took a wife from the American continent to pull these things out of me and bring things into the light sometimes with a good laugh. Hope these will at least ease your day.
This weekend I took a shot at the as-close-as-I-can-get-to American version of the Bistecca Fiorentina, Florence’s signature steak introduced a century ago and made famous by Italy’s greatest food writer, Pellegrino Artusi.
It is usually Friday and Sunday when it is my turn to cook in the Bucataru household. So I thought of posting a weekly review of what I whipped together in the weekend
Mushroom Stuffed Galantined Chicken
Jacques Pepin shows a way of completely boning a chicken in his The Complete Pepin: Techniques and Recipes DVDs so I decided to give it a try and make Mushroom Stuffed Galantined Chicken.
It an easy process even if it looks intimidating at first. I had to truss the chicken in the and so the stuffing remains in. Barbecued at 325 for about 1-1/2 hours. Stuffing was a simple sauteed mushroom/tomato sauce mix. Unfortunately had no time for pictures as family was too hungry to wait for my camera setup. Maybe next time.
This whole organic food concept cracks me up sometimes. There is a multi-billion industry built on it. The modern American culture became so “fat hydrogenated” that produced a whole anti-movement (rightly so) to bring back the original food production standards of natural cooking.
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
by Michael Pollan
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
