Mamaliga

So, what happens if you like to cook, you like writing songs and like video-production? You might start singing about recipes and post them in a videosong. Which just happened with me. It’s a practical song that you can actually cook! Crepes Recipe is the debut song from a collection of videosongs I plan to post in an album called “Kitchen Tunes”.
You can download the Crepe Recipe mp3 for free from Reverb Nation.

Please leave a comment and let me know if you cooked this Crepes Recipe and if you liked it!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Here is another of those “oh my, it’s 5.00 pm, and I have no clue what to cook for dinner” meals. Considering of course that you already have a boned chicken, grainy Dijon mustard and of course the new POM pomegranate cranberry juice.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Chicken Piccata

So we have this new thing going on when I have to take care of dinner three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday to be precise. It is something I enjoy, and it’s a way to wind down after a busy day. The problem is that I am a terrible meal planner. I do grocery shopping, and usually get what’s on sale, or what might inspire me to do a certain meal, but I don’t remember ever going with a pre-planned ingredient list for an upcoming meal. And usually what happens is that I wake up, open the fridge to sort of assess the situation of what I have or don’t have or what needs to be gotten rid of, then frantically search the Internet, cooking magazines or cookbooks for something that might resemble a decent dinner. For some strange reason, I always find that I have excessive mushrooms from the previous grocery shopping day. Don’t ask me why.

But I have my staples. I’m not that hopeless. For instance I make sure there are always a couple lemons and limes in the bottom fridge drawer. When skinless, boneless chicken is on sale, I pile up, and divide them up into portions and freeze them. Butter? I need that like gas in our car, okay?  And, look! I have all I need for Chicken Piccata, a sublime marriage between sauteed floured chicken breast cut into thin cutlets and a lemony-buttery-garlicky sauce topped with lemon slices, capers and parsley. To be honest, I inherited this recipe from Steph, since she does the best Chicken Piccata in town. And it’s a big town.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

Chocolate Tart

Don’t be fooled. This humble chocolate tart is packed with enough potential to turn even the most chocolate-disciplined person into a dessert-ivore. So much more that is so easy and fast – if you read my previous post on baking short crust sweet pastry tart shells and you have two or three of them in the freezer.

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Popularity: 40% [?]

Strawberry Short Cake

As every caring husband would do, I wanted to get the perfect Birthday gift to my dear wife, cooking the perfect meal,  make her day, etc., and as every procrastinator husband does, I realized half day into it that I did NOT have a plan!

Luckily I went grocery shopping a day before so I had the ingredients but I had to improvise and this is the menu I came up with, preparing the whole dinner in little less than 3 hours.

So I was thinking slightly Italian given the fact that she likes Mediterranean simplicity, taste and colors.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

The main chef at Mamaliga strikes again! This time featured in the spotlight of Foodbuzz.com, the online foodie community, a superb social and culinary network for all of us passionate about cooking

A unique community in itself, that let’s you and me connect, share, discuss view and track every little crumb of your life in the kitchen and beyond. It is a community that buzzes about food!

From browsing thousands of recipes voted by the foodbuzz community, savoring the Daily Special recipe, to the 24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Posts monthly event, presenting 24 unique meals that take place around the world in 24 hours.

So one thing I don’t understand is why – oh why – you, dear reader who appreciate cooking, food and fellow foodies,  didn’t created yet an account with Foodbuzz and start the exciting journey in a community that’s all about it!

Popularity: 10% [?]

Le Dough – (Bread Day 2)

A somewhat more complicated day. I started off by taking the sponge out of the fridge and cutting it into rough pieces to help it warm up faster (about an hour). I covered it so it would not crust over. Meanwhile, measured out:

4-1/2 cups flour (unbleached, all-purpose, high gluten)
2 Tsp salt
1-3/4 cup warm water

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Popularity: 7% [?]

The one great thing about the blogosphere is that one can actually get in touch with the blog author for advice, tips on a certain subject and get precious direction.

One of these examples is a fellow foodie – Nicole – the author of the fantastic Pinch My Salt blog full of superb recipes, tips ideas and marvelous pics, who had a great photo chronicle on making her own sourdough starter from scratch. Her detailed pics and description inspired me to make my first sourdough starter. If it is a success it will be passed down to my next generation, and probably mention in my will how to share it among my children so they wont fight over it.

Mother Sponge

Creating a starter, also known as Mother Sponge, is a very simple process. You are basically creating a habitat where the already existent yeast (in our case in the flour and maybe in the air), will reproduce happily ever after, by feeding it with a mix of water and flour (un-bleached, all purpose).
Apparently the Mother of all Sponges, lives in San Francisco, CA, where a bacteria named Lactobacillus Sanfranciscensis was discovered in the sourdough starters made there, the main culprit for the bacterial multiplication.

And you wonder why real-estate prices are so high over there…

Ingredients

It cannot be more simple. I followed Nicole’s recipe that calls for:

• 1 cup 100% whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cups bottled water

The reason for the whole wheat flour is because it has much more wild yeast than all purpose flour.

I mixed all these and poured the result into a glass jar, where I will be monitoring its progress (or regress), by adding a rubber band that indicates its initial level.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

I get a kick out of imported goods translations in English on their labels. You can see their native marketing department trying hard to come up with a decent convincing phrase.

This sometimes results in funky terms or concepts that will sound very corky for Americans. For instance this wonderful bottle of Romanian Chardonnay, that can be paired with many desserts, among other the popular (or not so) “Peanut Cakes” (?).

Suspecting that peanuts are native to the American Continent, the Romanian wine producer was maybe thinking that hey – in the end Americans must eat peanut cakes for dessert.

I suspect my own blog writing sounds like this example many times.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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.

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Popularity: 4% [?]