tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3217199749924044852012-01-26T12:21:10.238-08:00Recipes, Thoughts on Food, and the Occasional Bout of Philologyinoreply@blogger.comBlogger361100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-75096232524329289372012-01-08T21:24:00.000-08:002012-01-08T21:24:00.511-08:00

Lately, I've acquired a pretty full collection of books by John Thorne. The obsession started with Simple Cooking, which I thought was exquisitely written. I remember writing Thorne, and receiving a very kind note back from him. I picked up a few more of his books from Amazon, and while Simple Cooking remains my favourite, I've enjoyed picking through the others too. The thing about Thorne that

inoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-90780661090738916802012-01-05T19:19:00.000-08:002012-01-05T19:19:00.122-08:00

In the last post I wrote about roasting squash while I made raisin cookies. But although I had most of the ingredients in the house, I didn't have everything, and I was working from a different recipe than the one I posted here. The recipe I used, also from my grandmother Nadia, is more precise but makes about double the amount, that is, a truly impressive quantity of cookies. Make this full

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-18639055986974350782012-01-03T19:07:00.000-08:002012-01-03T19:09:38.443-08:00

Last week, in a hazy, happy holiday mood, I decided to make fursecuri cu stafide. I made a haphazard but tasty variation of my previous recipe (will post soon), and I worked with a different set of measurements -- one that yielded a much larger amount. The only problem was that while mixing the batter doesn't take very long at all, baking all of these cookies, even with four cookie sheets at my

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-82506363897162457232011-12-10T21:11:00.001-08:002011-12-11T00:42:54.682-08:00

When you grow up Romanian, you know the taste of boiled cauliflower well, too well. One of the delights of learning to cook for myself was discovering that other, more exciting things could be done with cauliflower too -- it could be roasted to nutty sweetness, for example, or stir-fried with curry leaves, turmeric, and coconut, or pureed into a satisfying creamy soup. Cauliflower could be

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-77980721658115329192011-12-10T20:53:00.001-08:002011-12-10T21:10:16.678-08:00

When I was very little, I was an incredibly difficult eater. It's hard to believe now that I have a voracious and pretty catholic appetite for food, but my family spent most of my childhood trying desperately to convince me to eat. For, as you may know, in Eastern Europe a child who doesn't eat is nothing short of a tragedy. It never seems to occur to anyone that the kid will eat when she's

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-40768922079732314212011-11-30T13:45:00.000-08:002011-11-30T13:46:02.803-08:00

Nancy Nichols has to be my new favourite restaurant reviewer... at least after reading this delicious review of MesoMaya in D Magazine: D Magazine : Restaurant Review: MesoMaya The best line, and one that gets at all Fancy Presentation of Bad Food, has to be: "Then someone in the kitchen uses a squeeze bottle to zigzag white cream sauce across the top until the mess looks like a mud pile

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-29914149578264534222011-11-28T22:35:00.001-08:002011-11-29T13:29:38.037-08:00

This evening, after coming home from work I: 1 - Baked some oatmeal-whole wheat bread. 2 - Made chicken in peanut sauce from the Oprah Magazine Cookbook. 3 - And in the meantime, rendered my own chicken fat from the skins left over from #2. Yup, I've officially become a wife. Judging by these foods, I can't quite tell if I'm a Middle America wife or a Crunchy Granola wife or a East European

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-963615747774074542011-11-27T09:49:00.001-08:002011-11-27T10:54:41.131-08:00

It's a bit of a running joke in my marriage that I like onions and garlic. Now, when I say I "like" them, you might be tempted to think that I sort of enjoy them, or that I appreciate a well-placed sliver of red onion, or that I think roasting some garlic for an hour and then pureeing it into the hummus is a good idea. And while these things are true, it's more accurate to say that I'm obsessed

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-35830034661301002512011-11-17T10:01:00.000-08:002011-11-17T10:03:51.253-08:00

Thanks to a Slate article on the etymology of macarons, I just discovered this blog on the language of food by a Stanford linguist, Dan Jurafsky. Now, this essay, and the blog in general, really appeal to my sensibilities: medieval history, cultural mixing, word change, and the contrast between sweet and savory. I'll be reading Jurafsky's other posts soon (and hoping that he posts some more), but

inoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-7021487764051201432011-10-16T14:34:00.000-07:002011-10-16T14:36:28.294-07:00

I haven't posted in ages -- the sign of a busy life, but also one with a lot of fun, experimental, and inventive cooking that went unphotographed and undocumented. However, I am planning to return with recipe ideas and food experiences soon. Until then, I'll share the news that an essay of mine on culinary fusion in Texas will appear in the literary journal The Southwest Review. I'll post more

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-26147006591611627602010-02-24T10:33:00.000-08:002010-03-06T08:50:41.572-08:00

A little while ago, possessed of a small package of mixed beans and desiring to improve their place in the world, I made the Tuscan Multi-Bean soup from The Daily Soup Cookbook, by Leslie Kaul and Bob Spiegel. It's a vegetarian soup, so it doesn't have the hearty flavour of meat stock. It does have celery, garlic, onion, rosemary, bay leaves, tomatoes, and a variety of beans, however, so I

inoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-8021289744984643662010-02-17T09:33:00.000-08:002010-02-17T09:36:12.288-08:00

Part of what I love about the ethnic-foodie-blogosphere is learning how much my native Romanian cuisine has in common with other traditions. In this case, a post over at Yulinka Cooks on horseradish made me realise that the Romanian word for the substance, hrean, comes from the Slavic languages, and is related to the Russian хрен. When I was growing up, we tended to have both white horseradish at

inoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-81303644217068643192009-12-25T05:32:00.000-08:002009-12-27T12:20:22.049-08:00

In the Southern-German city of Konstanz, you can begin dinner with a light salad of mâche grown on the nearby Reichenau (also known as the Gemüseinsel, or "vegetable island"), continue with fried trout that was caught in the Bodensee that very morning, and pair it with a Konstanzer white wine. In the village where I'm spending Christmas, the butcher and his slaughterhouse are in the middle of the

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-80659968690585945832009-12-10T23:11:00.000-08:002009-12-10T23:21:07.822-08:00

I just wanted to extend a quick welcome to visitors who arrived here from the Foodie Blogroll.You can imagine my delight when I saw that I made it onto the "Most Recent" list.Do explore my little blog, and leave me your comments. I'm also happy to get links to your own recipes if you think I might enjoy them.In the next couple of days, I plan to post recipes for Moroccan orange salad, Indian

inoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-23034152090755248592009-12-05T21:09:00.000-08:002009-12-05T21:30:55.736-08:00

One of the neat things about having a counter is that I can see how people reach this website. One reader, for example, searched for "medieval romanian cookbook" and, because I mentioned Nicholas Orme's Medieval Schools in a previous post, was offered this blog as a first-page result on Google. This made me, of course, do the same search, which led me to a couple of websites, both associated

inoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-67417555684082817522009-12-05T13:48:00.000-08:002009-12-05T21:14:31.168-08:00

When a friend wrote recently on his blog, Food With Legs, about making brawn, headcheese, pâté de tête, whatever you want to call it, I wrote him saying that I knew the food well from my childhood as piftie. And there was nothing that could ever get me to eat it again. I should probably explain that the Romanian version of headcheese not only involves odd pig parts suspended in gelatine, but the

inoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-85125276483329003102009-12-04T08:45:00.000-08:002010-03-06T08:51:45.852-08:00

The New York restaurant Kefi is one of those places that's my idea of a good place to eat. Casual, perhaps a bit too loud (ok, so that part isn't so ideal), with inexpensive, moderate portions that are very, very tasty. Perhaps the most delicious dish I have had there is the small, warm bowl of sheep's milk dumplings, tomatoes, pine nuts, and spicy lamb sausage. So you can imagine my delight

inoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-79102086696437089402009-12-02T22:30:00.000-08:002009-12-02T22:35:11.247-08:00

This is a very simple salad that is great for lunch or dinner. It is both light and incredibly filling. Despite the fact that I made a double portion the last time I made it, resulting in my having to eat this one salad for an entire week, it still tasted good days later. I first had this salad in Germany, made after a magazine recipe, so I can't give credit where credit is due! I've simply

inoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-34980597201394847572009-11-29T22:33:00.000-08:002009-12-05T21:23:46.243-08:00

Saturday afternoon, I am in New York, and I'm restless. I know that I should go somewhere walkable, so as to exercise those muscles that have atrophied in the Western wilderness I now inhabit. And yet, I can't think of any place in Manhattan where the interest provided by the shops will be worth the walk in the cold. I reflect on how I never really figured out how to enjoy New York when I lived

inoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-83287928965634683322009-11-21T22:36:00.000-08:002009-11-21T22:36:22.212-08:00

If you enjoyed my previous etymological musings here and here, you will love Matthew Driscoll's essays on the avocado, courgette, ginger, and turbot at Etymologiae cibariorum. If nothing else, you will learn how to make flavorful lawyer balls.

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-23895580163348490132009-11-21T01:00:00.000-08:002009-12-02T17:42:50.168-08:00

When they said Dallas was great for shopping, I scoffed. I scorned. I'm not that kind of person, I thought, I'm, you know, deeper than that. Of course, back then I didn't realise how great the shopping was, nor how much more fun it is to shop when you're driving around in a car. Nor did I quite understand that some of the shopping would involve.... books. I refer mainly to the spider's web that

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-90814810602258292672009-11-20T23:07:00.000-08:002009-12-01T14:52:49.073-08:00

I realised yesterday that my sincere efforts to keep this a focused blog, a blog which would only deal with Romanian food and with nothing else, also made this an empty blog. A sad, abandoned, postless blog. Which is a shame. Because I would love to write about other kinds of cooking experiments -- various curries, attempts at Middle Eastern dishes, my first Texas chili. And I would love to

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-69021804075222454202009-11-20T14:21:00.000-08:002009-12-01T15:33:30.636-08:00

Ridiculously simple, and yet this is one of my favourite dishes in the whole wide world. It is as good with breakfast (to accompany an omelette, for example) as it is with dinner. For some reason, I'm used to arranging it on a plate when I make it for breakfast, and more typically jumble it up in a medium-sized salad bowl when having it for other meals. There's really nothing to it. Cut the

inoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-80944337749093411882009-11-17T20:02:00.001-08:002009-12-01T15:03:26.919-08:00

Don't think I can't see you shaking your head. Israeli? I thought we were going to get Romanian recipes. I bet they don't even have avocados in Romania! Well, fine, I'm cheating a little bit. But I have three very good reasons for doing so: I grew up with this recipe, as made by my father, so it's in the Romanian file of my food memory cabinet. (Sorry -- I am coming up with all sorts of

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-86604357325480352182009-10-12T09:47:00.000-07:002009-12-01T15:34:04.245-08:00

Those of you who read this little blog (and it is, alas, a little blog) have seen me mention my Romanian grandmother. The truth is, I have two grandmothers, both Romanian, and both wonderful cooks. One excels at simple, light food, and the other is a master of the most elaborate concoctions, including desserts that would make any New York pastry chef weep and then launch himself off of a high

inoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-49421899501533441902009-04-24T21:56:00.000-07:002010-03-06T08:53:10.346-08:00

Though I enjoyed writing about the Persian origins of chiftele in the last post, I suspect that etymological musings are a blatant infraction of the food blog genre. However, as I've been writing up the recipes below I've started to wonder about the origins of some Romanian food words. And if you know anything about Romanians, it's that they love etymology. (Romanians are not unlike the father in

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-59646993216186993202009-04-21T07:41:00.000-07:002011-12-11T00:43:15.501-08:00

One of my great moments of enlightenment occurred when I realised that the kofta in malai kofta was closely related to the Romanian chiftea. Originally a Persian word, kofta generally refers to a ball of ground meat. In its various incarnations, the kofta is mixed with spices, herbs, onions, and a variety of vegetables. Variations of the word and corresponding food are to be found all over

inoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-72734568899886198122009-04-12T20:43:00.000-07:002009-12-01T15:35:22.242-08:00

A while ago, I made the claim that when it came to eggplant salad, the roasted eggplants had to be mixed with raw onions "or else." This was not as reckless a statement as it might seem, seeing as, at the time, I had spent almost twenty-nine years on this earth, most of them eating salata de vinete, and in all these years, I had never liked anything as much as eggplant salad with chopped, raw

inoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-67922891114113078552009-04-12T10:55:00.000-07:002009-12-01T15:35:41.313-08:00

This is the first batch of cookies I've ever made, and, not surprisingly, only the unsurpassed deliciousness of Romanian cookies could motivate me to bake. Although I'm sure this recipe could be found in one of my Romanian cookbooks, I have it via the time trusted method of calling up a grandmother. In this case, my grandma Nadia gave me the recipe from memory with exact weights, but since I

inoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-34561253290767995672009-01-19T06:24:00.000-08:002009-11-18T12:15:02.774-08:00

This is a quick dish, inspired by the fact that I had a head of cauliflower in the fridge, a roasted red pepper in the freezer, and some lettuce. Googling around for cauliflower salad ideas, I also chanced upon this post from Yulinka Cooks, which makes me think that Eastern Europeans have some sort of special love for cauliflower. I happen to adore the vegetable in all its forms: it can be

inoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-47378196973153578142008-10-10T19:39:00.000-07:002009-12-01T14:53:48.117-08:00

My definition of "Romanian" for cooking purposes is quite expansive -- dishes are Romanian if they're in Romanian cookbooks, made in Romania, or if they're made by members of my Romanian family. I think this is pretty reasonable when one considers that Romanian cuisine has influences from German, Turkish, Greek, Russian, and French cooking -- so much so that I never know what to answer when

inoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-10077030096728774292008-10-10T18:45:00.000-07:002009-12-01T15:36:18.071-08:00

When I think of Romanian cuisine, the words "slow" and "arduous" come immediately to mind. No wonder I've always been more attracted to Asian cooking, with its promise of lightning-fast stir fry meals. But I'm learning that some Romanian foods can be quite easy, especially if you prepare extra quantities of time-consuming items and freeze them. Say, for example, that you made salata de vinete,

inoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-11275015327416622492008-10-10T18:12:00.000-07:002009-12-02T17:30:59.268-08:00

Roast pepper salad is my second desert island dish. It is, quite simply, one of the most delicious dishes I have ever met, and not surprisingly, it pairs well with salata de vinete. Its tanginess makes it a particularly good accompaniment to meat dishes, especially if the meat is fried -- I like to have something sour to cut the greasiness of a meaty main course. Like the roasted eggplant, this

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-51396408190733839182008-08-10T08:52:00.000-07:002009-12-05T21:19:52.118-08:00

Inspired by this post on making paneer, I decided to make the curried eggplant with paneer pictured halfway down the page. I found a decent recipe online for Ringan no Ohloh, and as I contemplated making it I realised that oven roasting the eggplants would also give me the basics for salata de vinete. Just to give a little bit of context: salata de vinete is my absolute favourite food in the

inoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-17497684046496856942008-08-10T08:14:00.000-07:002009-12-01T15:36:59.149-08:00

A very easy summer dish and one of my favourites. I bought a package of flat green beans (I think it was half a kilo), snipped off the ends and washed them. (As a child, snipping off the ends was always my job!). The rest is almost like making pasta sauce, but with beans, and in a pot. I fried a couple of onions chopped coarsely in oil, as well as a little garlic, and then put in a couple of cans

inoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-321719974992404485.post-76201612887006421192008-08-10T07:56:00.000-07:002009-12-01T15:37:22.852-08:00

"Sanda Marin" was, as I was growing up, the ultimate reference work. By the time I was a teenager, our family's copy of this Romanian cookbook had traveled, with us, through three continents, and had reached an advanced stage of dilapidation. Since the answer to any cooking dilemma was, "look in Sanda Marin," I'm not surprised that the poor thing no longer has any covers. A month or so ago,

inoreply@blogger.com0