Cauliflower in mayo - Conopida cu maioneza

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 seriously good.

So why is it that lately I've had urges for recipes made with boiled cauliflower, of all things? It has to be something atavistic, a longing for the blander bits of my childhood. In this case, I was paging through Silvia Jurcovan's Carte de Bucate, and the single recipe she gave under "conopida" (cauliflower) was for cauliflower made with mayonnaise. Now, I despise mayo, and try to avoid it. But it turns out I had tasted a version of this recipe when visiting my uncle in Bucharest in 2006, and knew that it could be incredibly tasty.

Now, it certainly doesn't look tasty. It's a white vegetable in a white sauce when you get right down to it. But don't let looks fool you. I played quite a bit with the recipe given in Jurcovan, so much so that I'm only going to give you very vague directions. I think the keys here are not overboiling the cauliflower, and making the sauce flavourful enough to carry the veggie.

First, cut the cauliflower into large florets. I had an enormous cauliflower head (about 1800 g!), which I think was ideal. If you cut it into large enough pieces, they won't cook through as fast and they can suffer a bit of breaking. Then throw them in boiling water for around 5 minutes, but check every now and then to see if they're tender by inserting a sharp knife into a floret. Remove and drain.

In the meantime, make the dressing. Take about a cup of mayo and mix together with two cups of sour cream. I also added a couple of teaspoons of mustard and plenty of dried dill because Jurcovan told me to, and a few things Jurcovan didn't mention: four crushed cloves of garlic, a dash of Worcestershire, about half a lemon's worth of juice, a few squirts of olive oil, to say nothing of salt and pepper.

Finally, mix the thick dressing with the cauliflower -- do so gently so that the florets do not break apart. Chill, and serve! You can add some chopped parsley on top, though I might vary the leftovers tomorrow with some scallions.

Grandma's tomato soup - Supa de rosii

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 hungry, and so will most likely not starve. No -- she must be cajoled, threatened, forced, and constantly reminded to eat!

The upshot of this for me was that my grandmothers especially would latch on to any food item I seemed to eat with relish, and would compete with each other to provide it whenever I was at their house. I remember a visit to Bucharest when I was twelve or so. At that point, I had discovered I liked meat (an overnight sensation), and I wasn't all that finicky anymore. But there were certainly things I liked more than others... and one of these dishes was tomato soup with noodles.

The visit took place over the summer months, and I alternated between the homes of my grandparents, the way I had as a child. Every time I went to my grandmother Nadia's, she would make me tomato soup with noodles, and I would eat bowls and bowls of it, expressing a particular desire for extra noodles. So the next visit, the soup would have a greater proportion of fine, angel-hair noodles, and I'd finish it off with even more delight. I remember by the end of the summer sitting at her kitchen table, and Nadia putting a bowl in front of me: there was a mound of noodles, barely moistened by soup. This was now pasta with tomato sauce. I looked at the bowl, looked at her, and we both started laughing.

Well, despite making some delicious squash and carrot and African peanut soups in the past few weeks, what I've really been craving is tomato soup... with noodles. I called up Nadia for the recipe, and it turned out she had had the same craving. It also turned out that this soup is ridiculously easy to make -- and I simplified it even further.

You basically boil a carrot, a stick of celery, and some onion in a litre and a half or so of water, for half an hour. Then add half a litre of tomato juice, season appropriately, let it cook a little. Finally, throw in some noodles -- I used thin Italian egg noodles that come in little bird nests, crushed a bit. I made the recipe even easier by using a good vegetable bouillon instead of the real veggies (which can be crushed into the soup of course, or just removed). There are better tomato soups out there, I'm sure -- but this one is ridiculously easy, done in less than twenty minutes, and satisfies me like nothing else.

Medieval Romanian Cookery in translation: "Add in a foot of veal for inquiring"

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 with Society for Creative Anachronism activities. One offers some page scans from a 1997 edition of a seventeenth-century cookbook. (And yes, the seventeenth-century was still the Middle Ages in Romania. Long story.) The modern edition, by Ioana Constantinescu and Matei Cazacu, is titled, "O lume într-o carte de bucate: manuscris din epoca brâncovenească." For those of you who read Romanian, David D. Friedman offers a section on fish preparations here.

Headcheese and Brains

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 aspic is also garlic-flavoured. Now I love garlic, and regularly double the amount of garlic I put in every recipe, but the smell of the garlic-gelatine permeating the house as my parents cooked this piftie was really something else. I would carefully avoid the dining room, where the headcheese was put to cool, as long as it was there, and had a look of sheer disgust on my teenage face for as long as the piftie was around.

Salata de rosii - Tomato salad

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 tomato into wedges, arrange them around the plate, decorate with onion slices (yes, even for breakfast!), crumbled feta cheese (the fattier, the better), and olives. A drizzle of olive oil and a shake of salt and pepper, and you're done.

The hard part is really picking the tomatoes. Try to find some with taste. This kind of salad is not even worth making in winter with supermarket tomatoes.

Grandma's advice in the New York Times

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 rise. (I love simple, homemade North American desserts -- pies and crumbles and carrot cake and such -- but the stuff that's retailed is a disaster. We'll leave a discussion of the tasteless cakes I would have in Toronto and the abomination that is the NYC cupcake for another post.) Still, I refer to both ladies through the mythological composite, my "Romanian grandmother."

And this weekend, my Romanian grandmother made it into the New York Times Magazine food issue.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/11/magazine/20091011-foodrules.html

If you click on the fourth box, "Share," you will see the advice on portion control my maternal grandmother always gave me. Of course, my father was quick to point out that Romanians don't eat like this at all. We typically eat big dinners, and, as he put it, the only breakfast worth mentioning is the giblet soup served after an all-night bender. (Don't hold your breath waiting for that recipe to appear here.) I recognized the truth of what he said about dinner, but I've also enjoyed a breakfast while visiting the mountains near Baia Mare that included salami, ham, fried fish, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and cheese, all washed down with tuica (plum brandy). After eating all of this, my travel companion and I could do nothing but lie on the grass on one side of a mountain and look at the mountain opposite until lunchtime rolled around.

Chiftele din dovlecei cruzi - Zucchini fritters

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 the Middle East and the Balkans. In Europe, the kofta owes its popularity to the Turks, who not only introduced their köfte to Balkan cuisine, but do a pretty good job of popularizing tasty köfte kebab, or şiş köfte, in Döner stands throughout Germany.

Salata de vinete, variation

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 onions.

Imagine the shock I had a few months ago when I tasted an eggplant salad that did not, indeed, have raw onions, and lo, I found it good. Yea, even better than the eggplant salad of yore. So, this week, when my fridge broke down and I had to do something with the now-melted roasted eggplant I had stowed away in my freezer, I decided to try something similar: I lightly fried the chopped onion in the oil until it was translucent, and then added all of it to the eggplant.

The result is salata de vinete that you can eat for breakfast without worrying about your breath. (Though, I had it for lunch with raw green onions dipped in salt, but that just meant I was able to consume two kinds of onions rather than one!) It is also, and this should be noted as a possible strategic error, a salata de vinete that my boyfriend seems to enjoy more, and eat more eagerly, than the raw onion variety.


Note that it is also possible to mix a raw egg into this to make it even more creamy. I'm too scared of salmonella to do this myself, though by some magical effect, I'm not too scared of it to eat the result when someone else has mixed raw egg into a recipe.

Fursecuri cu stafide - Raisin cookies

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 don't have a kitchen scale, she hung up the phone so as to measure the equivalents in volume of the flour and sugar. When she called again, she asked me, "Do you have a mug the size of the "Yale Grandma" mug you gave me?" I said yes, and with the approximations she had worked out, was able to make a pretty convincing first batch of cookies. Accordingly, measurements below are given in metric and in "Yale Grandma" mug units.

The first step is to soak about a cup of raisins in rum or cognac or whatever you happen to find in your liquor cabinet. The raisins I was using were particularly dried out, so I also nuked them a little bit:


The next step is to mix three whole eggs with 200 g of sugar (one Yale Grandma mug full up to about two centimetres from the top). Then mix in 200 g of butter. Then mix in 200 g of flour (one full Yale Grandma mug) and a pinch of salt. Add the grated rind of one orange:


Mix well and add the drained raisins:


Line a cookie sheet with tinfoil (or whatever you like to use) and place small little mounds ("the tip of a spoon" according to Nadia) about 5 cm apart. They will spread and flatten out. I was able to fit eighteen on each sheet:


Put them in an oven preheated to 350 degrees F. Baking only takes 10 minutes, until the cookies are reddish-brown at the edges:


This recipe makes quite a few cookies (I'm waiting to pull the seventh pan out of the oven, so it's already well over a hundred). This is why it's nice to be able to just take the tinfoil off the pan and start the new batch as the old one cools. The cookies are not very sweet, as the taste comes mainly from the orange peel, raisins, and liquor. Since this recipe makes so many cookies, you may wish to freeze some of the batter to bake later, but I find they tend to disappear pretty quickly.

Zacusca - Vegetable spread

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, but you roasted two eggplants and froze one in a ziploc bag. Say you roasted some red peppers too, and froze some of those. You're basically ten minutes away from making your own zacusca, a spread very similar to ajvar.

This recipe comes from my grandmother, and she advised using four peppers to one eggplant. I should say that this made way too much, at least for me to consume, but I found another use for it. If I were making it again, I would make half the quantity at most.

So -- coarsely chop an onion, and sautee it in oil. Cut the red peppers into little squares, and add them to the pan:


Add the mushed up roasted eggplant, salt, pepper, and about a spoonful of tomato paste. That's it!


Let it cook for a bit, and the flavours will bind nicely together. I should add that I put some chili powder in this, and I don't think that was a good idea. I think the heat needs to come from the peppers or not at all, and the Romanian version is definitely mild.

In the end, I only managed to eat about half of this, even though it was nice to have in my fridge. (Unfortunately, I made it at the same time as the salata de ardei copti, so it was a bit of a red pepper overload.) But, I "recycled" the rest by frying a bit of garlic and ginger in a pan, some Indian spices (turmeric, cayenne, coriander), and then adding the zacusca (which already had onions). With some rice it made a quick, pseudo-Indian lunch.

Salata de ardei copti - Roast pepper salad

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.

Salata de vinete -- Eggplant salad

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 entire world. It's my one "desert island" food. It's the one food I could have every day of my life. It's not too dissimilar from other roast eggplant dishes around the world, such as baba ghanouj and various concoctions that go under the name "eggplant caviar." But here's the thing: the way I remember it being made in Romania involved charring the eggplants on a plita, a flat sheet of metal (a kind of sideless pan) that would go over an open flame. This was a smelly and hot process, and somehow my memories of the subsequent removal of the charred skin are also not good. So I've never tried to make this myself, figuring that, as much as I love it, I lacked the equipment (I also don't have a barbecue), and it would be too much work.

Fasole verde cu sos de rosii - Green beans with tomato sauce

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 of peeled tomatoes which I then crushed. I broke up the beans into pieces about two inches long, added them to the pot, along with salt, pepper, bay leaves, oregano, and some water. The meal just has to simmer for about half an hour (it takes longer than one would think) until the beans are soft.



All in all, the result was pretty edible, except that the beans were a little too fibrous for my liking. Next time around, I'd remove the long, stringy fibres on the edges, and I'd probably let the whole thing simmer even longer, so that the beans are really nice and mushy.

This is an all-purpose preparation -- one could use string beans, I think, or add some carrots and potatoes as well. Or red pepper. Now that I think of it...

Here's to you, Sanda Marin

"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, realising that I could make a greater number of Indian dishes than Romanian, I decided to try my hand at creating some of the dishes I love. I was never a fan of the heavy, fatty, go-out-into-the-field-and-work Romanian foods, but there are a few basic dishes that I could eat every day for the rest of my life. Like salata de vinete (roasted eggplant salad). And clatite (crepes). And salata de ardei copti (roasted red pepper salad). And papanasi (cheese donuts). And snitel (schnitzel).

Unfortunately, I wasn't at home, and although a growing number of Romanian recipes is available on the internet, I had no idea which ones to trust. Until I found that someone, bless their soul, had digitized Sanda Marin.

Gleefully, I downloaded the pdf (no frayed covers!). Imagine my surprise when faced with the vagaries of Romanian cookbooks... you get the right weights and measures for recipes, but are then told to "spice to taste." No clue on what the spices should be. Just spice it with what you like. The recipes are, in general, meant for people who already know the dishes, know how they want them to taste, and let's be honest here, probably know how to cook them already -- they just need a reminder. Sanda Marin reminds.

Well, I don't know how to cook all of these things, and for some of them, I don't even know how I want them to taste. But I do have a mother and two grandmothers who are reachable by telephone. So here goes.