Chiftelute marinate cu piure

Tried another recipe - this time from the Traditional Romanian Food blog. The Italian in me cringed at meatballs with mashed potatoes, bu I persevered, telling her to shut up :P 

It came out ok.  A looked at the recipe after dinner and critiqued it with me.  It's some thing to try again definitely, because it would be great comfort food, and both kids would eat it.  But with some adjustments - the recipe needs far more spices (you couldn't taste any of the spices at all), I won't use bouillon at all, and the marinade needs work (too much water for only 2t tomato paste - even with the bouillon).  And, according to A, traditionally chiftelute are not round like Italian meatballs, but flattened, almost like little patties.  So I will take that into consideration next time.  We had leftovers, and since you couldn't taste the spices at all, I doctored up the chiftelute and made Italian sauce and lasagna with meatballs the following night.  And homemade cannolli - I asked A if he wouldn't rather just be Italian ... it would be so much easier.  I mean, I can already cook Italian food, and I can speak some Italian, and with him already speaking Romanian, learning Italian would be a breeze ...

The verdict? Try again, but this will go into our repertoire for sure.  I will be trying it again this week. 

Cum mi-am petrecut sfâr¸situl lumii

We watched this last night (The Way I Spent the End of the World).  Thankful for subtitles, but I did catch lots of yesses and nos, water, several references to family, sleeping, eating, "wait" and "stop" ...

Google

just translated the name of a chicken recipe for me as "Naughty Chicken Company with Sourness".


I'm guessing A's mom has never made that ...


and that I am better off with my own translations :P 



Still, I am intrigued.  It might go well with the oddly translated dessert of  "apples on the sofa".  I would think one would need a break on the sofa after all that naughty chicken company.

La multi ani

We spent a quiet New Year's Eve at home cooking together.  Working more on the amandina, and I made my first attempt at savarine New Year's Day.  

I've realized that I will be spending the rest of my life chopping vegetables into little pieces.  I think I spent over an hour just chopping on New Year's Eve.   I chop veggies anyhow, but I'm not precise and methodical about it, not the way you have to be when you make things like salata de boeuf ...

which is misleading because we forgot to buy beef so really it is salata de pui.  I've helped A make it for the past few years, but I was determined to make this one completely by myself.  I am pretty pleased with how it turned out! And in case you can't tell, that's supposed to b a shooting star.  The one we made for Christmas was a lot prettier --

Usually, A just makes geometric designs, but I was feeling all inspired on Christmas morning and started a snowman.  He did make sure his tree was geometric :) 

Dinner was ghiveci, something I've never had before.  A keeps saying he made it, but I distinctly remember browning the meat, sauteing the onions and garlic, chopping the veggies by myself.  Hmmm ... He did add the crushed tomatoes and the herbs though because I was busy chopping more vegetables for my salata.

Amandina & Savarine

Getting closer on the amandina - the cream is perfect, the rum syrup and glaze are just what we want.  The cake though ...

First attempt at savarine - A's mom's favorite pastry.  The taste is good, bu again, that cake just isn't right.  They're not the right size either - I used regular cupcake/muffin tins, which are too small.  I need to find a savarine mold that is not aluminum or that flexible plasticy stuff - I won't use either of those.  Wonder what my odds are of finding stainless steel ones?

Even though the savarine isn't really even close, I am pretty proud of myself for making it.  Why? Because I made it on Sunday morning with a recipe that was entirely in Romanian.  Why is this a big deal? Because as of Thursday morning, I knew 4 words in Romanian - salad, fruit, of. and yes.  With all the recipes I've been googling and blogs I have been finding, I've been learning as I go along.  I ran down to the computer once before I started to check 2-3 things on google translate that were in the instructions, but didn't write anything in English on the recipe.  As I was making it, A walked in and said "I thought you were going to translate this."  I said I had, mostly myself, and I didn't need to write it down because I could read enough of it myself that I didn't need to :)   Having spoken/read Italian fairly well from middle school through college is totally paying off now!