As it started...
I think it started the night I cooked bucatini l'amatriciana just after New Years. I didn't have time to go get the good pancetta from the Italian deli downtown and just settled on the overpriced packaged meat and a bottle of cheap Chianti from QFC. I made it extra spicy with fresh Fresno peppers rather than just dried chili flakes. The sauce of this specific dish has a way of getting more flavorful as it bunches up towards the bottom of the dish. By day two it's even better than the night you made it.
I think around the second or third glass of wine this particular night, I had a notion. I told Laura I had an idea--that as usual--I prefaced by saying "You're going to think this is stupid, but..."(This is a frequent prologue to many of my somewhat quixotic ideas that don't go very far).
"What, just say it..." replied Laura...
"What if we just cooked a different dish from a different country every night, but did it in geographic order. Like we'd start in Italy right now and just plot an itinerary and keep going all the way around the world until we returned to our original destination..."
"Actually, that's not dumb at all, that sounds sort of interesting."
"Alright, we'll start in Rome, and just go from there..."
Ecstatic that my lady shared my enthusiasm for my new course of action, I quickly set about finding a proper meal of Roman origin to begin our culinary odyssey.
So to cut to the chase, we started in Italy--though we could have counted the meal a few night prior as the proper start to our journey.
Switzerland
"In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the Third Man...
Though we hadn't had the idea of making the dish part of a round-the-world trip, we had served up a somewhat Swiss fondue dish as an unofficial start.
Laura recieved a fondue pot for a birthday present a couple months prior to this. It was basically an easy dinner for both of us--though Trader Joe's was out of their own fondue cheese mix, so we basically bought a combination of pre-packaged Fred Meyers and some French gruyere and other cheese along with a white white from Alsace. Laura made an excellent Savoy salad with raspberry vinaigrette and walnuts.
A good choice, as pre-made Fred Meyer's fondue is always an enjoyable way to watch a Blazers game on a winter night.
Italy
"Esse nufesso qui dice male di macaroni" - Old Italian proverb translated as "One has to be an idiot to speak badly of macaroni."
We started with an Italian dish and I felt it appropriate to be something from Rome. Abbachio all Romana or Roman-style lamb, is a fairly simple dish. But it's a dish I remember eating in Rome at a restaurant near the Pantheon. The flavor from the dish comes from vinegar, white wine, and anchovies--which gives it a slightly salty, rich taste to it. It's a very hearty sort of lamb dish, cooked until tender. We served it was roasted rosemary potatoes, an Italian salad, and a bottle of Barbara D'Alba--a Piedmontese wine, that Laura found a little too intense after the easy-going Chianti we drank a couple nights before. The meal all in all was a success, a proper start, and as always Italian food and wine is an easy combination.
The lamb is on the right--we didn't eat the cat however.
Greece
"Well begun is half done." - Aristotle
The second official stop on the journey was Greece, and unfortunately Greece was a little rushed on busy middle-of-the-week worknight and just like the Greek economy, sort hit a bump in the road and required some austerity on our part. The soup Laura made was good--it was a Greek lemon and egg chicken soup that I enjoyed though she didn't seem enthused about. We also had some leftover spanokopita that we re-heated on the side. The bigger problem was that this meal came right at the start of a nasty stomach illness that Laura caught--meaning that we skipped cooking for a few days. A shame, as well, since we usually enjoy cooking Greek food. But alas, that's how travel sometimes goes...
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This is obviously Greek food.Bulgaria
"If you call one wolf, you invite the pack." Bulgarian proverb.
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Bulgaria was our return to cooking and I picked another relatively simple dish--Bulgarian potted chicken, which is a traditional way of cooking chicken. I used fresh tomatoes with mix of paprika and a chili pepper that gave it a good flavorful mix. I topped it with fresh parsley and a yogurt sauce--which was appropriate since Bulgaria is specifically known for it's yogurt. I couldn't get Bulgarian yogurt, but we used some Greek yogurt, which was really close enough. In fact though, the Bulgarians actually claim to have invented yogurt, the production of which in the region goes back to 3000 BC. Did you know that? Well, now you do. That's how you win Jeopardy and make big money, knowing facts about Bulgarian yogurt.
All in all though I thought the dish was good, if not particularly unique--but tasty in a familiar way. Laura compared it to Syrian food, which would be an idea repeated several more times. Apparently the Syrian food that Laura's father and family cook has a lot of commonalities with much of the surrounding region including the parts of the Balkans the Ottomans ruled over.
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Romania
"Calul bun se vinde în grajd." Romanian proverb meaning "Good wine needs no bush."
Back in the game after Bulgaria, we made another recipe from the giant Eastern European cookbook I bought at the Polish Festival over a year ago. This time we made Bessarabian pancakes stuffed with spinach and feta(Bessarbia was the historical name region of Romania that is now mostly part of the country of Moldova). Along with that we had a shopska salad or in Romanian, Salata bulgărească, which is actually a Bulgarian recipe that's popular in adjacent countries, that's a tasty tomato and onion and cucumber salad with a yogurt and vinegar dressing with a couple chili peppers to give it some kick. Tasty and we had it on our own trip to the Balkans in Bosnia as well. All in all a good mix, and we drank it with a bottle of Grüner Veltliner white wine that Laura had been saving. Again it was a simple meal that was enjoyable for it's simple familiarity--though I think in some ways we sold Romania and Bulgaria short with our choice of recipes. But we were both getting over winter illness, so just getting back to cooking was essential.Hungary
"I'm really Hungary, when is the goulash going to be done..." Laura Daye, waiting for goulash to be ready.
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| One bowl of many of our lamb goulash. |
Hungary will be the final stop on this leg of our journey--and for me it was a good one. Mainly because it involved a giant stewing pot of lamb goulash and lots of wine. Any time I get to drink wine while staring into a giant cauldron of stewing lamb and dumplings cooking in a rich broth, I'm fairly content. I made a couple other goulash recipes--one was more a Czech-style goulash and the other more a spicy Balkan one--and on our trip to Austria, Prague, and Germany last year, we each tried a couple different styles of goulash as it's a fairly ubiquitous dish in all of Central Europe. However, this was a real traditional Hungarian goulash with bell peppers and potatoes--along with the giant egg and flour dumplings. I added a ton of paprika, more peppers, both green and red, and a little of the Côtes du Rhône red wine we were drinking with dinner. We finished off the rest of the Grüner Veltliner as well--which was appropriate since the white wine was Hungarian. It was another rich dish that in some ways almost reminded me of Hungarian chili combined with the familiar flavors of a Eastern European beef stew. Central and Eastern European food however is best as a heary mid-winter meal--it's designed to stick to the insides of your ribcages.
The Journey Continues...
