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Romanians as a people love to eat all kinds of appetizing food. Romanian cuisine is therefore full of mouth watering recipes. You can take your pick from preparations of the everyday sort as well as delicacies, which are cooked only on special occasions. Just take a look at two preparations: traditional cheese balls and cabbage rolls.
As a matter of fact, Romanians hate delays in cooking something nice once they made up their mind about it. So let us start right away with the cheese ball, which you can find in any good list of Romanian recipes. The cooking time for this preparation is about an hour.
To cook cheese balls you have to prepare a corn flour sauce and a filling. For the sauce you need 350 grams of corn flour, about a half teaspoon of salt and one and a half litre of water. For the filling you require 4 eggs, 50 grams of butter and two types of cheese totalling 300 grams. The kinds of cheese best suited for this preparation are bellows cheese ("branza de burduf") and "telemea", a salt flavored cheese.
To start with, boil the eggs and cook a light corn flour sauce. For the authentic touch, an earthen pot is indispensable for cooking the cheese balls. It imparts the genuine Romanian flavor to the preparation. For the best results, you will need to soak the pot in cold water for 15 minutes and then rub the inside with enough butter so that the cheese balls do not stick to it.
When the corn flour sauce has been cooked, pour one third portion into the earthen pot. Next, cut the bellows cheese into small pieces with a fork and divide the boiled eggs into two. Then put in the bellows cheese and two halved eggs along with a teaspoon of butter. Follow it up with anoth
er third of the sauce, two halved eggs and the salty cheese. Top up with the sauce left and you have your cheese balls ready.
The next recipe we are going to share with you is the cabbage roll, and it is as important member of traditional Romanian cuisine as the cheese ball. It could take you half an hour to prepare the ingredients, and thrice that time to cook in an oven.
Basic ingredients of the cabbage roll are one kilo mincemeat, two onions (not too big), some verdure, 200 grams of rice, two spoons of tomato paste, one teaspoon salt, a dash of pepper, two laurel leaves, and a hot pepper. Also required is a regular sized sauerkraut, but only after you immerse it in water for a minimum of two hours to remove the salt. If you use raw cabbage, you will need to scald it.
Equipment required to cook the cabbage roll includes now familiar Romanian earthen pot, along with typical utensils and kitchen implements like a mincer or kitchen robot, a cooker with a mandatory oven, etcetera. Preparing the ingredients for cooking involves mincing the meat with the help of the kitchen robot or the mince maker and chopping the onions and verdure as well. Now mix the minced meat, chopped onions and verdure together with the rice, tomato paste, salt and pepper. Next, roll them into cabbage leaves and they are ready to cook.
These traditional preparations tell us a lot about the predominantly pastoral lifestyle of Romania down the ages. One can almost see the farmers and the shepherds sitting down at a traditional meal, drinking home brewed liquor with jokes flying around the table, having a gala time at the end of a day of toil in the fields and the meadows of the Romanian countryside.
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