Month 2 day 18: Transylvania

Today I cooked:
Mititei, Saveur March 2012
Supă Cu Găluşte, Saveur March 2012

These recipes were part of Saveur's Transylvania feature. Transylvanian cooking apparently uses tons of paprika (fine) and caraway seeds (eww).

Supă Cu Găluşte is chicken soup with semolina dumplings. But since we were already going to make sausages (G chose that recipe), I decided to just leave out the chicken and make a vegetable soup with dumplings. It didn't seem lacking in flavor, although it would certainly be good with chicken too.
We liked this soup. It's super easy and the semolina dumplings are really good. They have a strong egg flavor-- kind of like egg drop soup except more solid. The dumplings really expand when being cooked, even though they're just semolina flour, eggs, and onion. Is it the flour that expands like that?

 

Mititei are grilled pork sausages. (grilled on a grill pan, this being March. And by grilled, I mean boiled in the grease that poured out of them as soon as they got hot, which was deeper than the grill bars are tall). The reviews on the website are scathing, saying how inauthentic this recipe is (although we kind of trust Saveur).  But, the only thing we could taste was salt. The recipe calls for 4 tsp of salt to 2 pounds of ground pork. This normally would be a red flag, but the recipe also called for large amounts of everything-- 9 garlic cloves, 2 tablespoons of paprika, etc. I left out the caraway seeds because those are gross. G wants to keep this recipe, but we will make note for next time to put in less salt. It was good that we were eating it along with soup to dilute it out. A serving should have been 3 sausages probably, but we were overly ambitious and ate 5 each, which is 1 tsp salt and 1/2 lb meat. Gross. Although these really shrunk when the grease came out while cooking, so not quite 8 oz of meat in the end.

Most of the recipes in this feature are pretty straightforward with simple, easy-to-acquire ingredients (c.f. the Iranian feature with its Persian sour plums, rose water, etc. Or anything else in Saveur). But they pack a lot of spices and vegetables, making them really interesting. I think I might keep a few more of these recipes to try later. Originally we planned to make a meatball soup recipe, but then realized that was the Transylvanian equivalent of the Persian dish we had just last week, so switched to separate dishes of sausages and soup. But it would still be nice to try and compare.