Tropical Zone Gardening: It's the season to be jolly... so there's no... without..., 1 by goofybulb

goofybulb wrote:
Dutchlady, your comment makes me so happy!

There are a couple of days left 'till Christmas Eve. Until then, I thought of sharing with you two of our most important Romanian dishes, pillars of Romanian celebratory cuisine. No holiday is complete without sarmale and cozonac. This means that you will find them on our tables for Christmas too. Both dishes can be found, with variations, throughout the Balkans. But let me tell you, since I came to US, I tasted the sarmale equivalents (the Greek version, the Polish, even the American-style) and cozonac (Polish style, and the Italian panettone), but, no offense to any nation above, as rich and tasty as ours there were none! (of course I have to take sides to our national version! But the Italian girl in our lab admitted that ours is better!)

Today I'll tell you about cozonac. It's a desert that requires a lot of work and patience. It is said that a woman is ready for marriage when she can bake them properly.

I confess this is not true, at least not anymore... I got married without knowing the art of making cozonac. And so did my mother, and my mother's mother - Grandma Buita. In fact, at some point, all the women in our house thought there's a curse placed on us... Buita and Mom would work hard to prepare them, each year, about 3 times a year, and they never rose well. They were ugly, really ugly, flat and kind of compacted and hardened (I'm not finding better words to translate the Romanian word we use for this)! But they were tasty nonetheless!

I got married without baking them even once. My first cozonac was "made in US". It appears that the curse lifted, at least of off me. My sister still has trouble with them. I found that the best-kept secrets with cozonac are three: (1) a good mixing robot, (2) a well heated room (this wasn't a problem in Miami, just stopping the AC was doing the trick, but now I'll have to make sure that in the kitchen there will be over 80F for the raising) and (3) lots of patience for them to rise in the baking forms, before sticking them in the oven for the baking.

My "mixing robot" for 6 years was called Silviu. We purchased a real robot (KitchenAid) just after moving to El Paso. We both knew that Silviu's busy schedule would brig him to un-imagined levels of tiredness, so chances were that he will run out of batteries. I will try the robot for this Christmas' cozonac. I tested it with the bread recipe, and I've got nice bread, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for cozonac, too. If this works fine, the Silviu robot will retire with honors from this job, still remaining my sweet loving husband.

The recipe I'm going to present to you is my father-in-laws. There can be variations in the number of eggs (with increasing amounts of flour), the oil is replaced in some regions with lard (either pork or goose), some add other fillings, but the best, richest is with walnuts - after all, they were an almost sacred fruit for the Romanians. It is very wordy and detailed - I translated it for my Chinese friend, Ling, she never baked anything in her whole life until this recipe, and I'm very proud of her, she would make a great Romanian wife!

These intro stories being said, wait a second for the recipe... it can be round or rectangular, according with your aesthetic beliefs...