Wild garlic leaves make a delicious soup in the spring, they’re wonderful in salads and they’re packed with healthy nutrients, since they grow in rich, pesticide-free forest soil. Here you can see Ligia picking wild garlic this past spring, in a forest near Medias. The forests near our town are full of them!
Spring is almost here and if there’s a forest near you, go pick some wild garlic! The soup is finger-licking good, especially with nice, home-made bread on the side.
I made a short video last year, which I wasn’t sure I should post publicly, because it contains disturbing imagery. However, I finally convinced myself I should, simply because I want you, dear reader, to be able to make informed decisions when you go shopping for food.
The video you’re about to see shows the guts of farm-grown chickens. These are from an independent farm where they grow in crates, as they do in most farms these days. They’re not free range, and they’re certainly not organic. The name of the farm doesn’t matter. What matters is that these chickens weren’t treated as badly as those in true factory farms, and yet their insides tell a dark story about the way we, as humans, treat our food.
Their internal organs are pretty much destroyed, at around 6-7 months of age. They’re large, heavy, hard, tumor-laden, distended, they’re retaining huge amounts of water — they look as if they’ve been eating the most unhealthy crap there is — and they have. All of that chicken feed they get as food makes them look like this, coupled with the lack of movement, the drugs, the stress of living in crates, in the stench of thousands of others like them, unable to roam, forage for food, smell the clean, fresh air of unpolluted nature.
These chickens (and others in much worse condition) are what you find when you go to the supermarket. Sure, you don’t find their guts for sale. You find their meat, which looks decent enough, especially after it’s been pumped full of water, nitrates, MSG and colorants. But their guts find their way into pet food. They’re what you feed your pets.
Please, think about all this the next time you’re buying chicken (or other meat) at the supermarket. I’m not trying to convince you to stop eating meat — that’s your decision to make — I’m just trying to help you make better decisions when it comes to food.
Look for free-range chickens, for organic chickens, buy from local farms where you can see them roaming the land, scratching the earth for worms, not from factory farms.
Or you could try not eating meat. We don’t. We’re raw foodists. But as I said before, I’m not trying to force our lifestyle on you. You are free to choose what you do. Just be aware of the consequences.
Romanian cuisine was (and still can be) wonderfully varied and delicious. Not only are there different dishes in each region of the country, but even the basics, the staple traditional dishes, are prepared differently from region to region. Visiting Romania should be a delectable experience for one’s palate — the potential and the means to bring it about are there.
Sadly, if you should walk into more than one restaurant in Romania these days, your chances are better than 95% that you’ll see the same limited menu — the same soups, the same entrees, the same salads, the same meat dishes, the same desserts, the same drinks etc ad nauseam… It doesn’t matter if the restaurant is part of a two-star, three-star or four-star hotel or pension or if it’s a standalone place in a mountain or seaside resort or just some place alongside the road. Beside a few dishes or drinks that sometimes vary, they share the same boring menu.
They all have vegetable soup (most of them don’t know how to make it). They all have tripe soup (in varying degrees of stomach-turning oiliness). They all have fried trout, most of it bland beyond belief to the taste. They all have, of course, lots of pork, beef and chicken dishes (the same fattening dishes across the board), so it’s no wonder most Romanians are starting to look like potbellied pigs. They all have the same salads, and most seem to compete in using the most withered vegetables, drowned in a sea of oil and topped with nose-turning vinegar.
The question then arises, can you find decent food as you travel through Romania? Sure, if you manage not to get sick of eating the same dishes… We’ve traveled a lot through the country (we’d like to travel some more) and we have come across a few restaurants that do some dishes well. We’ve also seen a few restaurants that have impressed us by straying from the boring sameness with different and delicious dishes. But these places were few and far between, and when you’ve been on the road all day and you walk into a restaurant only to see the same menu, it’s a very disappointing experience.
There’s also another factor that adds a certain degree of difficulty to our search for food. We’re raw vegans, which means we prefer to eat raw, uncooked vegan foods. When we don’t have a choice, we’ll eat cooked vegetarian dishes, such as soups, side dishes or salads. But that doesn’t mean we don’t look at the whole menu, just to see what a particular restaurant is offering to the general public, and that’s when the disappointment sets in.
Having grown up in Southern Transilvania, my palate is naturally accustomed to Southern Transilvanian foods, which include Romanian, Saxon and Hungarian dishes. Those dishes were, surprisingly enough (by today’s standards) mostly vegetarian dishes (ovo-lacto-vegetarian). As I grew up, we ate meat once a week (on Sunday), and it was most likely chicken. We ate beef very seldom (I remember only a few occasions during my childhood), but we did eat pork quite often (to my chagrin) in winter-time. I loathed the stuff, but that’s what we had in the pantry, so that’s what I ate.
If you should go to a restaurant in Southern Transilvania these days, their menu won’t reflect the traditional cuisine of the region at all, even if they say they’re a traditional “Transilvanian” restaurant. (Somehow the stupidity of calling a restaurant “Transilvanian” when it’s located smack-dab in the middle of Transilvania escapes the owners…) They have the same dishes you’ll find everywhere else, prepared in mostly the same ways. And they’ll have mostly meat dishes. Where are the traditional soups, entrees and dishes I grew up with? They’re certainly not on the menu!
My grandmother used to make a delicious sweet potato soup. She also made a sour potato soup with tarragon and milk that makes my mouth water even now. She also made cabbage soup, a nice thick soup with dill and all sorts of condiments, completely unlike the pig food they call cabbage soup in restaurants these days. In the spring, she’d make a wonderful sour salad, watercress or wild garlic leaf soup. Her noodle soup was the best. And she’d also make a dumpling soup that had me licking my fingers and begging for more dumplings.
The meal that had me begging for more was chicken drumstick stew with mashed potatoes. That was the best. But she only made that once a week, on Sunday. She also made a delicious mushroom stew. Oh, and her pea stew was so good! Her fried onion sauce, usually served with mashed beans or whole bean stew, sure made my mouth water. She also made a mean potato stew with sweet sauce. Her fries were amazing, particularly when she sprinkled a little grated cheese on top! I can’t even find proper fries in restaurants these days! Most restaurants decided it’s better (for them, not for the customers) to buy frozen, pre-cut fries and warm them up instead of making them from fresh potatoes, as is the rule.
For dessert, my grandmother also made “gomboti” (a sort of dumpling) filled with plums, apricots or peaches. Or she made “clatite” (a small crepe) filled with fruit jam or honey. She made a lot of desserts as well (layered cakes and more) all of them delicious, unlike the cakes you find in pastry shops these days.
My mother and my wife both cook (my wife is a raw food chef) and they both make their own versions of the vegetarian dishes listed above. They’re all delicious. And as we visited various Romanian friends during my childhood and later life, I got to eat some pretty interesting variations on these same recipes.
When we go to restaurants, I can’t find any of these traditional dishes. Instead, what we’ll find is lots of bland, badly cooked side dishes and lots of meat dishes. And when we go to restaurants in other parts of the country (Moldova, Muntenia, Dobrogea), we can’t find any of the traditional dishes from those regions, either.
When did Romanians start to eat meat every day? That was certainly not the case 15-20 years ago. And look at them now, as a nation… They’re almost as fat as the Americans. Most Romanian men over 30 have pot bellies, which they proudly display and rub as if they’re some treasure. Hey, guys, I got some news for you, big bellies are nothing to brag about. In fact, they’re a sign you’re overeating and they’re also a precursor to erectile dysfunction. Think about that as you gulp down steaks and other fat-laden dishes…
My questions for Romanian restaurant owners are these:
I’m curious to see what answers I’ll get (if any).
This is how a local breadmaking company, Panmed (in Medias, Romania), washes its bread crates. At a car wash, on a muddy floor. You can see the condition of their crates in these photos, before they were washed. After the car wash attendants began to hose them down, more mud started to pour out of them. The thing that gets me is they carry UNWRAPPED bread in those filthy things.
Don’t think Panmed is the sole culprit though. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve talked with people who’ve worked for bread-making concerns, and I’ve found out other things about the quality of the flour, and the ingredients used in their breads, particularly the ones advertised as “traditional recipes” — things that make those breads anything but traditional. And there’s more stuff that happens to the bread when it’s transported, such as it being placed inside the driver’s cabin, out of the crates, on the floor or on the chairs, or being placed back in the crates after it falls to the ground…
I have yet to find a decent bakery that makes real bread — you know, with only the few traditional ingredients. Pretty much ALL bread sold these days tastes like it’s made of wood chips and chemical fillers, and when you look at the ingredient list, it goes on for entire paragraphs. Kaufland (an European grocery/department store) sometimes stocks better bread, baked in-house (I think), but all of the other bread on their shelves tastes just as bad as any of the bread I’ve tried in recent years.
So, welcome to the 21st century, where food is made of crap, and the hygiene is just as bad as in the past. At least back then the ingredients were wholesome.
When I saw the movie Daybreakers (2007), I was shocked livid by the treatment of the remaining humans in the world. They were hunted down like animals, and enslaved in blood harvesting facilities. There, they were hooked up to machinery which kept them barely alive and constantly sucked their blood away, which would then be sold to vampires.
The movie itself was a powerful statement about what would happen if our constant adulation of vampire lore actually came true and bore real fruits. It would be a horrific future. But the movie is also a terrible statement about our current food, which isn’t humans (yet?) but animals, and the way in which we treat them.
I’d like you to watch the movie Earthlings (2005), and ask yourself this simple question: How are we not monsters already? Given what we are doing to animals right now, given the way we treat living, feeling, affectionate beings, just so we can have our baloney and steak, exactly how are we different from the monsters in Daybreak?
Earthlings is available in full length on YouTube, so it’s free to watch. It’s also got subtitles in 25 languages (at the current time), so most of the people in the world who have an internet connection should be able to understand it.
In particular, I’d like you to watch this segment of the movie, where you can clearly see how we harvest our meat.
Upon further comparison, doesn’t it appear that the monsters in Daybreak behaved more humanely with their food than we do with ours? Isn’t that a sad statement upon our society?
Screenshots courtesy of Daybreakers.
Here’s episode 15 of Ligia’s Kitchen! When you watch it, you’ll find out how to make a delectable raw apple cake. To those who’ve patiently waited for it, sorry — we’ve been bogged down by renovations and other projects these past couple of weeks.
LK-015-RO-HD with English subtitles
Released 4/16/11
I am very much against GMO foods, and have taken that stance ever since I found out how these companies operate, and how unnatural it is to genetically modify living organisms, without regard for ethics, without regard for life, and without regard for the people whose livelihoods are affected by these companies’ business practices.
This is why I invite you — no, I implore you — to watch “Unnatural Selection“. It is a very good documentary about GMO foods, and it will help you understand what’s at stake in this brave sickening new world of ours.
I don’t know how much longer the documentary will be available online, but while it’s there, it behooves us all to watch it and learn the truth. And, if you’re reading this on a weekend and you’ve got some extra time, please check out these other documentaries and articles as well:
