Those of you who are naturally inclined to read a restaurant menu not only for nutritional purposes but also to pick on typos, misspellings and funny mistranslations [1] are probably used to seeing entries like “ciorbă de văcuţă” and “mămăliguţă cu brânză”, as in Meniu 2 in the picture. Nothing really wrong with those, but they do make you wonder a bit: both “văcuţă” and “mămăliguţă” are based on vacă (cow) and mămăligă (polenta), to which the diminutive suffix -uţă was added

When we say "fasting", we immediately think of food restrictions, that is, what we eliminate from our rich, daily diet - meat, dairy, eggs, and fish. But the benefits of this practice are part of a much deeper body cleaning and detoxification cycle. Fasting, at a more profound level, has other benefits as well - increasing cardiovascular health, reducing the risk of cancer, repairing genes and increasing longevity. The body has the great ability to repair and fix itself, as l

Do you ever miss those cold winter mornings when the whole house smells of sweet bread (cozonac) and your friends call you to go out carolling? I close my eyes and I can feel that smell again… Do you ever want to be a child again, to go sleighing and snowballing all day long? Well, I do! I really miss those wonderful times! I remember all the family preparations before Christmas: cooking the traditional Romanian cabbage rolls (sarmale), pork specialties like piftie, tobă, cal

A few years ago around Christmas, a Romanian-American acquaintance I was supposed to meet for a chat and coffee phoned to put off our meeting: he’d been invited to a childhood friend’s house to have a meal of “piftie and other such barbarities.” My acquaintance, a vegetarian Buddhist from an old aristocratic Moldovan family, who was now visiting the old country after 40 years in the US, was, of course, horrified by the prospect. The barbarities in question, colloquially known

Romania really is a wonderful country! Besides plains, rivers, hills and mountains, it has the Danube Delta: hundreds of bird species, white water lilies, an amazing maze of canals flanked by willows, a rich community of fish and animals: a paradise lost in time. From the moment you leave Tulcea, the last city proper before wilderness gradually takes over, and up until you come back to the city, you are amazed at the wonderful simplicity of these places. We left Tulcea on boa

The Romanian Easter is an Orthodox holiday. Easter (or the Resurrection) celebrates Jesus’ ascension to Heaven. This is always a Sunday holiday and the Monday after is usually a free day. The word for Easter in Romanian is Paște, with its other form Paști. The most commonly known Easter tradition in Romania is painting eggs. How the eggs are painted will vary from one region to the other. Red is the traditional colour (it symbolizes Jesus’ blood), but in modern days Easter eg

Ready? Steady. Hold it right! You hold it honest! No cheating. Ready? Yup. “Christ is risen!” “He is risen indeed!” CRACK! Little did we Romanian children know that our Easter eggs, dyed by mother on Holy Thursday in the steamy kitchen where the roast lamb was in a very hot get-perfectly-cooked race against the cozonac [1], had come down through the mists of Time all the way from - where else? - Africa, cradle of all sapiens. Back then and there, humans reportedly decorated o

1st of March - Mărțișor For celebrating the spring’s arrival on the 1st of March and the beginning of a new life cycle, Romanians have a special tradition, called Mărțișor. This tradition is a very old one (about 8000 years old) and it is linked to Romanian ancestors - the Dacians, who were wearing red and white pebbles strung on a string and worn around the neck, to celebrate the beginning of spring. The word mărțișor is the diminutive from the month of March (martie), whic