Cooking like a local in Romania

The fruit & veg here are very good, as are milk products like smantana. Pork is very easy to obtain & we make a lot of schnitzels & roast pork loins. We are used to the fat & skin being left on the meat in the UK & it's very difficult producing a decent roast with beef or pork stripped of it's fat.

I've made cozonac & papanasi - dumplings filled with jam & smothered in sweetened smantana & cheesecakes using telemea cheese. On the whole there is a good range of dessert dishes & cakes. We also bottle cordials in summer & make cider. 

Our neighbour who lives part time in England agrees with us that most Romanian food is bland & lacking in sauces, so on the whole we use local ingredients & adapt to English food. There is very little choice in meat outside of big cities & even our supermarkets & butchers stock  exactly the same limited range of pork & veal with lamb for variety at Easter.

Local curd cheeses are good & very cheap but we buy cheddar in English week at Lidl. Our neighbours seem to live on a diet of soups, cooked in massive pots outside plus mici and sarmale, neither of which appeal to me!

"Romanian food is bland and lacking in sauces" !! Are you crazy. If you are serious in your statement then you've obviously not enjoyed real Romanian food. Shame on you for making such an ill considered statement.

Obviously you have access to a far greater & better range of foodstuffs than we have in the provinces. The quality of butchery locally is abysmal & the range of meat very poor. The local restaurants all serve the same range of 'food like mama cooks' dry, under seasoned & inevitably cold. The comments I made on the bland & lacking sauces were echoed by my Romanian neighbour who works in Birmingham & comes back to Romania for the summer. Apart from cakes & desserts the food is generally very very dull.

Wow, my only advice to you is that maybe you should move. I'm sorry that there is nothing good to eat or in your area, but I assure you that good Romanian cuisine is pretty hard to beat. I've lived in a number of countries both in Europe and the far east. Good food can be found everywhere and preferences are subjective.

It's easy to cook like an amazing Romanian chef if you have these ingredients :

Peppers (Ardei)
Pork or chicken
Pickled cabbage
Smantana (kind of like sour cream in the states)
And tomato paste

That's just a very small amount of popular ingredients, but you can do one of the following to make it the perfect Romanian dish:

1) Use Gaina
2) Use Leustean
3) Use Marad
4) Use Gaina
5) Use Gaina
6) Use Gaina

And enjoy.