3 Warming Dishes for Crisp Fall Days
The New York Times
Carolina Gelen, a cookbook author and video personality, shares cozy vegetable recipes from her childhood in Romania.
I remember the first time my mother allowed me to bake by myself: I must’ve been 6 or 7 when I made poppy seed-coated pretzel bagels. Of course, I forgot the salt in the dough, and they ended up a little bland. But I had found my passion.
That moment stands out for me, but most of my early food memories from my home in Transylvania, a region of Romania, are of my family at the dinner table. We’d set up big pots and pans of chicken soup, roast chicken, mici (Romanian flavored meat rolls), couscous and cabbage rolls, plus homemade pickles, marinated roasted peppers, fresh bread, piles of fresh scallions, raw garlic cloves, chiles and dips. The person closest to the food would tell everyone at the table to “pass the plate” so it could be filled.
As my skills in the kitchen grew, I expanded my repertoire beyond classic Romanian and Hungarian foods. We didn’t have much and going to restaurants was a once-a-year treat, so my mother and I watched cooking shows and tried to replicate the dishes we saw the hosts make.
Turning my cooking hobby into a career was a dream I hadn’t dared to dream. But I applied for — and received — a visa that allowed me to work at Utah’s ski resort restaurants, and I built a wonderful online community of cooking enthusiasts through my social media accounts. From there, I quickly outgrew my small town in Romania and returned to the United States to turn cooking into a career.
I’ve been in the United States for five years now and, funny enough, I miss things like the fresh bread, roadside wine and juicy summer tomatoes from my favorite farmers’ market in Romania. These three celebrations of vegetables come from my Eastern European upbringing and carry all the warmth I hold on to from my old home country to share with my new one.
This classic Hungarian dish encompasses so much about the cuisine I was raised with. With a little time, the vegetables and spices cook down into a silky, jammy stew. There are as many versions of this dish as you might imagine: Some families pair it with meat, some with rice, but my family kept things simple and served it with crusty bread or, sometimes, a crispy fried egg on top.
