Halfway down the Danube

The chicken adobo sounds good. And not unlike see yo gai or red cooked chicken. The difference being the see yo gai can use chinese wine in place of the vinegar. Plus there is ginger and star anise as well as the garlic.

I can't really say anything about the tomato kitchen but the tomatoes here are great. Full of flavor, yum.

Here my favorite tomato summer dish: Boil any pasta you like (any short, fat pasta is best). Discard the boiling water and add, to the hot pasta, in the still hot pot, the following:
Fresh, diced tomatoes (raw, of course), diced mozarella cheese (the real kind), and fresh chopped basil. Quantities to your liking.
Add a spoonful or two of balsamic vinegar, a sprinkle of olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. The result is a warm, light dish that tastes great and is wonderful for those sticky, humid days. Enjoy!

Chicken adobo! Wow, I haven't thought of that since I left Saipan. But the name brought back a flood of sensory memory. Vinegary and garlicky, as you say. Mmmm.

Romanian tomatoes are indeed wonderful, but somewhat underused AFAICT. I suspect it's the damn BPPCD at work again.

That's the Balkan Public-Private Cuisine Dichotomy, of course; and what it means is, the stuff you get in restaurants tends to be "prestige" cooking, while a lot of native cuisine is never seen by the foreigner because it's low-status "kitchen" cooking.

Public cuisine tends to emphasize meat -- lots of meat -- and large portions. Alternately, it's foreign (i.e., Western European) cuisine, usually not done very well (though there are honorable exceptions). Lots of grease, lots of starch, heavy sweet desserts; the point is that when you're finished, you know you've had a /meal/.

Private cuisine seems to make a lot more use of vegetables... but it's, well, low-status, and hard to get unless you actually get into someone's kitchen. Even then, you have to get past an initial period of "you are Special Guests, so we will serve you Meat, followed by lots of high-calorie sweets". You know you've really made friends with a Serb or Romanian when you can drop in and be served a casual meal of sarma or cabbage salad.

Point being, tomatoes, being veggies, seem to be relegated to the low status of private food -- something you might secretly enjoy in Mama's kitchen, but not something you'd pay to get served in a restaurant. More's the pity, because when they're in season, they are delicious.

Doug M.

Hi Syd! It's not surprising that chicken adobo bears a close resemblance to a Chinese dish, and some European ones too. In fact, there's a whole class of simple chicken dishes from around the world that have sour, savory, and spicy components. Chicken paprikash, for example, falls right along that continuum. And there are chicken adobo versions with ginger.

But chicken adobo is very much a sweep-your-kitchen sort of meal. All the principal components can be stored for a long time -- vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, rice, and presumably the chickens still running around -- and it's been speculated that chicken adobo was devised to avoid ingredients that could spoil easily, the Philippines having been for centuries a rather footloose pioneer society. This may be the covered wagon version of a fancier Spanish, or Malay, or Chinese dish, or some combination thereof.

C.

Claudia, my tomato lust starts with that recipe, and then strips the ingredients away in stages, like Gypsy Rose Lee.

First stage: why a pasta salad? Even pasta can be kind of heavy in the summer. Italians do just fine with insalate caprese, slices of real mozzarella and fresh ripe tomatoes, served with a sprinkle of fresh basil (the king of herbs), salt, pepper, and good olive oil.

Second stage: much as I love cheese, it's not really necessary here. This is from someone whose home state made dairy products an essential dietary requirement for forty years.

Third stage: the olive oil and the basil are sometimes a little bit too fancy for my spartan Midwestern tastes. Just honest salt and pepper will do, and the tomato itself.

Final stage: but sometimes, sometimes I want just the tomato, and nothing but the tomato. Fresh, ripe, juicy, bursting in my mouth... oh yeah.

It's a very primal experience.

C.

Mais non!

It's not a pasta salad, really. It's warm pasta with a raw sauce. It's better than Caprese because it's more filling -- a real main dish that kids also love.

The basil is absolutely necessary. Ah! Ah! Fresh basil, of course, plucked from your own window sill/balcony plant. The olive oil is just a sprinkle to keep the pasta from sticking. The mozarellea (again, I mean the real mozarella, not what most Americans/Romanians mean when they say mozarella) slightly melts from the still hot pasta/pot and ah... it all just con-fuses (little joke) into a perfect mix.

Come to think of it, we have all the ingredients and need to empty the fridge. Tomato pasta it is, again, tonight. :-)

In defense of American mozzarella, it's used in the US primarily as a melt. So the formulation is a little different.

C.

"It was originally devised in the Philippines"

You sure about that? Sounds suspiciously like a dish my mom used to make. Though since she worked in hospitals in New Jersey most of her life, I can't discount the Philippine influence.

Bernard, I'm pretty sure it's Filipino in origin (and it certainly is Filipino now, since it was served at the 1898 independence dinner, a bit prematurely I suppose). On the one hand, there's the soy sauce; on the other hand, there's an absence of both lard and olive oil as cooking fats. This rather precludes a more direct colonial Spanish origin. Though there's a Mexican chicken adobo which seems to be a distant cousin to the Filipino dish, and I've heard of a Peruvian one.

(Mexican chicken adobo has the same basic premise of sour, savory, and spicy flavors as Filipino chicken adobo, but the ingredients are rather different, and some, I suspect, would be nearly impossible to find in Romania. Achiote? There's probably one American expatriate movie guy who keeps his stash in a safe in his house off Bulevardul Mircea Eliade.)

C.