I HAVE A NEW LOVE... ROMANIAN WINE!!!

I knew that I would probably be entertaining a lot more in Romania than I normally did in Canada. Now I had many people over for drinks and snacks like Christmas parties, driveway parties and the odd small supper with close friends. Let's face it though, I have never hosted a Christmas dinner, Easter dinner etc that I would need to prepare a lot more stuff for. So when David came home a told me he volunteered me to cook a Canadian BBQ for his big boss and others I was not surprised. The surprise came when he told me 2 days before the events that all of the mangers, directors and chiefs would be attending. He wasn't sure if they would be bringing their families with them. At the very least we were expecting 16 people and many more at the most. I had been thinking all week about a menu and how to make it Canadian, whilst living in this Romanian world. My major struggle was the language. You walk down the sugar ilse and you don't know if your buying powdered, fine, icing, or even brown sugar. They are all in boxes. So together with David, we bought all the groceries we thought we needed and hoped for the best. I would be serving at this BBQ, Romanians, Canadians, Parisian & Luxemburg residents, Czechs and East Indians. The Czech was Davids big boss who had flown in 2 days prior for meetings. How on earth do I please everyone! As they walked in I greated them with drinks of their choice but was shocked with what they had brought for me. Almost every person who attended brought me flowers, chocolates, wine, home made wine, books and even toys for the children as gifts. I ran out of vases and had to cut 1.5L water bottles to host all the flowers! Apparently it is the custom to bring flowers to a dinner party here. How nice is that? Hopefully they would like what I had to give them. My menu was as follows:

Appetizer - Heaping stack of ground beef nachos smoothered in Canadian cheddar cheese. (I know the nacho part isn't terribly Canadian but I couldn't find molasses anywhere to make French Canadian Beans.) We found the cheddar after shopping high and low in many stores and ended up buying the whole block. We served the Nachos with sour cream and Salsa that I had brought over from Canada as David had told me there was no salsa to be found in Roman.
THEY LOVED IT! THEY WERE SHOCKED WITH HOW TASTY IT WAS! We found these tortilla chips at a store about 40 kms away from Roman and they had a bit of a spice to them. Most of them had never had tortilla chips before. So far, so good.

Main Dish - BBQ Steak and Chicken Breast. 26 of them to be exact. I marinated them all day in wine, garlic and Montreal spice. (I obviously had shipped that.) David cooked it to perfection on our Vermont BBQ that we brought over from Canada. The Romanians were gob smacked when they saw the grill. Not many grills around here. A grill here is an open fire built up with bricks and coals. The meat was delicious and a huge hit. I put ketchup on the table as well as HP sauce and Bulls Eye BBQ sauce. (Also sent from Canada) The Parisien took the BBQ sauce to try something different and fell in love. So then everyone else had a go. Not much left now.

Side Dishes - BBQ Potatoes served with sour cream, chives , shredded cheddar and butter. I cut some more potatoes up thin and covered them in Olive Oil, sea salt and pepper and BBQ's them wrapped in tin foil also. They were also a hit.
A huge Mandarin and cashew salad with thin sliced Red onions and a sweet vinegrette. Asian inspired I think but was stumped on a Canadian salad.
Of course, 4 loaves of gorgoeus fresh, french bread that you can but just around the corner. So hard to resist when your walking by and a fresh, still warm loaf only costs $0.38. We ate one loaf on the way to the mountains the other weekends. Sigh!

Dessert - The selling feature and reason that at least 3 of the people came to the BBQ, Canadian Maple Syrup Crepes. I spent all night the night before and the morning of making 36 crepes exactly the same size and thickness. I wrapped strawberries and cold whipped cream in the centre, plopped a dolop of whipped cream on the top, topped (generously) with Maple Syrup and facied up with sifted icing sugar around the plates edge. They were the bomb! One of the Indian ex pats came to the kitchen at one point when I was plating more crepes and asked for a spoon. I thought I hadn't given him a fork and felt embarassed but he sheepishly laughed and said with thick Indian accent, "No, I want only t o scoop up the remaining syrup and then I will lick my plate." I beamed with pride. About 3 minutes later someone came in and asked for 9 spoons. No kidding!

Now did I mention I don't have a dish washer in Romania! YA! I used every single dish in my house. China, crystal, regular dishes and even had to break out some plastic bowls for Nuts. (They love nuts here. I haven't heard of anyone having allergies either which is very interesting.) I'm sure you can imagine the enormous pile of dishes that awaited me. SHIIIIT. So I started, the girls wee being entertained by one of the Admin. Assistances there were there, thank god for her, so I started washing. I left at one point to get something for someone and next thing I new my husbands close friend Sachin was washing my dishes. No matter what I said he wouldn't stop to let me wash. So I started to dry and put things away. Ruby needed a new diaper so when I returned from changing her a lovely girl from Luxemberg was drying. No matter what I did, they wouldn't let me do it. They gave me a glass, filled it with home made red wine and said have a drink. That is when I fell in love. This wine was the smoothest wine I've ever had. I thought immediately of my dear friend Shelly would is toasting me as she reads this. OMG! So good. When I say home made wine I mean they have a small vineyard in their backyard and make the wine in the basement. No WineNot stores here! God bless these 2 angels cause my feet were getting sore. Never showed it though! David broke out the scotch and shooters at the end of the night. One of the Romanian bosses agreed to trying Grand Marnier and fell in love himself. So much so he broke out into song and serenaded us with Romanian welcoming songs for 15 minutes. He was singing so loud, like the famous tenors, his face was actually turnign purple at times. I thought I was going to be doing CPR at one point. His BP must have been 260/140 but he was smiling!

Everyone was gone by 11:00 which was nice and I think I slept the best I had since I had arrived. What an introduction to dinner parties! Hopefully they get smaller from here.

Alison