The home away from home

Passport & Plate - Fusion Romanian camel sour soup

Romania | Wednesday, March 4, 2015 | 5 photos

Ingredients
One piece of camel meat with fat and bone (can work with pork or beef)
2 carrots
2 parsnips
2 potatoes
Half of a celery root
2 bell peppers
6 tomatoes
A handful of rice
2 eggs
Fresh parsley
2 table spoons of Vegeta (or dehydrated vegetables)
Some sort of sour liquid like vinegar, pickle juice, sauerkraut juice or Romanian Bors if you have the connections
Feta cheese

 

How to prepare this recipe
1. Take a big pot and fill it half way with water. Put the pot on the fire and add the meat after being cut into smaller pieces.
2. Boil the meat for about half an hour on a medium fire, taking the foam and impurities from the top.
3. While the meat is boiling, take the vegetables and dice them really small with your cool knife while feeling like a bad-ass ninja . Only the potatoes should be left in bigger pieces.
4. After the water stops making foam, add the diced vegetables,rice and Vegeta. Be careful not to drop them from too high and burn yourself. You still have a lot to do.
5. Continue boiling until the vegetables are soft. At this point you can check the consistency of the soup. If you feel like there isn't enough liquid and it resembles a stew a little too much, you can add more water and mix.
6. Add the sour liquid that you so skilfully manage to procure from a friend that knows a friend that sent it to you from the homeland by post, breaking all the rules of international trade and customs.
7. Now is the moment of truth when all your skill as a cook comes into play. It's the all important moment of the taste test. Check if the sourness is there and tweak it with salt and pepper until it's just right.
8. After you've done all this turn off the fire and add the 2 beaten eggs slowly into the liquid while creating a spinning vortex in the soup with your spoon. The eggs should be broken up like your tent after a hurricane.
9. Serve it hot, in a bowl with fresh cut parsley on the top and some feta crumblings inside. If you feel brave you can have a hot pepper on the side.
Congratulations! You made your first Arabic-Romanian fusion dish.
Now enjoy the results and save some for your friends. Don't forget to post it on Instagram, Facebook and send it by mail.

 

The story behind this recipe
Most of my adult life I've been working abroad. From the hills of France to the deserts of Libya, the Romanian sour soup is what made me feel at home. There is nothing more comforting then a nice, hot bowl of soup, just like grandma made it.
After working in Libya for around 6 months and having tried all the local food available in the small city of Sirt a few times over, I've decided that I've had enough lamb, beef and rice to last me for a lifetime. So it was time for Romanian sour soup.
Finding all the ingredients wasn't easy. After an all-out search that lasted two days, we found everything in the recipe except for pork meat and sour cream.You'd be surprised how hard it is to get root vegetables in the desert. But Romanians never give up and are very resourceful. The pork meat was replaced by an exotic looking piece of camel leg and the sour cream by some imported feta cheese found in the back of the supermarket shelve.
When it came to cooking it we had one last obstacle to overcome. We had no kitchen. Nevertheless our Romanian ingenuity triumphed once again and we improvised a kitchen from a portable hot plate on top of an air conditioning machine.
After a few hours of cooking in the midday sun and struggling to keep the sand out of the food, we finally got to enjoy the fruits of our labour. The moment I felt the very familiar sour taste I was instantly transported back home to Romania. Back to my garden from which I normally source the ingredients for all my cooking. Back to my childhood when mum or grandma where talking my year off while cooking next to stove. Back to the green place where shepherds pass my house twice a year taking the sheep in the mountains and back again.
For me, The Romanian sour soup is the taste of home, the taste of the familiar. And no matter where in the world I find myself, I know that I have a strong connection with everything I left behind.