Cooking In The Yard

A week outside the big city. A week in the house of some friends who have a huge yard and seven dogs. I like to cook as archaic as possible and here I can do it. My friends have everything they need for cooking in the yard.

Yard cooking has several advantages. The food tastes better, smells of wood fire and I can use a recipe I know from my grandparents.

I try to show how I made a preparation for autumn.

It's about zacusca. I don't know how this word can be translated into English, especially since I don't even think it's a Romanian word!

ZACUSCA is a vegetable preparation that is boiled in oil and kept in jars all winter. It is very tasty.

Although it seems simple, the preparation is very laborious and I worked almost a whole day. I will show you how to prepare it, in stages but without a recipe to follow. It's hard to do for the first time because you have to know how it should be, in taste and shape, when it's ready. That requires exercise ... I have made several mistakes in the past and failed to get the best food. We learn from mistakes! If anyone wants the detailed recipe, then ask for it in the comments and I will publish it.

ZACUSCA

Ingredients: eggplant, red bell pepper, tomatoes, onion, garlic, oil, salt and pepper.

Eggplants and bell peppers should be grilled or baked. Fortunately, my friend has a large hob in the yard. This is a great advantage, you can cook several vegetables at once and the fact that it is outside, in the open air, makes the heat released easier to bear.

While the vegetables are cooking, I take care of the tomatoes. They must be grated and boiled. Fortunately, these activities can be done simultaneously.

After baking, eggplant and bell peppers should be peeled.

The eggplant is chopped into small pieces ...

... and the bell peppers as well.

Now it's the onion's turn. Onions cut into pieces are baked in a pot with sunflower oil. First we prepare the pot and the fire. Then add the oil and onion. Bake until tender.

I forgot to say that I had companions all the time I worked on this zacusca. Very curious.

These separately prepared ingredients are now found in the pot. After the onion has softened, add the aubergines and bell peppers and continue to cook, stirring constantly so that the composition does not burn on the bottom of the pot.

It remains to add the tomato juice obtained by boiling the tomatoes given by grater.

The last phase of cooking means this ... add crushed garlic, hot peppers, salt and pepper. All in quantities required by our taste, meaning we have to taste the composition until we like what we have obtained.

We do this if we want to make eggplant zacusca. There are other types of zacusca, for example mushroom zacusca, but eggplant zacusca is the best known and appreciated.

Then follows a very important action in which zacusca is put in jars and they are sterilized to last for months in the pantry. I don't show it now because I risk boring you.

Along with the time spent shopping, all this action lasted almost a day. Of course, this is also influenced by the amount of vegetables used.

This is how life in the country is, you have to work all the time, especially if the house and the garden are big. I could say it's a dog's life but I would be very wrong.

Because that's dog life!