Creative Cooking

Growing up my grandmother always had plain yogurt in her refrigerator. Every morning for breakfast she ate a combination of plain yogurt and a fiber rich cereal mix that for 80 years has kept her looking like she’s 60.

I understand the health benefits of plain yogurt. No added sugars or flavors – just natural, healthy cultured cow product. The closest I’ve come to enjoying plain yogurt in recent years is vanilla yogurt which has just as much sugar as the more delicious varieties of marionberry or passion-peach.

Unfortunately, when shopping for big tubs of yogurt, Romanians only seem to like plain yogurt. Granted there are 10 varieties of plain yogurt to choose from, but it is all plain just the same. For a few days I mixed my plain yogurt with the corn flakes and powered through my breakfast that just tasted a bit off. Then, I got creative.

As it turns out – a spoon full of mixed berry jam livens up your bowl of plain yogurt with remarkable effectiveness. I’m guessing the caloric intake of my jam-yogurt combination is at least as high as it would be if I just bought a single serving of mixed berry yogurt. But I’m cheap and don’t like to buy individual containers of yogurt because they are a total rip off. So jam-yogurt it is.

Another example of creative cooking? A couple of weeks ago I had not yet discovered the hiding place for salt at my grocery store. And clearly not knowing the phrase “what aisle is the salt in” I was limited in my ability to find the salt (and admittedly lazy and impatient on my shopping ventures). So when eating chicken nuggets and fries at the IKEA café I snagged a few packets of salt. This did two things for me: gave me much needed salt for my delicious dinner of pasta with butter AND taught me the word for salt. Sare. So last night when shopping I was confident in my purchase of a bottle of SARE and didn’t have to worry that I was buying a bottle of MSG or rat poison.

And when I don’t want to cook I have found a pretty terrific place on my way home from the metro. It looked sketchy. Then I ate there and it was fantastic. If you come to Bucharest and visit me, insist on a visit to Pita Fan. Then we’ll go to the place a couple of doors down for a Nutella crepe. And then you will understand why I MUST conquer the city that doesn’t run if I, too, want to look 60 when I'm 80.