Urzici cu orez la cuptor

“Nettles with rice in the oven”

So, in a previous post I cooked a dish of patience dock leaves with rice (stevie cu orez) so it only seemed fitting that I cook a similarly popular countryside dish from their archnemisis, the stinging nettle. If you’ve never eaten stinging nettles before then don’t worry as cooked nettles won’t sting. Nettles, or urzici as they are called in Romanian, start to appear in the markets around the beginning of April. In fact, there is a day dedicated to nettles called ‘nunta urzicilor’ (the wedding of the nettles) which is usually the last Sunday before Easter Sunday and is also celebrated as the Day of Flowers, when people called Florin or Florentina are wished well. After this day nettles are no longer considered good eating as their taste decreases once they have flowered, although I've obviously ignored this - we had a late winter so we are perhaps a few weeks behind schedule. However, whenever you pick your nettles, make sure you go for the young fresh tips of the plant. If you have them growing in your garden, you can continue to trim them, harvesting the new tips as they appear, for some time. If you forage them, make sure you wash them well and avoid those nettles from the roadside (probably too stinky with pollution to be edible).

In this recipe, which I found in Radu Anton Roman’s book, I’m just going to cook a simple oven dish of nettles made with rice and eggs, similar to the dish I made with the stevie (patience dock). Again, it can be a meal in its own right, or a side dish. You could serve it, as with other leaf-based dishes, with a poached or fried egg (runny yolk, of course) and even with a little bacon. As a side dish, it would probably go best with pork or beef.

Time: 90 minutes

Servings: 6 (as a main) to 8 (as a side)

Ingredients:

About 1kg (a very full carrier bag) of stinging nettles

4 eggs

50g of butter

1 glass (about 200ml) of milk

4 tablespoons of plain flour

Rice

Around 200g of telemea (white cheese, feta)

Salt and pepper

Method:

1. Pick over the nettles and remove any old leaves, rotten leaves, badly chewed leaves, wilted leaves, excessively long stalks, stalks with roots still attached – anything that doesn’t look good – and give the nettles a very good wash in cold water to remove any soil or sand.

2. Bring a large stock pot half full of water to the boil (or if you don’t have such a pot, bring two or three regular pots of water to the boil or do it in batches). Plunge the nettles into the boiling water, leave them to return to the boil, stir from time to time, and cook until well wilted and soft, probably about 5-10 minutes. Check they are done by looking for a thicker stem and tasting it – it should be soft and edible, not at all chewy, but perhaps with a little crunch. When they are done, remove them from the pan with a slotted spoon and dump into a colander over a bowl to collect the liquid. Leave for a while to drain well and steam dry. Some poeple reserve the drained liquid and drink it in the mornings on an empty stomach for health reasons - it's supposed to be a good purifier.

3. While they are boiling, wash a cup of rice and cook it in boiling water until soft.

4. While the rice is boiling, beat the eggs together in a bowl and mix in the butter (melted), the pepper, the milk, and the flour. Beat together until it’s well combined and frothy. Put to one side.

5. Once the nettles have drained and cooled a bit, chop them up roughly with a heavy knife or a mezzaluna. Probably best to do this in batches.

6. Mix the chopped nettles with the egg mixture and the cooked rice and season with salt to taste.

7. Grease a ceramic baking dish with butter or lard and tip in the nettle mixture.

8. Grate or crumble the white cheese on top.

9. Put it on the oven, preheated to a lowish heat (about 180-200C say), and leave it there for about 30 to 40 minutes, just about long enough for the egg mixture to thicken and the cheese to turn brown.

The resulting dish can be served in squares. I had it on its own with a simple salad of leurda and ceapa verde (wild garlic and spring onion) mixed together with some mayo.

Mancare de stevie cu orez

“Patience dock leaves and rice”

I have very vivid memories of dock leaves from when I was a child, normally memories of spitting on them and holding them on a freshly-inflamed area of skin brought about by running through the stinging nettles at the bottom of the garden. I never once recall talk of eating dock leaves but apparently they are edible and a forager’s favourite. The most commonly-found type of dock plant is the broad dock and I suppose it was this that grew at the bottom of my garden. This is edible, but apparently not favoured. The patience dock (rumex patientia) makes the best eating and it is this that can be found in the market around Romania in the spring, under the name of stevie – no, not the diminutive of Steven: it’s pronounced shtev-ee-eh.

Stevie, the patience dock, has numerous uses in Romanian cuisine. Most commonly, it is cooked as a kind of salad, a meal in its own right or as a side dish. It can be cooked in a similar way to spinach, as in the recipe found here, but can also be made a little more substantial with the addition of rice as in the recipe on this page. Furthermore, the larger leaves can be used to make a kind of sarmale, a little packet of rice and sometimes meat rolled up in the stevie leaf and boiled slowly in a ceramic pot. Sometimes the young leaves are chopped and used in salads. The plant itself is purported to present many health benefits and are packed with minerals and vitamins.

Time: 60 minutes

Servings: 4-6 portions

Ingredients:

5-6 bunches of patience dock (about 500g after trimming)

1 large onion

2 cloves of garlic

1 cup of rice

1 tablespoon of tomato puree/paste

2 tablespoons of olive oil

1 knob of butter

Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

1. Trim the thick stalks off the patience dock leaves and give them a wash. Pre-heat the oven to about 220 degree C (490F).

2. Blanch the leaves in boiling water for 30 seconds, remove, change the water, repeat, plunge into cold water and leave to drain. This process of blanching helps to soften the leaves and removes some of the more bitter flavours.

3. Roughly chop the patience dock leaves once they have drained.

4. In a ovenproof pan, heat the olive oil and sauté the finely-chopped onion for a few minutes until it is soft and translucent.

5. Add the chopped patience dock leaves to the onion and stir well for a minute or two.

6. Add the finely-chopped garlic cloves (you can use more, or even omit them entirely, according to taste) to the onion and dock and stir in.

7. Add the cup of rice (you can use any rice really, it’s up to you) and mix in well.

8. Add the tomato puree and mix in.

9. Pour in 3 cups of water, cover with a lid or some foil, and put the whole pan into the pre-heated oven.

10. Check back from time to time to check on the progress of the rice. Once the rice has absorbed all the liquid and is edible, the dish is done. Make sure it doesn’t run out of liquid - if the water has been absorbed and the rice is still a little crunchy, then just pour in a little more liquid.

11. Once it is done, remove it from the oven and stir in a nice knob of butter for a little extra richness. This dish can be eaten with eggs and bread as a dish in its own right, or used as a side dish. Can be eaten hot or cold.

Pilaf de ciuperci

“Mushroom rice”

Rice dishes were introduced to Romania during the period of the Ottoman occupation and are still fairly popular today in home cooking. Most Romanian stores will have several varieties of rice for sale: long grain, short grain, wild rice, and even boil-in-the-bag rice. This rice dish is cooked in the oven, which, if you are not in a hurry, tends to be quite a fool-proof way of preparing it, reducing not only the risk of the bottom of the pan burning as it so often does when cooked on the hob, but also the temptation to over-stir the rice, bashing the starch out of it, and causing it to become excessively sticky. Like many Romanian dishes, I find the quantity of oil to be perhaps a little too generous, so I will generally reduce the quantity by half; 3 tablespoons will usually do for the quantities below. The recipe is also good for periods of ‘post’ when religious Romanians fast, omitted animal products from their diet in the lead up to celebrations such as Easter, essentially a vegan diet.

Servings: 3-4

Time: 60 minutes

Ingredients:

2/3 cup of rice

1 medium onion

300g of mushrooms

100ml of oil (olive or vegetable) or 3 tablespoons (lower-fat version!)

Salt and pepper to taste

2 cups (500ml) of water

A handful of chopped parsley

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to about 210C.

2. Chop up the onion reasonably finely.

3. Heat the oil in a large ovenproof pan with a lid.

4. Add the onions to the oil and cook on a medium heat until they are soft and turning golden in colour.

5. Chop the mushrooms up, as coarsely or as finely as you like – I do them in rough chunks about 1cm square.

6. Wash the rice and add it to the onions and, stirring, allow it to cook gently for a minute or two.

7. Add the mushrooms to the onion and rice and, stirring from time to time, fry for about 5 minutes until the mushrooms decrease in size.

8. Add the two cups of water, mix well, put on the lid, and place in the preheated oven for about 45 minutes. Check from time to time to make sure it hasn’t dried out – if it has, add a little more water.

9. Cook until the rice is soft and edible and the water has been absorbed. If it has cooked but there is still a little too much moisture, just leave the lid off the five minutes or so.

10. Check the seasoning, mix in some of the parsley, empty into a serving bowl, and sprinkle the remaining parsley on top.

11. Serve hot or cold.