I am not starving, just people give me food enough times a week to be substantially sustained.
But sometimes I get in the mood for something that people don't eat much here. Last Saturday I was in the mood for bran muffins. So I looked up the word for bran - tărâță.
"Do you have tărâță?" I asked my counterpart.
she chuckled. "Of course. We feed it to the cows."
I asked a couple different people where I could buy it and someone finally asked me, "Why don't you ask any of your neighbors that have cows."
So I did. "Of course you can have some tărâță. They told me, eying me suspiciously for wanting their cow's food. What for? A cake? Hm."
Granted, the tărâță you feed your cows isn't exactly the tărâță you eat in bran flakes. I painstakingly picked out the wheat grains that had gotten through the crushing process whole and mixed up my mom's recipe for bran muffins.
In the kitchen Gabi was curious about the recipe, Mamitza tried to give me directions for making some other type of Romanian recipe that uses tărâță, and Cipri was shocked that I would use tărâță for baking.
They turned out golden-bottomed, and bran-textured, with the occasional oat grain.
Gabi, the politically correct one, didn't say they were amazing, nor that they were horrible.
Ciprian, the one who says what he thinks, told me that when I get married and make these, my husband will tell me that they are delicious, but to never make them again.
Marin, my neighbor who I got the tărâță from took one bite and told me it tastes like the black bread everyone ate during communism as he ate two more muffins with gusto.
