Sounds of a Small Town
4 August 2016. 11am. It’s a beautiful day at 26°C, with a continuous stream of gentle breeze passing through. I sit on the balcony outside my bedroom in Sebes, Central Romania. Silviu and I are spending a month of our summer holidays with his parents in his southern Transylvania hometown.
It’s peaceful here. The chirping of the birds and the rustling of the tree leaves in the breeze mainly break the silence. Then, the neighbours’ hens add their sporadic clucking. Occasionally, their roosters and dogs join in too, with crows and barks of their own. (Visiting Romania corrected my old misunderstanding that roosters crow only at dawn.)
View from the Balcony
From where I am sitting on the balcony, I can see the landscape divided into 3 distinct rings. The innermost ring, just below the balcony, is the garden. A variety of flowers, fruits and vegetables grown by my in-laws fill it. Next, the intermediate ring scatters the neighbours’ reddish-brown roof tiles across the middle distance. Finally, a range of low-lying hills occupies the outermost ring, sitting just in front of the Apuseni Mountains — the Western Carpathians, whose name translates as “Mountains of the Sunset” — 130 km away from Sebes.
The garden is a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables and flowers. A white, squarish pavilion dominates the centre: grapevines with small bunches of unripe green grapes tangle from its roof frame, while pots of flowers line its four sides. Meanwhile, radiant splashes of colour from the flowers liven up the whole garden: pink hibiscus, yellow sunflowers, orange/reddish-petalled roses blotched with patches of white, bunches of fuchsia hortensia, white petunia…
Manna from the Garden
The garden is also the source of some of the fruits and vegetables that I have been eating since last week: tomatoes for the salads and soups, pickled cucumbers, strawberry jam and strawberry ice-cream, raspberry soda, and bean stew. Apart from raspberries, there are also other fruits: apples, plums, and pears which are not in season.
Treasure Trove for a City Gal
I have lived in developed cities around the world all my life. The scarcity of land in these cities makes living in houses with green space a luxury good, and thus unaffordable to me. Staying in apartments means that I have never had the fortune of hand-picking fresh ingredients from the garden and integrating them in my meals. As such, the opportunity to live in the house with such a bountiful supply of fresh fruits and vegetables makes me feel like a kid receiving her Christmas presents!
Gigantic Tomatoes
Tomatoes…the tomatoes here are so good that they deserve another mention. Being the city gal, I expect supermarket tomatoes to be roundish and the size of a tennis ball. Here, though, the tomatoes are huge!
Beefsteak, Beef or Ox Heart Tomatoes
The tomatoes I see here can be as heavy as 0.45 kg and as wide as 9 cm! Tomatoes in general are juicy; however, I discover that there can be two types of juiciness. The ones I find in the supermarkets are usually full of juice, but lack in pulp. When you slice these tomatoes to make salads, the salads turn slushy. However, if you make salads with these homegrown tomatoes, you will get a salad with plenty of sweet, fleshy pulp! Perhaps it’s the absence of any man-made chemicals in growing these tomatoes that makes them especially sweet.
Toss these tomatoes with some onions, a splash of basil, and a pinch of salt, and you will get a delicious, refreshing, easy-to-make salad for the hot summer days!