Hello world. My name is Andrei and, if not already obvious, I am very new in the online blogging community.

Fist a little bit about myself and this Blog.

About me:

I was born in Romania, where I also graduated as a doctor and left 2011 to practice in Germany. I have been practicing in Germany ever since and have completed my training here as a lung specialist and also as a sleep specialist. But that’s enough of a CV.

I would like to apologize from the beginning for any writing mistakes, I am Romanian and used to writing almost exclusively in German these days, but hopefully the next page will be understandable.

I grew up in Romania basically between two households. One was where my parents lived on the edge of the Danube-Delta in an average Town of now about 80.000 (back then about 30.000) and where I spent most of my time, and the second was that of my grandparents on my father’s side in a remote small village of about 300 people in the north-east of the country, where I would spend my summers (2-3 months out of the year).

What influenced me from early on was on one side the self-sustainability of people in remote regions, in the case of my grandparents they consumed for 99% of time only what they could produce on their own, and access to store-bought produce was a thing that happened only one once or twice a year, and it wasn’t any different for the people in the Danube-Delta either. And on the other hand, the diversity of culture, religion and traditions that thrived in the area around the Danube-Delta, which brought along with itself also very divers food and cooking.

I myself am half “Russian” and half Romanian, my mother was born in a community of so-called “lipoveni” that came to Romania from Russia about 200 years ago, but have kept their traditions and language, they continue to speak Russian at home and use old Slavonic in the church but at the same time speak Romanian. I myself sadly never learned Russian (apart from some swearwords that the neighbours used when we did dumb children stuff) because my father and my mother only spoke Romanian at home. But I grew up in this Russian community with all their customs and tradition and absolutely delightful cooking.

As most of the neighbours were fisherman, we always hat access to the freshest fish 😊.  I could go on forever about the wonders of this Russian community and its traditions but…I will try to do so in a different post.

Beside the Russian community there was a very large Turkish community where I grew up, which brought along a wonderful and diverse cultural and culinary world. And besides the Turks there were also Greeks and Ukrainians and Aromanians and Tatars and Gypsies that all brought something to the diversity of this region. Romanians made up only a little more then half the population, so you had in a town of 30.000 so many different neighbourhoods and customs, it is hard to believe that it existed peacefully.

And on the other hand I had the experience of the small Romanian village with my grandparents, where I had the opportunity to see what you can do without any modern amenities or comforts and still have a decent life, a grandfather who was a blacksmith and still made everything by hand, and a grandmother who could grow anything in her garden, and make the most delicious meals without going even once to a store. A world where you had respect and were really grateful for the food you had, a world where being a vegan, yes that’s right a vegan for half of the year is common practice. A world where if you sacrifice an animal for food you have the decency to use at least every bit of it and not throw more then half away as scraps.

So much to say, and so much to remember, but I do not want to bore you with my whole life-story here- Maybe I will do so in a later post.

About the Blog:

I created this blog for two main reasons, one of them is my passion for food and cooking and the other one is my passion for medicine.

As a doctor I am surprised many times about the lack of patient information that is out there, and I am not talking about patients not reading or informing themselves about a disease, but of the lack of willingness of many of my colleagues to explain diseases and treatments to patients. I am talking about patients not being informed by their physicians in a way that they can understand. Very often patients ask a question, they are hit with a long sentence where about half the words are only understandable to other doctors or nurses and you can see it in their eyes that they are embarrassed to ask what all that exactly means. This is a problem that I have seen in Romania and in Germany on about the same level. Also, the information that is out there (by that I mean Internet) is very hard to sort through if you do not know exactly what you are looking for.

On this Blog I decided to try and answer some commonly asked medical questions in a way that is easy and understandable, we will have to wait and see if I will manage to make it understandable. I specialize in lung diseases and sleep medicine (sleep apnea for example) so this is the topic I will probably be addressing first, but I am open for questions on all medical issues. As this is a blog and not an online practice, I can help with explaining some terminology and diagnosis and offering my opinion on the matter, however I cannot make any treatment plans or set any diagnosis online.

The second reason for creating this blog is my passion for food and cooking, I will be trying to share with you some of my favourite recipes and dishes. I am a very big fan of almost every type of cooking, I like to put the emphasis on what I like to call ‘honest’ cooking, with good, fresh ingredients in an authentic way. Ingredients that taste right, and not tomatoes that taste of ‚plastic‘ and strawberries as hard as a golf ball. I like cooking traditional Romanian dishes sometimes, but they usually take longer so I do them on the weekends or for special occasions. On normal days I find myself very often doing south Asian and Indian dishes, but like to mix in Turkish or Italian dishes every now and again.

I will also be trying to share some of my favourite Romanian recipes, and I will be having an extra vegan recipe section because believe it or not, there are very many Romanian vegan dishes. The reason for this I will also be explaining in later post.

So, to sum up, I am a doctor, somewhat of a foodie and decided to go online to try and make the world a better place, or at least a tastier one.