Ricotta and spinach soup - Zuppa di ricotta e spinaci

Yesterday I went to visit my friends who have a holiday home in the countryside. It's a small wooden house, like a cabin, with a fireplace and it's surrounded by ponds and trees and lots of beautiful wildflowers. It's very idyllic, you have the feeling that you're completely away from everything and it's hard to imagine that you can find places like this still in Flanders.

There's a vegetable garden and yesterday we had artichokes from the garden - delicious.

My friends brought ricotta and 'warmoes', an oldfashioned vegetable similar to spinach but not as soft. I offered to make a soup with this.

Serves 6

300 g ricotta
600 g spinach, torn in pieces
1 big onion, peeled and chopped
4 tomatoes, peeled and chopped
vegetable stock
ground pecorino or parmesan
olive oil

Fry the onion on low heat for a few min until golden. Add ricotta and fry it while stirring for 15 min, until it also gets coloured.
Add pepper and salt, tomatoes and spinach. Add 1,5 l boiling water with a bit of vegetable stock.
Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 15 min.
Serve very hot with extra olive oil and ground cheese.

Note: I tend to add a small dried red pepper (peperoncino) to spice it up a little.
You can use the spinach stalks; I cut them off but I add them with the torn leaves.

This is the soup with the view:

We also had some home made elderflower juice, made from the flowers in the garden. I photographed it in a small herb patch:

and on a seat made from a tree that was cut off.

Truly nice getting away like this for a city gal like me!

Wiels

This WE a new centre for contemporary art opened in Brussels. It's called Wiels and it's housed in the former brewery of Wielemans Ceuppens, a beautiful modernist building from 1930 by architect Adrien Blomme. I went to have a look.

I saw some beautiful tiles, that would go well in my new bathroom:

There were several contemporary art exhibitions. I particularly liked the piece by Saâdane Afif called 'Le Bar des Héros' which had a sound installation with pieces of music which played in a bar in Marseille in 1999, and flashing lights like in a club, and this poem:

It reminded me of Marseille, a city I love.

Rape caramellate - turnip 'tzimmes'

Today I bought turnips and I meant to add them to a lamb stew. But when I peeled them I noticed that they were so young and juicy that I decided to prepare them separately according to an Italian recipe called rape caramellate.


Serves 6

1 kg turnips, peeled and chopped or sliced
2 tbsp butter
salt & pepper
1 clove
2 tbsp sugar

Fry turnips in butter on medium heat for a few min. Add a little water, the clove and salt & pepper. Cover the pan, lower the heat and let this simmer until the turnips are done.
Add sugar when most of the liquid has gone en stir for 2 min. until the sugar has caramelized. Serve immediately.

I had this with a lamb stew (basic recipe with onion, carrots and courgettes) and steamed potatoes. For dessert, strawberries again, this time with a mixture of sour cream and cane sugar, hmm.

Fish curry

For mother's day my cousin and me invited our mothers over for lunch, together with our brothers and sister.

My cousin made a mozzarella and tomato salad which I forgot to photograph. She made a delicious sauce to go with it: she fried pine nuts in olive oil and added soy sauce in the end.

I made a fish curry, from a simple recipe that someone gave me years ago. You can get most of the ingredients in an oriental supermarket. Taste the dish to adjust the quantities.


Serves 4

1 can of coconut milk (400 ml)
same amount of water
800 g fish fillet, cut in pieces (I used haddock)
lime/bergamot leaves
fish sauce
thai basil leaves
fresh coriander, washed and chopped
thai aubergines
1,5 tbsp cane sugar
juice of 1-2 limes
1 tbsp green curry paste
2 onions, chopped
sunflower oil or butter

Fry onion in curry paste in sunflower oil or butter.
Add everything else, bring to the boil and let the dish simmer for 15 min.
Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

I served this with (Tilda) basmati rice.

My mother brought beautiful flowers from her garden.


For dessert we had strawberries of course

with vanilla ice cream


and tiramisu. My mother made it and my cousin B. grated the chocolate on top. As you can see, he got fed up in the end ;-)

Broccoli, potato & sweet potato all' acciuga

Italians often prepare broccoli or cauliflower with anchovy and garlic. I added normal and sweet potato.

Serves 2

small sprig of broccoli, cleaned and chopped
2 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped
1 sweet potato, peeled and chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1-2 tbsp breadcrumbs
4 anchovy fillets (from a tin), chopped
olive oil
pepper & salt
lemon juice

Steam broccoli and potatoes until just cooked.
Stirfry garlic, anchovy and breadcrumbs in olive oil for a few min.
Add steamed vegetables, pepper and just a little salt and cook on low heat for 5 min.
Sprinkle some lemon juice over the dish and serve.

Summer in Brussels

My neighbours came up with a good solution for the Summer weather we've been having.

Brussels goodies

One week ago I had friends over from the UK, so I stocked up on a lot of goodies from Brussels, before fleeing with them to the countryside. One night we had a big dinner.

One speciality here are 'grijze garnalen', a small type of shrimp. I got a salad with these and another one with crab from a renowned fishmonger. We had this on toast as an appetizer.

One very small hand was tucking in:

As a main course I prepared a chicken stew. I've posted it here before, just used carrots and parsley in stead of Jerusalem artichokes and coriander.

This is what was inside the pot:

And this is what it looked like on a plate:

In Belgium this is the season for strawberries. Labelga brought some along:

I had also gotten ice cream from the adventurous ice cream maker Comus & Gasterea, just around the corner from my appartment in Brussels. His ice cream is excellent, made from top quality ingredients, and he makes strange tastes such as curry, ginger, rose, chocolat sorbet...The owner has a rather oldfashioned approach, so I wasn't surprised not to find a website. I did find a few sites mentioning him though, such as this article in the newspaper Le Soir.

I went for classics: vanilla,

strawberry


and mango.

Everything met with success ;-)

Thank you labelga for all the pics!

Old books and bluebell forest

On April 13th I went to visit a library of old books and made a few snaps.

The first ones are miniatures from a manuscript of a medieval religious song book.

The next ones are from a book by Dodoens describing herbs en vegetables: fennel

I particularly like this one of the 'patissons':

and this one is garlic:

After this visit we had lunch on a sunlit terrace - we've been having Summer in Belgium during April. Labelga from Leafy Cooking had invited us over; you can see one of the delicious dishes she prepared that day on her blog.

After that we went to the Halle forest. At a very specific moment this becomes very spectacular with a carpet of bluebells. As you can see in the pics, we went at exactly the right moment.


Our next stop was a landmark in Brussels: the ice cream maker Zizi. One of my favourite spots.
We finished with a bottle of champagne, an appropriate ending for a day like this...

Ricotta artichoke pepper and bacon tart

Finally I'm back to blogging. But without recipes for the time being.
Yesterday I made this tart. I bought a pastry, spread it in a baking dish, spread some ricotta on top, then added yellow pepper; small, young artichokes - which my mother brought from her garden; she told me Italians eat them raw like that but I preferred to bake them - one shallot; some smoked bacon - all of this finely chopped -, a little olive oil and pepper & salt.
I baked this for 30 min in the oven at 200°C.

Today I also made a simple soup: onion, shallot, carrots, leek and potato, according to my basic soup recipe.