Sweet roast pumpkin

I had more than half a pumpkin left from making the pumpkin and hazelnut cake. I was inspired by labelga's 19 December post of an oven-baked pumpkin cup and I also remembered a dish my friend K once prepared as part of a Jamaican meal: sweet potatoes baked with rum and butter.

So I invented this dessert:

I greased an oven dish with sunflower oil, added the pumpkin half and a few more pumpkin wedges, added a few broken cinnamon sticks on top and sprinkled a bit of sugar and quite a bit of rum over the pumpkin. I baked this in the oven at 200°C for around 40 min, until the pumpkin was really tender.


It tasted delicious. I was out of butter, but I think that would be a nice addition.
You can eat it just like this. Maybe vanilla ice cream would go well with it.

This is Babette's duck, which really does change colour when it gets hot.

Pumpkin and hazelnut cake

Recently I copied this Spanish recipe from Larousse's 'Les cuisines du monde'. I decided to try it for my yearly get together with my friends from school.

Serves 10-12

400 g pumpkin, peeled and chopped (weight is without peel and seeds)
4 eggs
40 cl sunflower oil
350 g flour
200 g sugar
200 g ground hazelnuts
a little butter
3 tsp cinnamon
pinch of salt

Steam the pumpkin until soft. Let it drain in a sieve overnight.
Crush it with a fork or using a handmixer.
Add eggs and oil and whisk everything.
Mix flour, sugar, ground hazelnuts, cinnamon and salt, and add this to the pumpkin mixture.
Mix well.
Grease an oven dish or cake tin with butter and add the mixture.
Bake for 50'-1hr at 180°C, until a knife comes out dry when you stick it in the cake.

Note: Unless you have a huge party, use half the quantities mentioned.

Unfortunately my cake was in competition with 3 delicious pies from Les tartes de Françoise.


So I took some of it home again and had a piece for breakfast.

Taking a break

In between all the renovating and Christmas socializing, I finally had time for a simple drink in town, in the company of Wisteria and others.

The next day this was repeated at a cosy lounge in Gent, of which I've forgotten the name.

You do get used to bubbles at this time of the year.

Aromatic Christmas

At my third dinner (in as many days) we had takeaway lobster

accompanied by a simple vegetable soup - the picture isn't great but the soup was delicious.

My mum grew lots of herbs in Italy and dried them, and decided to distribute them to her children for Christmas.

This was my share: verveine, citronelle, tilleul, basilic, sarriette, peperoncini, rosemary, fennel seeds, oregano, bay leaves and sage.

And because this is a sentimental season, I include a picture of my mum's dog.

Blinis - small version

The festive season has started, where I get together with friends and family and there is lots of food. Last Saturday I was invited for dinner and I helped out a little in the kitchen.

I baked small blinis, prepared according to a recipe from the beautiful cookbook 'Het Gerecht' by Filip Verheyden.


It's a fast and easy recipe without yeast, so the dough doesn't need to rise as in my previous post.

Serves 4

60 g buckwheat flour
40 g normal (wheat) flour
1 egg
1,5 dl milk
butter for baking
salt
sour cream and caviar

Mix both flours, add egg yolk, milk and a pinch of salt. Whisk it into a homogenous dough and let it rest for 5 min.
Beat the egg white and mix it gently into the dough.
Heat a little butter in a pan. Add several teaspoons of dough and fry both sides for 2 min on high heat.
Let the blinis cool and serve with sour cream and caviar.


Note: We also served a few blinis with smoked salmon in stead of caviar.
You can sprinkle a bit of lemon juice over the finished blinis.


We got very spoilt: loads of delicious appetizers, next to the blinis


a salad with deep-fried mozzarella, rucola and baked cherry tomatoes, as a starter


and a fantastic fish soup



served with homemade rouille


Quite amazing that after all of this we still managed to eat my Danish apple dessert, served with vanilla ice cream from Comus & Gasterea (described in my post about Brussels goodies).

We ended the evening with a game of Colonists of Katan - very enjoyable, especially for the winner :-p

Thanks R and F for your great hospitality!

Christmas market

Met up with my colleagues to go to the Christmas market. It's next door to me but I hadn't properly visited yet, although I've already taken a ride in the fancy new big wheel followed by an ice cream at old favourite Comus & Gasterea.

It's becoming tradition to have fish soup at fishmonger De Noordzee


Some of us chose other fare

Were they pregnant by any chance?

Another tradition is having a real German sausage, nibbled at at both ends

and a 'jenever' goes down well after that.

After the market I needed some spices, so we popped into Desmecht, a fabulous shop with a room at the back which only has drawers with herbs and spices.

After this fun intermezzo I went back to my apartment which I've started renovating.

I'm a total wreck after only 2 days of manual labour.

Roast chicken with potatoes and mushrooms

My neighbours had a busy weekend moving stuff etc so I cooked them a simple Sunday dinner.
The recipe is from R. C. Sidoli's "The cooking of Parma".
Forgot to take a pic though :-(

Serves 4

16 potatoes (small - medium size)
1 chicken, cut in 8 pieces
500 g mushrooms, whole

Put all ingredients in an oven dish, season with a lot of pepper and salt. No oil is required.
Bake in oven at 200°C for 1h30 - 2h, until everything is cooked.
Mix the ingredients regularly while baking.

I served this with a turnip soup and pears with star anise.

Note: the chicken legs took a bit longer than the wings.
The vegetables tasted so delicious that everybody ate loads of them.

Très bon

Yesterday we went to try out the restaurant Bon Bon, which had been recommended by my friends K and F, true food lovers and very good cooks.

We had incredibly fresh langoustines, cooked exactly enough

deer - very tasty and tender meat in a delicious sauce - with red cabbage and bacon, and alternating slices of black pudding, apple and red beetroot


three types of butter: plain salted, butter with seaweed and smoked butter


Some of us couldn't resist the cheese platter

and then our entire table got covered in desserts, that just kept coming:
a mango and lime affair, with a pistachio cracker

roast pineapple spread out at the bottom

we couldn't guess what was in the guimauve (marshmallow): it was Chartreuse verte, a French liquor
the moelleux and crème brûlée were delicious, I was told, but by then I had given up, much to the contentment of the men in our party
the third dish held grapefruit and a white cheese and basil mousse, very surprising

also surprising was the sorbet of kriek beer


Our verdict was unanimous: très bon.

Christmas tree felling

My friends in the countryside own a small wood with Christmas trees and each year they invite their friends who want a tree to come and fell it. I didn't want a tree - I'm not so Christmassy and I still have a small Japanese cardboard specimen if I really feel like it - but I went and enjoyed the other goodies ;-)

Fantastic cheeses, with delicious home baked breads (maybe the recipe can be posted here?)

accompanied by cold meats

and pumpkin soup - made from home grown pumpkin - to which you could add 'croûtons'

so it looked like this

served with great wine - two types of red (a Sancerre and a Côtes d'Anjou if I remember correctly) and a white, which is supposed to be the best to serve with cheese

and then there was dessert, served by a tiny hand.

What a feast! Thanks guys!

As my friends also function as a kind of private library, I was handed a new load of books to read:

Colum McCann: This side of brightness
Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood
Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road
E.L. Doctorow: Ragtime
André Aciman: Call me by your name

I had brought these back:

Dave Eggers: What is the what (fantastic)
Sandro Veronesi: Kalme chaos (fantastic and hilarious)
David Mitchell: Black Swan Green (not bad)
Haruki Murakami: A wild sheep chase (not mad about it, too surrealistic for my taste)

and I've just started reading
Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely loud & incredibly close (reads 'like a train').