Rice and parsley soup

Yesterday I prepared a light soup, ideal for letting your stomach recover after your boss brought buckets of Häagen Dasz to the office, to celebrate that he's going on holiday.
The recipe, minestra di riso e prezzemolo, comes from Emanuela Stucchi's 'Italian vegetarian cooking'.

Serves 4

2 potatoes, peeled and cut in big pieces
2 tbsp olive oil
1l vegetable stock
210 gr rice
2 tbsp fresh parsley leaves, chopped
15 g butter

Add potatoes, olive oil and some salt and pepper to the vegetable stock. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let the potatoes simmer until cooked. Remove them from the stock, mash them and add the mash to the stock again.
Bring to the boil, add rice and simmer on low heat until the rice is cooked.
Remove from the heat. Add parsley, butter and more salt and pepper if necessary.

Note: I added first some carrots and then courgettes to the rice and left out the butter this time.
Last year I prepared the soup without vegetables.

More Summer

I was offered special sepia pasta and a great bottle of rosé from Süd-Tirol (Alto Adige), which together with a few more courgettes from my mother's garden made for another delicious Summer meal.

Thanks F. & I. for your gifts!

Summer delights

Finally a few tropical days in Belgium. I prepared the first of the courgettes (and its flowers) from my mother's garden, just lightly fried and served - with love - on toast with olive oil.

Today was a day for roaming the countryside of my youth, visiting a mill, where a brave guy was challenged to climb up and change a sail

and later a content millner was spotted looking out his window.

Seaside cooking

Last weekend I spent at the seaside. On Sunday I did an early morning walk along the beach in a heavy gale and I saw a curious guy sitting on the 'golfbreker'.


After that I was picked up for a day of relaxing, fighting the wind, buying Dutch specialties such as Autodrop and plenty of cooking. You can find a full report at Leafy Cooking.

We had a well equipped kitchen at hand and exploited its facilities

such as this steaming oven,

a first with a great result.
Thank you labelga for a relaxing afternoon in enjoyable surroundings.

Apple crumble

Recently I tasted a special crumble, made with speculoos, which worked quite well. I was asked for my own recipe and apparentely I haven't posted it yet. So here comes my friend K's delicious recipe, without picture because I haven't made it in a while.

Serves 6

6 apples
200 g dried raisins (or raspberries)
125 g butter
250 g flour
75 g light brown sugar
25 g dark brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Mix flour and butter, then add sugar.
Peel apples, remove core and cut them into pieces.
Grease an oven dish with butter, add a layer of apples, then raisins and cinnamon, and repeat.
Sprinkle the pastry on top.
Bake for 30 min at 200°C.

My addition is to soak the raisins in rum before adding them.
Of course this tastes great with vanilla ice cream.

Clafoutis

For our annual neighbours' party, I made a clafoutis. I consulted a recipe in 'Het Gerecht' by Filip Verheyden, but I decided to stick to a very quick and light recipe from my mother, which probably comes from the magazine Elle.

500 g white soft cheese (platte kaas)
125 g flour
100 g sugar
a little vanilla sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
400 g fruit (cherries, red- or blackcurrant, plums, ...)

Wash fruit.
Beat egg yolks, sugar and vanilla sugar until the mixture gets creamy.
Mix baking powder with flour, and add flour and cheese gradually to the mixture.
Beat egg whites and add.
Pour half of the mixture in a greased tin, distribute the fruit over it and cover with the remaining mixture. Keep the fruit 2 cm from the border to avoid leaking.
Bake for 30-40 min. at 180°C.

The recipe in Het Gerecht uses these ingredients:
100g flour, 4 eggs, pinch of salt, 175 g sugar, 2 packets vanilla sugar, 4 dl milk, 450 g cherries.
Everything just gets mixed, with the milk last, except for the fruit.
They gave the useful tip to leave the cherry stones in the fruit for extra flavour.

Sushi

Making sushi isn't as difficult as it seems. We were invited to sushi but we had to make them ourselves. The rolling bit was quite fun actually.
I didn't take any pics but you can see a full report at Leafy Cooking.
We smacked our lips with the result. Thanks T & M for a great evening!

Biologists' dinner

Last month we had another biologists' dinner.

With delicious cavaillon melon and ham

and pizza in two versions

one for the kids

and one for the adults (I'm glad to be an adult)

and for dessert I baked a crostata di marmellata with fresh apricots.

After this we participated in a walk combined with theatre for kids, organised by Bronks,

in which I humiliated myself with a football in front of a bunch of very good football players.

Birthday bash

Beautiful flowers

a fantastic guacamole is being served

animals from Tanzania guard the napkins

a present is tried out

and then my battery went flat.

Bar Bik

Another favourite restaurant in Brussels is Bar Bik. It has good food and drink, a pleasant atmosphere and even a few tables outside when the weather's good. Booking is recommended.

I was joined there by someone - a Belgian person - who likes to take the necessary literature with him when venturing onto the streets of our capital.

I had asperges again

whilst soup appeared on the other side of the table.

The vitello tonnato was delicious

and this was duck if I remember correctly.

Simple delights

Tonight I had a simple and delicious meal: a quiche with steamed courgette, endives lightly fried in butter and smoked trout, prepared with 1 egg and cream according to my basic recipe

and preceded by the first artichokes from my mother's garden.

Zinneke

Lots of photos and lots of stories are waiting to be disclosed here, if only I would find the time. For now just a quick one, showing our Zinneke Parade which took place last Saturday, a fantastic initiative uniting thousands of Brussels people in a festival of creativity and spontaneity.


You can see more pics at my Picasa gallery.

Appropriately, at the end of a day like this we had asparagus, a typical Belgian speciality - probably for the last time this season -

prepared à la flamande, but with a special secret touch which enhances their flavour even more.


Delicious! Thanks a lot W!

Eurasian dinner party

On Saturday I was invited for a party. When I arrived the table was already filled with goodies,

a small hand was tucking into Asian rice snacks,

and from the window we could check out one of the pretty squares in Brussels.


Meanwhile rice was being prepared

as well as potatoes.

A bowl was filled with Asian fruit

and the chicken got a finishing touch.


My plate looked like this:

I admit I had several helpings.

And then it was time for dessert: pears stewed in port wine

were covered in chocolate sauce

a strange Asian fruit was added (the name I remember is dju dju, which is actually a swear word in Flemish)

and this was served with ice cream, cookies and a mint leaf.

Hail to the cooks R and F for this feast!

Dinner in the Brussels sun

When the sun is finally out in Brussels, everybody is out on the terraces. Yesterday we had dinner at an old family favourite, la Marie Joseph.

This choron-sauce was anxiously eyed when it arrived, because the fear immediately arose that there wouldn't be enough of it to accompany two tuna steaks.

After dinner we went for an ice cream at Zizi. It used to be another of my favourite spots in Brussels but I have to admit that we were a bit disappointed by the quality of the ice cream last night. I hope this was a one off.