Stuffed courgette flowers

Today I went to visit my friends in the countryside. I witnessed the preparation of a house specialty and I asked for the recipe, so here comes.

180 g ricotta
100-200 g boiled spinach
some grated parmesan
2 tbsp fresh basil leaves, chopped
15 courgette flowers
pinch of nutmeg
1 tbsp olive oil
125 g flour

Mix ricotta, spinach, parmesan, nutmeg and basil leaves. Season with pepper and salt.
Wash the flowers delicately, make an incision and remove the part in the middle.
Stuff each flower with a teaspoon of the ricotta mixture.
Make a liquid batter with flour, olive oil and some water.
Dip the the flowers quickly in the batter, let them drip a bit then fry them in frying oil.
Serve immediately, sprinkled with salt.

These were the flowers, straight from the garden.

Stuffing them

Stuffed

Frying them

and savouring them! Delicious!

Note: you can omit the parmesan for a lighter dish.

My friends live in a great house with a fantastic garden: they have a vegetable garden, a flower garden, chicken, sheep, fruit trees... and today was a beautiful autumn day, perfect for enjoying this.

We ate outside, probably for the last time this year.

My friends' dahlias

and sheep, in a meadow with an apple tree bearing loads of fruit

The hazelnut harvest

which needs to be peeled

and the walnut harvest, which we gathered in about 15 minutes; there are so many nuts this year!

and this is the loot I took home.

Pesto

My mother brought me lots of stuff from her garden: apples, pears (a very nice variety called 'Jefke'), grapes, patissons (a type of white pumpkin), ...

and basil plants. So I decided to try to make pesto according to my mother's Italian recipe.

a handful of fresh basil leaves
2-3 tbsp pine nuts
1 garlic clove
salt
olive oil (use a very nice quality)
grated parmesan cheese


Wash basil leaves and dry them with kitchen roll.
Put them together with pine nuts and a little olive oil and use a handmixer or other device to blend this.
I crushed the garlic separately and added it at the end.
Add salt and some more olive oil. Taste the mixture and add more of any ingredient if necessary.
I used more basil leaves and only 1/2 garlic clove.
I didn't mix the grated cheese into the pesto but served it separately.


In stead of pasta I made a soup to go with the pesto. It was a basic vegetable soup with leek, celery, courgette, onion and potato. I made it according to my basic soup recipe, but I didn't blend it.

I added pesto and parmesan to the soup

and mixed it in.

Delicious!

Swetschkenkuchen - plum pie

Another Claudia Roden recipe from 'The book of Jewish food'. I made it with reine claude, a variety of green plums.


Serves 6-8

125g sugar
175g flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
75 g butter
1 egg
1 tbsp rhum or brandy
750g - 1kg plums

Add half the amount of sugar to the flour and baking powder and mix well. Cut the butter in dices and add them. Mix with your fingers. Add egg and rhum and work this into a nice dough - add more flour if necessary. Make a ball of the dough and let it rest while you prepare the fruit.
Wash the plums, cut them in half and remove the kernels.
Grease a pie dish with a little butter and sprinkle a bit of flour over it. Roll out the dough and put it in the dish. Spread the fruit densely over the dough and sprinkle the remaining sugar over it.
Bake for 40-50 min at 190° C until the dough is golden brown and the fruit is soft.
Eat warm or cold.

Notes
A lot of juice comes out of the fruit, but this solidifies into a kind of jelly when the pie is cooling.
I added a little lemon juice on top, which wasn't really necessary.
Claudia Roden suggests using sweet black plums or apricots.
She also suggests that you can add a crumble layer on top, made of 50 g flour, 4 tbsp sugar and 50 g butter.

Tishpishti - Almond, walnut & orange cake with syrup

Birdies are starting to gather on the crane outside my window. It seems early for that. Last year I saw loads in October.

My aunt and I cooked together for our friends from Curaçao. I made the dessert and decided to try another recipe from Claudia Roden's 'The book of Jewish food'. It's a sephardic recipe from Turkey.

Serves 8-10

4 eggs, beaten
150 g walnuts, finely chopped or ground
100 g ground almonds
200 g sugar
juice and rind of 1 orange
2 tsp cinnamon

For the syrup:
200 g sugar
250 ml water
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp rose water

Make the syrup first: Mix sugar, water and lemon juice and bring to the boil. Lower the heat and let it boil on medium heat for 10-15 min. Add rose water and let the syrup cool.
Mix all ingredients for the cake.
Cover a pie dish with tin foil or baking foil, grease with (sunflower) oil and pour in the cake mixture.
Bake the cake for 1hr at 180° C until golden brown. Transfer it immediately to a dish, remove foil and cut it in slices. Pour the syrup over the cake while it's still warm. Turn the slices around after 30 min in order to distribute the syrup evenly.

Notes
This is a very refined cake with subtle flavours. Claudia Roden advises to make it several hours in advance so the syrup can soak in properly.
Make sure the cake is baked enough before taking it out of the oven. It's a very liquid dough so it takes a while.

Here's the view from my cousin's terrace:

Moroccan fish dinner

Recently we went out to celebrate the submission of a PhD thesis. We went to a Moroccan fish restaurant, L'Océan (Av. Stalingrad 94 in Brussels, near the South/Midi railway station).

This is the view from the window.

You can choose the fish that you want to eat.

It comes with salad

and paella

and finally the fish appeared too.

Afterwards we got mint tea

and then we still managed a small dessert from the pastry shop next door.

Sublime Turkish dinner

Last Friday we discovered a very refined Turkish restaurant, La Sublime Porte.

We had a delightful mezze for starters.

Then as a main course: lamb,

stuffed chicken,
duck with fruit,
and stuffed vegetables.
This is Picasso's hand ;-)

For dessert we had a type of water pudding with dried nuts

and a sesame mousse.

At the end, Turkish coffee of course.

We had a great evening with our guests from Curaçao: delicious food, good conversation and a pleasant enough temperature to sit outside - which we do appreciate in this Summer with very changeable weather.

Sardines

On Wednesday my friend and me decided to cook together. I felt like eating fish and I still had a memory of delicious sardines from my trip to Portugal. So I went to a Moroccan fishmonger and got sardines that looked really fresh. The man also told me how to cook them in the oven.

Serves 2

10 sardines
2-3 potatoes, sliced very thinly
4-5 tomatoes, partly sliced and partly cut in wedges
bunch of fresh coriander leaves, chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 lemon
olive oil

Take an oven dish and put a layer of sliced tomatoes at the bottom. Add a layer of sliced potatoes. Add pepper & salt and sprinkle garlic and coriander leaves over it. Then put the sardines on top and add tomato wedges and some more garlic, coriander and pepper & salt.
Cut one third off the lemon and squeeze this over the dish. Cut the remainder of the lemon in slices and add them on top. Sprinkle 1-2 tbsp olive oil over the dish. Last but not least add some water, there should be about 0,5 cm in the dish. I wouldn't have thought of that but the fishmonger told me.
Bake in the oven at very high temperature (200 °C or more) for 20-40 min.

This is what the sardines looked like before cooking

and on a plate

We finished the whole dish and licked our fingers!
Afterwards we just about managed to squeeze in a little bit of lettuce

Note: The fishmonger told me that if you cook sardines in the oven, the insides need to be taken out. If you grill them, it's not necessary. He also said that I could substitute the potatoes for carrots. He advised against cooking courgettes with the sardines.

Dinner with a view

Last weekend I was invited for dinner on a terrace of a rooftop appartment in Brussels (St-Gilles). The view was fantastic. Weather had been very changeable in the past days and hours, but we enjoyed the sun all evening.

Preparations in the kitchen

Mmm, nice dinner, hardly anything left to photograph

Dessert was good too

Part of the view. Those who know it can spot my apartment block on the far right. Still not entirely sure where the appartment block in the middle is, on the right of the church spire (nor which church this is). I'll have to go and explore. At the back, a Brussels landmark: the atomium, well worth a visit, especially since it's been renovated with good taste.

Another part of the view

More landmarks: the 'Pensions Tower' next to the South/Midi railway station, with a reflection of the next landmark

the Palace of Justice, of which the dome has been renovated - it's really shiny now - we're waiting for the rest.

St-Gilles town hall

Then the sun went down

Just love this birdie

Sunset over the Brussels skyline

Thanks J. for the invite and the pics!

Vegetables again

Yesterday I prepared a quick dinner with lots of vegetables for my friend who is visiting from Curaçao.


We had a spinach, courgette and bacon tart, sweet potato ajlouk (she calls it pom over there), a salad with red beetroot, sourcream, dill and lemon juice and a fennel salad simply seasoned with lemon juice and olive oil.

For the tart I just steamed the courgettes, cooked the spinach, rolled out a ready made dough, covered it with the vegetables and a bit of smoked bacon and 2 eggs mixed with some sour cream. Baked this for 20-30 min at 180°C.

Walvis

Yesterday we had a quick meal: risotto with broccoli, peas, leek, spring onion, chervil and smoked bacon. I like to use just one colour of vegetable.


Then we hurried to the cinema to watch Persepolis, the Iranian animation film based on Marjane Satrapi's 'graphic novels' (apparently the author doesn't like this term). I read all the books and the movie was a nice reminder of the stories.

After the movie we went for a drink in the Walvis (Whale), one of my favourite bars in the neighbourhood which had been closed for a while but was open again for the first day, to our great relief.

This is the view from the terrace in the evening light.


We still had a few munchies left from the movie:

Attack of the crocodiles

Cute kitten