Girls and their toys

This week I took an afternoon off for a shopping trip to Antwerp. The first place we ended up in was In den Olifant, the most magical toy shop I've ever seen. We went around the beautiful old house, shrieking with delight at each new discovery.

Isn't this chicken fantastic?

Or do you like this one better?

This was my absolute favourite cuddly toy

Great puppets for playing puppet theatre

and beautiful Pinocchios

a balloon to fly away in


The duck was chosen as a present for a niece

and look at all this miniature cooking gear



After this some more shopping was accomplished, useful as well as frivolous.

And then we went to check out the recently renovated Stadsfeestzaal.
We were impressed.

Fancy champagne bar, high up above

but we chose the ground floor


for our aperitif



For dinner we returned to an old favourite, where we hadn't been in a long time: pizzeria Arte.




This is what happens when you go out for dinner with a fellow blogger


we didn't resist dessert

The food was as good as we remembered, with very pure flavours, we enjoyed the cosy atmosphere and the beautiful interior design, and we thought about the lyrics of Les Feuilles Mortes by Jacques Prévert written on the wall.

City alpinists and dinosaurs

Sometimes building works need to be tackled by alpinists.


Today I had the great opportunity of getting a privileged guided tour at the newly renovated dinosaur gallery, at our Museum of Natural Sciences.

Wow!
Beautiful old floor

an elephant with a story

birds showing an evolutionary link

Rhoarrr!




A beautiful renovation with fantastic design and lots of interactive displays. A museum to be proud of in Brussels.
Just go and see for yourself!

Simple chicken stew

Tonight I prepared a simple, quick and light chicken stew, based on the recipe for treya by Claudia Roden.


Serves 2-3

2 chicken breasts, chopped
1 fennel, washed and chopped
2 carrots, peeled and sliced
4 small potatoes, peeled and chopped
6-8 cardamom pods
a few parsley sprigs, chopped
1 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp sunflower oil
salt

Put all ingredients in a pan and add water until the ingredients are not entirely covered.
Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let it simmer until it's cooked (around 15 min).

Notes
I had added 2 slices of pancetta, but this didn't do much for the flavour, so next time I will leave it out.
You might add a dried chilli pepper or lots of white pepper. Ginger could also be nice.
On a previous occasion I prepared this dish without potatoes and served it with rice - a special Claudia Roden version of rice with vermicelli, called roz bil shaghria.

Perfect Sunday

Yesterday labelga and I had a leisurely afternoon at a well kept secret, which I will nevertheless share with you: Sauna O. It's a small scale, cosy sauna with beautiful interior decoration.
One of the things I really enjoy there is having a cup of tea by the fireplace.

Then we set off home, where a gentleman opened a bottle of bubbles for us.

Meanwhile, the preparations for a great dinner, started in the morning, were finished: chicken broth and tamarind-coated duck, with a side dish of black beans.

And again there was this leftover Sunday pie, which I really shouldn't eat but couldn't resist.

That was just a perfect Sunday. Thanks labelga for the glorious food!

New Year's walk

On New Year's Day labelga picked me up and we drove to the seaside for a big walk near het Zwin in Knokke. A walk is a great idea for a day like this, when you're too wasted to do anything else. I vote for making it a tradition.


It was a bit misty, and you got the feeling you could be anywhere, in another world even. The atmosphere reminded me of the movie Down by law by Jim Jarmusch.
It took us a while to find the big rabbit - oh no it was a hare.

After the exercise in the cold we had to recover of course, so we went to Marie Siska, where we've spent many childhood hours.



The cream was for the waffle

the heart went onto the pancakes

you can sprinkle sugar from the big cans

but I prefer brown sugar.

Hmm, now we felt better, ready to drive back to Brussels and take another ride in the big wheel.




The new year has started well.

Tom Yam Goong

I prepared this Thai shrimp soup on New Year's Eve, according to the recipe from Weldon's 'THAILAND The Beautiful Cookbook'.

Serves 4

250 raw shrimps, peeled, keep the shells
750 ml water
2 garlic cloves, chopped finely
5 bergamot leaves
3 slices of fresh galanga or ginger
2 tbsp fish sauce
2 stalks of lemon grass, only 1/3rd (the lowest part), cut in 3 cm pieces
2 shallots, sliced
50 g straw mushrooms, sliced
juice of 1 lime
2 tbsp fresh coriander leaves, chopped

for the black chilli paste:
1-2 chilli peppers
1 shallot, chopped finely
1 garlic clove, chopped finely
pinch of shrimp paste
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp sunflower oil

Make the black chilli paste: fry chilli peppers, shallots and garlic in oil for a few min. Add the other ingredients and fry for a bit longer. Set this aside.

Rinse the shrimp shells. Put them in a pan with the water and bring to the boil. Then pour through a sieve, conserve the liquid and throw away the shells.
Add garlic, bergamot leaves, galanga or ginger, fish sauce, shallots and mushrooms to the stock. Bring to the boil on medium heat and let it simmer for 2 min on low heat.
Add the shrimps, bring to the boil again and let them simmer until cooked. This takes only a few min., at most.

Add lime juice, chilli paste and coriander leaves to the soup and serve.


Notes
A difficult thing with this soup is estimating how spicy it will be. I used 2 dried chilli peppers (1 small and 1 medium size) for 8 persons and this was definitely too much. Steam came out of everybody's ears. 1 small one would have done the trick.
You might try using fresh chilli peppers, which are less hot.
You might also add the chilli paste little by little to the soup and taste in between.
The recipe doesn't mention salt, but I added some.

Fortunately I had also prepared blinis again, so we could cool our palates with those after the hot soup. Since we were 8, I doubled the quantities mentioned in the recipe and we got through most of that.



As a main course, we had two types of guinea fowl: one with the typical Belgian ingredients gueuze beer and witloof (endives), and the other one with a raisin and cream sauce. They were served with mashed potatoes and mashed parsnips. Very yummy, all of this!

Cosmopolitan

I like to drink this cocktail at L'Archiduc, but the one we got served on New Year's Eve tasted even better. And I got the recipe!


2 measures vodka
2 measures cointreau
3 measures cranberry juice
1/2 measure lime juice

Shake with ice and serve!

Note: The cocktail maker advised to use fresh unsweetened lime juice from the brand Pulco.

Later that night I tasted a great rum from Barbados.

This was after wine and champagne.
Don't know how I managed to play Jenga without making the tower fall once.

More pumpkin

Can't get enough of pumpkin, so in between the party dinners I made another pumpkin risotto. A simpler version of the recipe posted before, only with pumpkin, no onions or carrots. I used a big slice of organic muscat pumpkin and it tasted delicious. Contrary to my habit, this time I prepared it in the proper risotto way, adding small portions of water at a time and stirring a lot.

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.