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.