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!

Tabouleh

Tabouleh is more of a Summer dish, but it's also good party fare. Yesterday we organised a small party with our neighbours, so I prepared this dish, according to the recipe my aunt gave my mother, over 15 years ago.

250 g couscous
4 juicy tomatoes + 1 extra for decoration
2 small onions, or a few spring onions
2 lemons or 3 limes
1 cucumber
black olives
5 tbsp olive oil, extra virgin
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp chopped fresh mint leaves
pepper & salt

Put couscous in a bowl, add olive oil and lemon juice, pepper and salt, and mix well.
Peel cucumber, remove seeds, cut in small dices.
Peel onion and chop finely.
Peel tomatoes (put them in hot water so the skin comes off easily), and cut in small dices.
Add vegetables, olives, parsley, and mint to the couscous.
Mix well and let this stand for at least 2 hours in a cool spot. Mix once in a while.
Decorate with olives, slices of tomato and mint leaves.

Note: Crucial to this recipe is that you don't use water at all. The couscous gets softened by the olive oil, lemon juice and vegetable juices.
I tend to use half a bunch of parsley.

Before the party started, we had a Thai curry delivered

which tasted very nice with our first bottle of bubbles.

Red pepper and walnut paste

Last month, when my friends came to dinner, we prepared this paste and served it on small toasts as a starter. You can also use it as a sauce to dip vegetables in. It's another Claudia Roden recipe, called muhammara.

Serves 6

2 red peppers
red chili paste
1 slice of bread without crust
90 g peeled walnuts
1/2 garlic clove, crushed
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cumin
olive oil

Roast red peppers in the oven at 200°C for 30 min. Turn them once. Let them cool in a plastic bag, then peel them and remove stem and seeds.
Blend all ingredients into a paste using a blender.
Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

The walnuts were deftly and painstakingly peeled by hand using Mono Pico, a very simple device which my cousin brought me from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.


We forgot to take pictures of the result - which was delicious. So instead a few pics showing the view from the kitchen in the evening.

Hommos - chick pea spread

Yesterday I had friends over for dinner. As a starter I made hommos, based on a recipe by Jamie Oliver. It's a typical middle eastern dish.


Serves 6

750 g cooked chick peas (drained weight) or 300 g dried chick peas
1/2 tsp cumin seeds, crushed in a mortar
1 tsp red chilli paste (e.g. sambal)
1 garlic clove, crushed
juice of 1-1,5 lemon or 2-3 limes
1 red pepper
3 tbsp pine nuts, roasted
extra virgin olive oil

If you use dried chick peas, soak them overnight in water, then rinse and add fresh water. Bring to the boil, boil uncovered on high heat for 10 min., then cover and let them simmer until they are cooked. This usually takes around 1 hr.
If you buy them boiled, drain and rinse in water.
Crush them in a blender with the lemon juice and some olive oil. Add cumin seed, chilli paste, garlic and pepper and salt. Taste and add some more of any ingredient you think is lacking.
Peel the red pepper. You can cut it in half, remove stem and seeds, put them in a greased oven dish and bake them in the oven for 30 min at 200 °C. Alternatively, you can leave it whole and put it under the grill; let the skin blacken and then turn it over for the next part and so on until the whole skin is black.
When the pepper is baked or grilled, put it in a plastic bag and let it cool for a bit. Then peel it and remove what remains on the inside. The steam in the bag makes it possible to peel them easily.
The flesh should be soft. Cut it in small pieces and add to the hommos.
Decorate the dish with the roasted pine nuts.
Serve with baked pizza crust or pitta bread, cut into pieces.

Notes
You can also add chopped fresh coriander or parsley leaves.
In traditional hommos there is some tahina (sesame seed paste) added. I didn't think of this but I will try it another time.
Claudia Roden keeps the cooking liquid from the chick peas and adds some of this to make the hommos creamy. She also adds red paprika powder.

As a main dish I prepared the spicy lamb and coconut stew (see previous post) and as a side dish spicy root vegetables, another Claudia Roden recipe from her New Book of Middle Eastern Food, posted by labelga. For this last dish I used the original Claudia Roden quantities, perhaps with a bit more Jerusalem artichokes. I left out the chilli pepper since my other dishes were already quite hot. One of my guests suggested the addition of parsnip, which I might try next time.


For dessert I made the Danish apple dessert again (see previous post) and served it with vanilla ice cream. And as a final touch I got some of Brussels best cookies from Dandoy, to go with tea and coffee afterwards.

Today there's finally some sun in Brussels, after weeks of depressing grey and dark winter days. So I had this view while clearing up my kitchen this morning:

You can see the Koekelberg basilique far away in the middle and the white tower on the right is a beautiful concrete church from the 1930's in Molenbeek.

Roast pumpkin

Roasting is my favourite way of preparing vegetables. It gives them a great flavour. I do it with potatoes, carrots, fennel, sweet potato etc. and usually just add some olive oil, salt and rosemary or fennel seeds.
For pumpkin I use this delicious recipe by Jamie Oliver. The nice thing about it is that you don't need to peel the pumpkin, which is hard work sometimes. Depending on the type of pumpkin, you can even eat the skin.

Serves 6

1 pumpkin
2 tsp coriander seed
2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp fennel seed
2 small dried chili peppers
1 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 garlic clove
1 tbsp olive oil

Wash the pumpkin, cut it in halves, remove top en bottom and the seeds. Cut it in wedges of 2,5 cm.
Take all dried herbs and spices and ground them with the salt and pepper in a mortar. Add garlic and mash it together.
Put this mixture in a bowl, add the olive oil and mix well. Add the pumpkin wedges and turn them around until they're all covered with the mixture.
Put them in an oven dish and roast them for 30 min. at 200°C.