Chestnuts again

Tonight I prepared my first chestnuts of the season, hooray!
A simple soup to start with, using a previous recipe, with slightly different ingredients.

I used patisson from my mother's garden and also shallot and leek.

Old books and bluebell forest

On April 13th I went to visit a library of old books and made a few snaps.

The first ones are miniatures from a manuscript of a medieval religious song book.

The next ones are from a book by Dodoens describing herbs en vegetables: fennel

I particularly like this one of the 'patissons':

and this one is garlic:

After this visit we had lunch on a sunlit terrace - we've been having Summer in Belgium during April. Labelga from Leafy Cooking had invited us over; you can see one of the delicious dishes she prepared that day on her blog.

After that we went to the Halle forest. At a very specific moment this becomes very spectacular with a carpet of bluebells. As you can see in the pics, we went at exactly the right moment.


Our next stop was a landmark in Brussels: the ice cream maker Zizi. One of my favourite spots.
We finished with a bottle of champagne, an appropriate ending for a day like this...