London

Went to London for a short break. We enjoyed very sunny and mild weather. And great food, as usual.

Ahh, the pleasure of a gin-in-T at the local...

After that, you may imagine seeing foxes roaming the neighborhood, but this one was for real

We went for a nice curry at the South-Indian restaurant Rasa in Stoke Newington, with mango lassi

and fish cakes for starters



We also had Japanese food at Aki Japanese Bistro. London is the place where I had the best Japanese food ever, and we weren't disappointed on this occasion.

My favourite Japanese dish: beef teryaki

Another favourite is brunch at the Giraffe in Islington, where you can have smoothies such as Mango Mama

or Groovy Muesli Smoothie

and my all time favourite cooked breakfast - aahh, still smacking my lips -

but you can also have pancakes with maple syrup

Look at the weather we had:

Brunch

A lot of blogging is due, but I have to find the time. So, for now, just two pics of a nice Sunday brunch at Le Passiflore in Ixelles.

Two old ladies' feet at the table next to us.

Apple pie

So many nuts


- huge ones -


and so many chestnuts!


But this post is about apples. Also huge ones - boscoop, a sour variety meant for cooking - from my mother's garden, which I used to make a pie. I follow my friend K.'s simple and delicious recipe. It has lots of fruit and only a little bit of pastry around it.

2 eggs
125 g sugar
125 g flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
750 g apples
a bit of dried raisins
butter

Separate the egg whites from the yolks and beat the whites.
Then beat the yolks with half the amount of sugar until you get a creamy and light coloured mix.
Add the egg whites.
Mix baking powder and cinnamon into the flour and add this to the egg whites.
Peel the apples, remove the cores and cut them into pieces.
Add them to the mixture together with the raisins and mix well.
Grease a pie dish with butter and add a little flour.
Add the mixture.
Sprinkle the remainder of the sugar on top and add a few pieces of butter.
Bake in the oven for 50 min at 180° C.

The pie was eaten by candle light in a cosy appartment ;-)

Note: I added a bit of rum.

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.

Pears with star anise

My mother gave me pears from her garden, a special variety called St-Rémi, which you need to cook. I was inspired by labelga's recipe for stewed pears with star anise and cardamom.
I left out the sugar as she recommended and added honey instead.
I also left out the cinnamon as I wasn't sure how this would combine with the other spices, and used bigger quantities of those.

4 pears
2 star anise
5 pieces of cardamom
2 tsp honey

Peel the pears, remove stalks and cores, and cut them in pieces.
Put them in a pan with a bit of water (they should not be completely covered) with spices and honey. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let it simmer for 45 min.

Birdies and beans

More and more birds are showing up on the crane outside my window.

And where's the royal palace?

Tonight I made another butter bean casserole, with a few adjustments to the recipe:
I added carrot and bay leaves when boiling the beans for the first time.
In the second part I used shallot, carrot, yellow pepper, courgette, potato and celery as vegetables. I only let it simmer for 20 min, until the vegetables were soft.

Pumpkin and chickpea soup

Yes! Today I prepared my first pumpkin of the season. It comes from my friends' garden.
I'm feeling a bit ill so I made a spicy soup to fight my cold.


1-2 tbsp sunflower oil
2 small onions, peeled and chopped
1 small dried chilli pepper (peperoncino), chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1/2 tsp dried coriander seeds, crushed
6 cm ginger, peeled and cut in 3 big pieces
1 small pumpkin
2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
400 g chick peas, cooked and drained (this is the weight of cooked and drained chick peas)
salt


Fry onion and chilli in oil for a few min on low heat, add ginger and coriander seeds and fry for a few more min. Raise the heat a little, add pumpkin, cover the pan and fry for a few more min. Then add potato and chick peas, fry for a few min and add a little water if necessary to avoid burning. Add more boiling water, bring to the boil, add plenty of salt, then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 30 min. Remove the pieces of ginger and serve, e.g. with fresh coriander leaves.

Notes:
You might add leek.
You can also chop the ginger finely or grate it and leave it in the soup.
The taste of the coriander seeds was a bit weak, so you could probably add a whole teaspoon of them.
On the whole the soup received acclaim, from grumpy old men!

Red beetroot soup

When I got home, I decided to start cooking the red beetroots from my friends' vegetable garden, right away. I still had some leftover vegetables so I combined everything in a soup.


3 small onions, peeled and chopped
6 small carrots, peeled and chopped
1 red pepper, washed and chopped
1 courgette, washed and chopped
3 red beetroots, peeled and chopped
a bit of celery, washed and chopped
chopped parsley
olive oil
2 cloves
2-3 bay leaves
vegetable stock

Fry onions and celery stalks for a few min in olive oil on low heat.
Add red beetroots, carrots and pepper, raise the heat a little and fry for some more min.
Add courgette and celery leaves and fry for some more min.
Add boiling water, lots of salt, pepper, cloves, bay leaves and vegetable stock.
Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 30-45 min until the vegetables are cooked.
Serve with chopped parsley.

Note
The original recipe (from the cook of Lukemieke, a vegetarian restaurant which existed in Leuven when I was studying there) uses these vegetables: 300 g red beetroot, 2 carrots, 1 onion, 1/2 white or green cabbage and 2 leeks. It also suggests serving the soup with sourcream. I added a tbsp of extra virgin olive oil.
After tasting the soup I decided that in future I would leave out the red pepper (too tangy) and courgette (got too soft) and add leek and potato in stead.

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.