Stoemp Met Wortelen (Stoemp with Carrots)

Since winter has arrived, I couldn't resist making this wonderful winter dish.  A traditional dish from Brussels, "stoemp" has everything you need to stay fat warm and happy!  It basically is a type of mashed potatoes with a large amount of vegetables mashed right in with the potatoes.  And you can do it with all kinds of vegetables, although each one will require a slightly different preparation.

This time we'll focus on Stoemp with carrots, one of my favorites, especially when served with a nice banger-like sausage (although it should have a bit more of a peppery taste to it).

What do you need?

For two people you'll need:

6 to 7 large potatoes

10 large carrots

1 large onion

butter

salt

pepper

nutmeg

1 to 2 cups of milk

Let's get cooking!

1. Start by peeling the potatoes and cleaning the carrots and onion. 

2 Boil the potatoes to the point where they're soft enough to make mashed potatoes (usually around 18-20 minutes, but it varies according to the size of the potatoes).  You can halve the potatoes to shorten the cooking time.  Make sure to add plenty of salt to the water.

3.  Dice the carrots into small cubes.  Do the same thing for the onion. Melt a tablespoon of good, unsalted butter in a small frying pan or pot.

4. Once the butter has melted, add the onion.  Stir it until it has become glazy.  At that point, add in the diced carrots.  Keep it on a low fire for about 15 minutes, while stirring regularly.  You may need to add a little more butter or olive oil if you prefer.  Once the carrots are soft, you can remove them from the fire.

5.  When the potatoes are cooked, pour away the water and leave the potatoes in the pot. Mash them up a little bit before adding in the carrots.

6.  Add the carrots, a tablespoon of butter, lots of pepper and freshly ground nutmeg.  Also pour in about a cup of milk to ensure the stoemp is moist enough.  Add more later if need be.

7.  Mash it all together so that you get a consistent orange-yellow mass.

8.  Taste it to check whether it needs more spices or butter, or milk.

Serve with sausage, porkchops or thick bacon.

To wash it down, I suggest a dark beer with spices, such as a Belgian trappist or abbey beer.  A nice pale ale will also go great with it!

Foodbuzz Publisher Community Launches!!!

Today is an important day for our foodblogging community, where we take a significant step forward!

The press release below gives all the information on this event. Enjoy!


LAUNCH OF GLOBAL FOODBUZZ BLOGGER COMMUNITY
LEVERAGES REAL-PEOPLE, REAL-TIME POWER OF FOOD PUBLISHING

San Francisco – October 13, 2008: Foodbuzz, Inc., officially inaugurates its food blogger community with more than 1,000 blog partners, a global food blogging event and an online platform that captures the real-people, real-time power of food publishing in every corner of the world. At launch, the Foodbuzz community ranks as one of the top-10 Internet destinations for food and dining (Quantcast), with bloggers based in 45 countries and 863 cities serving up daily food content.
“Food bloggers are at the forefront of reality publishing and the dramatic growth of new media has redefined how food enthusiasts access tasty content,” said Doug Collister, Executive Vice President of Foodbuzz, Inc. “Food bloggers are the new breed of local food experts and at any minute of the day, Foodbuzz is there to help capture the immediacy of their hands-on experiences, be it a memorable restaurant meal, a trip to the farmers market, or a special home-cooked meal.”
Foodbuzz is the only online community with content created exclusively by food bloggers and rated by foodies. The site offers more than 20,000 pieces of new food and dining content weekly, including recipes, photos, blog posts, videos and restaurant reviews. Members decide the “tastiness” of each piece of content by voting and “buzz” the most popular posts to the top of the daily menu of submissions. Foodbuzz currently logs over 13 million monthly page views and over three million monthly unique visitors.
“Our goal is to be the number-one online source of quality food and dining content by promoting the talent, enthusiasm and knowledge of food bloggers around the globe,” said Ben Dehan, founder and CEO of Foodbuzz, Inc.
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The Foodbuzz blogger community is growing at a rate of 40 percent per month driven by strong growth in existing partner blogs and the addition of over 100 new blogs per month. “The Foodbuzz.com Web site is like the stock of a great soup. The Web site provides the base or backbone for bloggers to interact as a community, contribute content, and have that content buzzed by their peers,” said Mr. Dehan.
Global Blogging Event
Demonstrating the talent and scope of the Foodbuzz community, 24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Blogs offered online food enthusiasts an international, virtual street festival of food and diversity. The new feature showcased blog posts from 24 Foodbuzz partner bloggers chronicling events occurring around the globe during a 24 hour period and included:
· Mid-Autumn Festival Banquest (New York, NY)
· The "Found on Foodbuzz" 24-Item Tasting Menu (San Francisco, CA)
· Aussie BBQ Bonanza – Celebrating Diversity (Sydney, Australia)
· The Four Corners of Carolina BBQ Road Trip (Charleston, SC)
· Criminal Tastes – An Illegal Supper (Crested Butte, CO)
· From Matambre to Empanadas: An Argentine Dinner (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
· A Sweet Trompe l’oeil (Seattle, WA)

“24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Blogs” captures the quality and unique local perspective of our food bloggers and shared it with the world,” said Ryan Stern, Director of the Foodbuzz Publisher Community. “It illustrates exactly what the future of food publishing is all about – real food, experienced by real people, shared real-time.”

Salsa con pomodori freschi e bacon

Even though this is ideally a summer dish, when ripe tomatoes are available in abundance, the weather was so nice this weekend with blue skies and radiant sun shine, that I couldn't resist making myself a dish which was equally light and radiant. (Plus I had a whole bunch of (over-) ripe tomatoes to use... ). You'll notice that it closely mimics the quintessential Italian dish, pasta all'amatriciana. This is just my own take on that classic recipe, where I used whatever I had lying around the fridge.

It's easy, fast, and most importantly, tasty!

The only things you need are:

For two people:

8 medium-sized ripe tomatoes

Olive oil

4 strips of bacon

Fresh spring onions

Black pepper

Preparation:

1. Clean the tomatoes, and remove any brown spots around the area where the tomatoes was connected to the plant. Leave the tomato whole, do not cut it up in pieces

2. Boil a pot of water and put the tomatoes in the boiling water for about 2-3 minutes.

3. Take the tomatoes out of the water and leave them to cool down for a few minutes.

4. Remove the skin of the tomatoes, which should come right off now that the tomatoes have been lightly blanched. Cut the tomatoes in halves and remove the seeds and any hard parts.

5. While heating some olive oil over a low fire in a frying pan, dice the bacon in small pieces. When the oil is hot, add the bacon. Stir frequently as you don't want the bacon to go brown.

6. Dice the tomatoes, and add the pieces to the bacon. Add freshly ground black pepper and stir well. Let the whole cook slowly over a low fire for about 15 minutes. Stir occasionally, in order to mix the juices.

7. Boil water and prepare the pasta.

8. Chop up some fresh spring onions and add the majority to the tomato sauce, while saving a small portion of the spring onions. Stir them into the sauce and remove the frying pan from the fire. Let the sauce sit for another 2 minutes.

9. Pour the salsa over the pasta and sprinkle the remaining spring onions over the sauce.

Serve with some fresh ciabatta and a dry, light white wine!

Buon appetito!

A trio of sauteed mushrooms

I love mushrooms. Strange, however, that as a kid I would try to avoid eating mushrooms at all costs. I'd pick them out the sauce and throw them outside when my parents weren't looking, I'd scrape them from my plate into a napkin and hide them in the pocket of my pants only to dispose of them later. I'd even hide the mushrooms before my parents had even started cooking them. But, all of a sudden, I started appreciating the viled mushroom. Some years later I began to discover more varieties of mushrooms. And now I can justly call myself a true mushroom lover. Shitake mushrooms, enokis, fresh forest mushrooms, funghy porcini, ... The other day a Chinese friend of mine made a dish with mushrooms which can only be found in her region in China...gorgeous! All these types are grand prize winners, however my post will feature a type of mushroom which is sometimes looked upon as being too ordinary for some of today's high culinary artists... the plain white Parisian champignon or white button mushroom. I'll be showing three ways in which you can thoroughly enjoy these babies as a side dish (to be honest I could even eat them as a main dish!). So, without further adieu, three sumptuous recipes for making quick sautéed button mushrooms.



Numéro Un: Baby button mushrooms with soy sauce

What do you need for two people?

One basket of button mushrooms (I think it's about 250 grams) or if you're lazy/in a hurry, you could even use the canned ones for this.

light brown soy sauce

pepper & salt

olive oil

Preparation:

1. Pour some good quality olive oil in a frying pan.

2. Clean your mushrooms, you don't have to slice them if they're still baby mushrooms; just trim the stalks.

3. Once the olive is hot, add the mushrooms. Sautée them; don't fry them! Keep them moving around in the frying pan and only cook them on a medium to low setting.

4. Add the soy sauce to the mushrooms.

5. Add the salt and pepper (I personally like to add a good amount of freshly ground black pepper).

6. Keep on sautéeing them until they're cooked. Serve and Savor!
These mushrooms go very well with grilled chicken, makes for a very light and tasty meal!


Numéro Deux: Garlic Mushrooms

What do yo need for two people?

A basket of button mushrooms
2 cloves of garlic

1 tablespoon of butter (or margarine)

olive oil

freshly ground black pepper

light brown soy sauce



Preparation:


1. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the olive oil. Once the butter/oil is hot, add the garlic. Briefly sautée the garlic.

2. Add the sliced mushrooms. Stir them into the butter-oil mix, and let absorb the goodness.

3. Drizzle the soy sauce over the mushrooms so that all are nicely coated with it.

4. Add the black peppper. If you want, you could also add some garlic powder at this point.

5. Cook for another ten minutes on a low to medium fire and then serve.

These are great with steak, or as a sidedish to just about anything.


Numéro Trois: Sauteed mushrooms with lemon and parsley

What do you need for two people?

a basket of mushrooms
1 tablespoon of butter
olive oil
fresh, chopped parsley (optionally also chopped chives)
1/2 lemon
black pepper
salt

1. Put about three tablespoons (or more, depending on the amount of mushrooms) of olive oil in a frying pan, along with the butter. Melt the butter and mix it in with the olive oil.

2. Slice the mushrooms. Add them to the butter-oil mix. Stir them well, so that they're all coated with the oil and butter.

3. Squeeze the half lemon, and add the juice to the mushrooms. Stir well.

4. Add the freshly ground black pepper and salt. Stir well.

5. Add the freshly chopped parsley (and chives if you wish)

6. Softly cook the mushrooms for another 7 minutes or so, until they're light brown.

Serve and enjoy!

Saffron's back, baby! With Flemish Beef stew (grandmother's style)

I'm back! Finally, after almost two months of silence, Pass the saffron, please has jumped back into action! Now that I've settled into my new home and into my new life, I hope to be able to post regularly again, although you'll have to bear with me at some points... Law school will demand most of my time to be spent sitting behing books instead of standing behind pots and pans.

The first dish I'll be posting is my absolute favorite dish, Flemish Beef Stew ( Stoofvlees or Stoverij in Dutch or Carbonades à la Flamande in French). However, there are so many different variations to this dish as there are grandmothers I think. Every family's stew tastes a little bit different. The dish also varies according to the region or city you're in, for example, if you have stoofvlees in Leuven (Louvain), then the taste will be somewhat sweeter than in other cases due to the addition of speculaas (a typical Belgian cookie). Another famous variation to this dish is called Gentse Stoverij, which uses two different types of beer and more herbs (thyme, parsley, etc). However, the recipe I'll be posting is the one created and followed by my grandmother.

What do you need?

For two to three people:

1 kg of beef stew meat (don't use "good meat" i.e. steak etc, rather use the shoulder meat, or rib meat). Make sure it's not too lean, you want to have some fat in there as the taste will be much better and the meat won't turn out to be chewy.

1 medium sized onion

1 teaspoon of sharp mustard

potato flour

2 medium-sized bay leaves

1 tablespoon of vinegar (don't use wine vinegar!!)

Pepper & salt

1 clove

Freshly grated nutmeg

optional: slice of white bread

optional: trappist beer

Let's get cooking!

1. If the meat hasn't been diced, cut up the meat into cubes of about 3x3x3 cm. Then melt about a tablespoon of unsalted butter in a large frying pan. Once it's gone light brown and there's no more bubbles in melted butter, add the beef.

2. Brown the cubes of beef. Make sure all the sides are brown, if not, your stewed beef will be very chewy and tough.

3. Once you fried the beef, remove it from the frying pan and put it in a casserole. Add water to the frying pan, and make a sauce with the butter left in the pan. You will probably have to do this several times in order to get all the rests of butter left in the frying pan to dissolve. Add the sauce to the casserole, but only add enough to leave the tops of the meat sticking out. Add salt, pepper, bay leaves and nutmeg.

4. Add the whole onion to the beef. Stick a clove into the bottom of the onion. You can also cut up the onion into quarters and let it dissolve. Also, add the teaspoon of sharp mustard. You can also use a slice of white bread, spread the mustard onto the slice of bread. Put the slice on top of the meat, with the mustard side facing down. The bread will dissolve and thicken the sauce (most likely you won't need to add potato flour afterwards).

5. Put the casserole on a very low fire, and let it cook very slowly for at least an hour (it might take a good deal longer, or it might less time, it all depends on the meat). Every so often check on the meat, whether it's cooked well enough, and give the whole thing a good stir. 6. Take a few tablespoons of the sauce and mix it with the tablespoon of vinegar and about a teaspoon of potato flour. Stir and then add to the beef. This will thicken your sauce (watch out, don't use too much, the sauce shouldn't be too thick, it still has to be quite runny). Stir the stew to let the potato flour do its work.

6. Once it's ready, remove the whole onion and the two bay leaves.

Serve with fresh fries, fresh chopped Belgian endives and some "pickles" (similar to British picalilly, but not as sweet and more sour)!

Smakelijk!! Enjoy!