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!

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!

Vleessla (Meat & egg salad)

Ahhh vleessla...no doubt one of my all-time favorite sandwich fillings. You can buy it readymade in virtually every butcher's or supermarket in Belgium, however, there's nothing like the homemade version. It's easy, it's rich and it's very, very tasty. And it's not for those who try to keep their cholestorol in check...

In Belgium it's usually eaten as a filling between two slices of bread, for lunch or dinner. However, while I was studying in the UK last year, it also appeared to be a great hit as a late night snack with my Spanish friends. We had planned a big night out; dinner, bar and some not too sober dance moves later on. As usual, afterwards all of us were craving for a good, filling snack before we were going to crawl into our warm, soft beds. Since these midnight cravings always seem to surface each time we went out for a drink or two, I prepared a large bowl (there were ten of us...) of vleessla in advance. Upon our return, I toasted a whole loaf of sliced bread and plopped the bowl of goodness on the table. Soon after, I was struggling to scrape together enough vleessla to put on my own piece of toast...the nerve...

What do you need?

Three hardboiled eggs

60 gr of cooked ham

1 mid-sized white onion

Three tablespoons of mayonnaise

salt and pepper

This will serve 3.

Preparation:

1. Hard-boil the eggs.

2. While the eggs are boiling, start slicing and dicing the onion and ham into little cubes or slices.

3. Once the eggs have cooled down a bit, remove the shell and mash them up in a plate.

4. Add the sliced ham and onion. Mix these three ingredients thoroughly, so you end up with a somewhat homogenous mixture.

5. Add the mayonnaise and mix it in well with the other ingredients. When the mixture has a thick paste look and feel to it, you're done!

6. Put some on a slice of (toasted or not) bread, if you can resist eating it straight from the plate!

Again, here you can play with the amount of each ingredient used; if the mixture is too dry add some more mayo, if you prefer a stronger onion taste, just pour in some more! Flexibility is key!

Tip: you could also replace the onion with chopped up chives and add a little natural yoghurt to the mayonnaise. To top it off, add in a little bit of chopped dill.

Frikadellen met krieken (Meatballs with sour cherries )

Another signature Belgian dish with contrasting tastes, typical of the region I live in, the South of the province of Antwerp. I know it may sound strange, even people from other parts of the country who don't know this dish will usually give me the "what the heck?!" response. But trust me, the saltiness of the meatballs goes great with the tangy sweetness of the sour cherries! If you're not sure what a sour cherry is exactly, you can find more information on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_cherry.

In the past, and also today (perhaps to a lesser extent), this was/is a dish eaten at festive occasions, such as the town fair (kermis), family parties, etcetera etcetera. I've heard it being eaten as a desert, but in my family, we've always had it as the main course.

What do you need?

To serve three to four people:

550 gr of ground beef
450 gr of ground pork
250 gr of breadcrumbs (no crust, only the dry inner white part)
4 eggs
salt
pepper
nutmeg

1 kg of sour cherries preserved in their own juice
3-4 tablespoons of sugar
3 tablespoons of water
1-1,5 tablespoons of potato starch

Preparation:

1. Take a big casserole and put the ground meat in it. In total, there should be about 1 kg of meat, but make sure that there's a little more ground beef in the whole than ground pork. The pork gives a lighter flavor to the beef and also adds some fat, again adding to the overall taste. But you shouldn't use too much pork, otherwise the meatballs will get too greasy.

2. Add the breadcrumbs, the eggs, salt, pepper and nutmeg. If the meatballs are too sticky, or too "wet", add a bit more crumbs. To make the breadcrumbs, leave a couple of slices of white bread out to dry, and after a couple of days break them up into crumbs.

3. Use your hands to mix all the ingredients, so that you get one homogenous mass.

4. Roll the meat into balls of about 3 to 4 cm in diameter.

5. Boil water in another casserole. When the water is boiling add the meatballs, and boil them for about 10 minutes. When boiled, pour away the water and leave the meatballs to cool down.
In the meantime, get started on the sour cherry sauce. You could also make the sauce first, and leave it to cool in the fridge, as I for example prefer my sauce to be cold. But it works equally well when the sauce is still warm. When the sauce has been prepared, fry the meatballs in a frying pan with a litte butter. When they all have a dark golden look, they're ready to be served.

6. To make the sauce, pour the contents of the jar of preserved cherries in a small casserole. Add the 3 (or four, or two, depending on how sweet you want it to be; my grandmother makes it really sweet, whereas my mother prefers to keep some of the cherries' natural sourness). Boil the mixture for about 5 minutes and then leave it to cool down while you mix the water and starch.

7. Mix the potato starch with the water. Add it to the cherries, to thicken the sauce. Again, here you can add more or less starch, depending on how thick you want your sauce to be. Briefly boil the thickened sauce again (for 2-3 minutes).

Serve each person about 6 meatballs, and pour an ample amount of sauce on each plate. Serve with a couple of slices of white or whole grain bread.

Smakelijk!

"Kermissoep" (Fair soup)

My grandmother often makes this soup for Sunday lunches, when the entire family has lunch at her place. Originally, this soup was only cooked when there was a "kermis" or fair in town, which called for a celebration. The celebratory part of this soup in those days was the use of meat, as in the past -for example during the war- meat wasn't always readily available. Luckily, we now don't have to wait for the fair to come to our village in order to enjoy this hearty soup!

Ingredients

300 gr of meat to create the stock, preferably a piece of shank (beef)
4 large stalks of celery
2 large leeks (only use the white part)
2 mid-sized carrots
(optional) 2 tomatoes
macaroni
Salt
Pepper
Laurel leaf

Preparation:

1. Fill a large casserole with water and add the the shank (with bone and the oh so important marrow). Often this soup meat is eaten afterwards (it's delicious cold with some mustard, and it also goes very well with the fried young potatoes described in a previous post.), and if you do wish to eat it afterwards, it's preferable to add the meat to the water once the water has reached its boiling point. If you don't plan on eating it, you can add the meat to the water from the beginning. Leave the meat to boil for about an hour (depending on the meat) so that the meat has been thoroughly cooked. Remove the meat from the casserole. Keep the stock boiling.

2. Finely chop up all the vegetables, the carrots let's say about 0,5 cm thick whereas the celery and leeks can be anywhere between 0,5 and 1 cm. The tomatoes can be cut into larger chunks, as otherwise they would desintegrate rapidly.

3. First add the sliced carrots and leave them to boil for about 15 minutes. Then add the chopped celery, and boil for another 10 minutes. Finally, add the leeks, macaronis and tomatoes. Leave this to boil for another 5 minutes and then turn off the fire.

4. Serve hot, with little meatballs; Belgians put little meatballs in almost all their soups. They even voted tomato soup with meatballs to be their all-time favorite dish! These meatballs are made with ground beef and pork, breadcrumbs and eggs. I will put up the full recipe for making these small ones as well as the standard, larger ones tomorrow.

Belgian Food & Young potatoes with cured ham

Finally, I will be starting a long line of posts on Belgian cooking and Belgian food. Most of the traditional Belgian dishes are handed down from generation to generation, usually from (grand) mother to daughter, but in this case from grandmother and mother to (grand) son. I basically spent a few days interrogating my grandma, asking her to spill her secrets. Although I was already quite familiar with the preparation of the larger share of these dishes, my grandma's help was essential in getting things right. But you all know grandma's cooking, absolutely delicious, but usually done without the slightest sign of precise measurements. So, on that note, you'll have to bear with me for a bit and experiment a little on your own, to get the recipe to fit to your particular tastes.

As this is my first Belgian food post, I thought it would be a good idea to give a short descriptive introduction into Belgium's food. This actually led me to do some culinary soul searching as I had never thought about Belgian food in this way before. I had always taken my own country's food for granted, never really stopping to wonder why there weren't any Belgian cookbooks alongside the endless rows of cookbooks of more internationally established cuisines, such as the French, Italian, and Spanish ones (to name a few). Only now that I have had the opportunity to savor an ever-growing number of dishes from all over the world, am I beginning to see that our little country’s cuisine deserves to be recognized as a full, rich and delicious kitchen as well. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Belgian culinary tradition is still mainly an oral one as indicated earlier. For over five decades, there’s only been one essential Belgian cookbook, of which each family owned a copy; “Ons Kookboek” by the “Boerenbond” (Our Cookbook written by the Farmer’s Union). Only in the past decade and especially in the past three to four years, has there been an increase in the number Belgian cookbooks available in bookstores. This may have to do with the recent institutional crises that the country has experienced, which has brought some people to search for a unifying Belgian identity. I can only applaud such initiatives.
However, the cookbooks produced so far are still focused on the internal Belgian market, which doesn’t exactly help the promotion of Belgian food abroad, where Belgian cuisine all too often equals Belgian chocolate, waffles, endives, beer and sprouts. Although these products are delicious and Belgians are very proud of them, there are so many more delicacies to be explored and savored by foreigners! As far as I know, only one good Belgian cookbook has been written; “Everybody Eats well in Belgium” by Ruth Van Waerebeek. You can find this book on Amazon.com.

But what exactly is the Belgian kitchen? How could one describe Belgian food? I have often heard the Belgian food being described to foreigners as “cooked with the same quality and finesse as the French cuisine, while it is served with German generosity”. That is essentially what it comes down to; Belgian food can be characterized as a combination of German, Dutch and French cuisines, with the French influence clearly being dominant. This isn’t all too surprising, when one takes into account that the regions which nowadays constitute Belgium have been overrun by and been under the control of foreign powers on countless occasions. The Romans, Germans, Spanish, Austrians, Dutch and especially the French, all left their marks on the country’s culture and culinary traditions. Even today, the country remains a meeting point of the two main European cultural groups: it sits astride on the barrier which separates the Flemish, who have a Germanic culture, from the Walloons, whose culture is of Romanic origin.

Belgian food is still deeply ingrained in its medieval traditions; the recurrent use of spices such as saffron (Pass it please!!!), nutmeg, the abundance of vinegars, condiments, mustards, almonds and dried fruits, they all lead to typically medieval contrasting tastes such as sweet-salt (for example red cabbage with sweet apples served with salted bacon), sour-salt and sweet-sour. This all reminds us of the region’s rich history as an economic center, when its ports of Brugge and later Antwerpen saw all those exotic spices being bought and sold within their walls.

Belgians tend to attach enormous importance to the quality of the ingredients used in their cooking. Long before the great chefs of the world chanted in chorus that high-quality ingredients are “key” to great cooking, Belgians (and others obviously) had already realized and consequently applied this knowledge to their everyday cooking. Belgian cooking usually doesn’t mix a great number of flavors to create highly complex palettes (although such complex dishes do exist), but rather it will use several key ingredients and bring their inherent flavors to the fore. Hence, you must have high-quality ingredients, as there’s nothing to hide poor quality ones with. A typical example is a dish which is very popular this time of year, namely young potatoes with cured ham, demonstrates this very well. There are two (yes, only two) pivotal ingredients: fresh, young potatoes and cured ham, either salted or smoked. Once the young potatoes have been boiled, they are sliced and fried in a frying pan, with either good butter or for the waistline-conscious, with a neutral vegetable oil, such as sunflower seed oil. When they’ve reached a light brown color on at least one side, they’re served with several slices of good cured ham, and a green salad. As you can see, you must have good ingredients to start with or otherwise your entire dish is ruined. Typical dishes such as this one, give a correct image of the honest, rustic kitchen that can be seen as the Belgian kitchen.
A true reflection of their love of all things delicious and mouthwatering, is the sheer quantity that the food is served with. If you ever have the opportunity to take part in a Belgian family dinner, or a large family party, such as a birthday party or “kermis” (fair) parties, then you’ll see why we are called the Burgundians of the North. Tables will be filled to the edge with main dishes, side dishes, condiments, sauces, beers and wines. Trust me, if you’re a guest at one of these parties, the most common question you’ll be asked is “Are you sure you don’t want anything more? You’re full? Nonsense, have some of this…” Even a simple Sunday morning brunch or evening dinner (depending on the family), will feature pistolets (a round, golden-colored bread roll), sandwiches, wholegrain bread, raisin bread, and several pastries. To go with the bread, you’ll be able to choose from different types of hams, salami, paté, sausages, americain (raw ground beef mixed with herbs and a sauce – a Belgian favorite), chicken in mild curry sauce, chocolate paste and the list can go on and on. Suffice it to say, you will not leave the table feeling hungry!