You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘home’ tag.
Nothing more rewarding after a busy week at work than cooking some delicious food and enjoying it in good company. Sandrine and I asked my parents over for dinner at the start of their long-awaited holiday. In stead of going for a traditional two course meal we decided to just serve some home made appetizers with a glass of champagne, before having the main course.
APPETIZERS:
- olives and feta cheese - bruschettas with fresh tomato salsa - mini North Sea shrimp cocktails - mini quiches à la Sandrine, with Belgian endive and goat cheese - blood sausage with caramelized apple (see also Bloody Sausages and More Bloody Sausages)
MAIN COURSE:
Guilt-head sea bream à la Bart
Ingredients (serves four): 2 fresh sea breams (gutted and descaled), 1 lemon, lots of dill (on this occasion I used both fresh and dried dill), white pepper, coriander seed, sea salt (preferably course), olive oil, butter
Make two incisions on each side of the fish, rub in some olive oil and stuff the fish cavity with a mixture of dill, pepper, coriander, salt and the juice of half a lemon. You could also add a few slices of garlic. Place the fish in an oven tray with the rest of the lemon cut up. Add enough butter and season with more dill, pepper and salt. Bake in a preheated oven for 15-20 minutes at 200 °C (about 400 °F). Sprinkle with fresh dill sprigs and serve with bread, parsley potatoes, steamed broccoli and young carrots.
We drank a white 2004 Crozes-Hermitage AOC (France) with it. Bull’s-eye! They loved it. The perfect way to start your vacation. Bon appétit!
Presenting my mum and dad’s specialty! They own a butcher’s shop and produce a wide range of traditional meat products, one of them being the famous blood sausage. It’s known all over the world, especially in Europe: in France they call it boudin noir, in Germany it’s Blutwurst, in the U.K. and Ireland you can have black pudding for breakfast… Its origins lie in traditional slaughter, utilizing every single part of the animal and certainly not wasting its very nutritious (lots of proteins, minerals and vitamins) but perishable blood.
What’s really astonishing is the vast variety of recipes for making blood sausage. It seems every country, every little region has its own traditional recipe. The basic recipe for blood sausage uses only blood, seasoning and a filler. Most often pig’s blood is used. Bread, barley, rice, oatmeal, buckwheat or even sweet potato can serve as a filler. In Western Europe the seasoning is rather limited, but in both Southern and Eastern Europe some very typical spices are used, e.g. in Hungary I once tasted a delicious little sausage made with blood, rice and lots of sweet paprika powder. Sometimes even ingredients like raisins, onions or pine nuts are added.
My dad’s recipe is fairly simple. The recipe was passed on by his grandparents, so it really has been in the family for quite some time now. It contains fresh pig’s blood, cooked pork and rind, stale bread and some spices. The cooked meat is minced and then mixed with the other ingredients into a dough. The natural sausage casings (outer lining of the pigs intestines) are stuffed with this dough and finally the sausages are slowly cooked at low heat.
In Belgium and France, the traditional way of eating blood sausages is gently browned in butter and served with applesauce. Instead of using applesauce, my mum serves them with baked apples. She cores the apples and cuts them in half, bakes them in a pan with some lard and finally adds a few tablespoons of brown sugar and a cup of coffee, creating a sweet caramel sauce. It’s the balance between the mineral flavour of the sausage (because of the blood’s high iron content) and the sweet and sour taste of the apples that makes this dish so great.
Although by many regarded as a rather dull and old fashion product, the blood sausage is making its comeback in Belgian cuisine, e.g. I ate it once in a Michelin star restaurant where it accompanied a fillet of rabbit and a well seasoned pumpkin mash. Heavenly! The sweet and sour of the pumpkin worked perfectly with the sausage and the blood sausage in its turn gave the rabbit a little taste of the wild. A part of our culinary heritage restored! Bon appétit to you all!
This postcard dates from the 1920′s. It shows the little village of Holsbeek, Belgium. Marked with a red circle is the house I currently call my home. Amazing how much history got packed together in this one picture. In the middle you see the church of St. Maurus. The church was destroyed on December 28, 1944 (during World War II) by a German V1 flying bomb, but was soon after rebuilt. The five cent stamp shows a picture of King Albert I (1875-1934) who died in a climbing accident in Marche-les-Dames, Belgium (Ardennes region). The hilly terrain you see appearing in the distance, as well as the hill the photographer was standing on when he took this picture, are in fact the remains of a series of sandbanks left here by a prehistoric sea arond five million years ago. In between lies the Winge valley, known for its Early Mesolithic sites dating from about 9500 BP. The house you see in front, the one with the little dormer, used to be a corn mill. The mill also produced electricity for street lighting. The house I’m living in used to be a pigsty… and honestly, from time to time it still looks like one.
