Fish and fourspice

For the first time after two weeks, a period with disciplined workers in half of my home replacing windows and producing dust, I could regain a moment in my kitchen that didn't look too much like an encampment. And on summer solstice day, of which the eve was marred by heavily overcast skies, my newspaper delivered the most incredible: that a summer high was nigh.

Having come home with some fish at 7 pm I suddenly felt elation. A pressing urge was telling me that vitamin D was waiting on my porch and that I was to take full advantage. Cooking fast was key. So I threw together fish, four spices, and young thin carrots, and bingo.

Fish and fourspice

2 fillets of white fish
liberal sprinklings of: turmeric, ginger powder, curry, and chipotle chilli
olive oil, salt and pepper
young carrots
rocket/rucola salad for decoration

Preheat oven at 180°C

Place fish in oven pan, and liberally coat them with four spices. Turn the fillets around, and make sure they're evenly coated. Season with salt (careful) and pepper, and sprinkle with olive oil.

Steam carrots a little (which I didn't), then place them around the fillets. Take some foil, and cover the oven pan. Place in oven for 10-12 minutes (turn heat a bit lower) or until done. The fish is steaming in juices.

Wash some rocket salad, cut it, and decorate the fish. Serve at once.

Note: be careful with salt. In fact, next time I won't use any.
The ginger powder does wonders here for taste and is good against fishy smells.

Dash to the terrace and soak up that Summer Solstice Day Sun until it ends!

Why Kobe goes to Los Gatos

In an interview (Sabato, 13 June), young chef Kobe Desramaults from In de Wulf announced that he will be spending a month in restaurant Manresa of chef David Kinch, who is based in Los Gatos and who won "Best Chef Pacific 2010" from the James Beard Foundation.

Why does this young Belgian chef plan this internship? Most likely to broaden his command in the challenge of using whatever local surroundings yield in food, and to resort less to the automatic pilot that chefs ignite when buying their produce at Rungis.

Nothing wrong with Rungis - food mecca second to none, but chefs like Kobe Desramaults, in the wake of René Redzepi of Copenhagen's Noma, who have seen every new device under the stars, really want to work with impediments. They really are the new hunters and gatherers. And that's why Kobe goes to Los Gatos.

For this is what I imagine chef Kinch does: he visits the Love Apple Farm, his royal purveyor, a place where in another life I'd work, or in another life I'd try to recreate, and gathers the yield of the day for his kitchen.

Now here's what baffled me as well. Desramaults isn't using tomatoes until July. He has a Tomato Criterion.

Unlike last year, this winter I have continued eating tomatoes, solely on account of an extremely local producer (7 km) churning out baskets of cherry tomatoes out of his greenhouse. And in the past weeks, I've been eating this bounty from Holland (or the US?):
In short, conditions were such that I succumbed. Because organic seems to defy any season. Because organic goes colorful. I prepared this quick salad in a state of bewilderment, because it suddenly felt like cheating.

Green tomato salad

Green tomatoes (or if you have them, tomatillos)
1 avocado in its prime
cold cooked chicken breast
fresh tarragon leaves
olive oil
dash of lemon juice (optional)
generous sprinkling of sesame seeds
pepper (salt optional)

Lightly heat the oil over low heat and suffuse with fresh tarragon leaves. Pour leaves and oil over the ingredients, combine everything, serve.

Now start ruminating the Tomato Criterion.

Zucchini tart and string beans

Don't just think that hardly any time for food excludes the home-made vegetable tart. Here is a meal gilded by the evening light of a side order of string beans, stewed in some oil and their own juices, and a vegetable tart filled with zucchini and goat cheese. Hey, why not a string beans and goat cheese tart next time?

Key message of this post: Jason Epstein's memoir Eating has liberated me once and for all of the imperative that we should at all cost let a dough of pâte brisée (in some older posts on vegetable tarts I've spoken of pâte sablée) rest after blending the ingredients. Epstein doesn't bother, and I don't either, ever.

Pâte brisée (my recipe, see also Taty's in her book Tartes et Légumineuses)
10 dl (100 ml) cold water
250 g flour
125 g butter
pinch of salt (or add other spices e.g. paprika, curry)

Combine until you have the consistency of a soft leather glove. Quickly flatten and in one move, drape over a round baking tin. Cut off remaining edges if needed, form a smaller ball with them, and use the next day for something else (like a covered fruit dessert for instance).

Steamed chicken and bell pepper

Like May, June will have its share of disruptive moments due to home renovation. The little cuisine we do, will be of the most light and easy kind. Taty's steamed chicken and steamed bell pepper are ready in no time. Light food accompanied by a tasty bell pepper sauce.

Steamed chicken and bell pepper

From: Cuisine nature... à toute vapeur (Taty Lauwers)

4 chicken breasts (with skin if possible)
salt
lemon juice
4 red bell peppers

I oped for orange and yellow bell pepper, to distinguish from the yellow bell pepper strips.
Cut 3 bell peppers in long strips. Cut 1 bell pepper in little cubes.

Steam bell peppers for 5 minutes, then add chicken breasts, steam for 8-9 minutes more. If you like, first fry the chicken in a pan in some oil to give them some color.

Bell pepper sauce: Blend cubes of bell pepper, a bit of oil, with lemon juice and salt. The result is an unctuous sauce.

Eat, then proceed having a mind filled with other concerns.

Fine finger food in honor of a Great Ocean

There's no time in the Northern hemisphere I like better than this: the countdown to June 21. Before this, all of nature is thriving, moving to and reaching its most upward position. I'm eagerly enjoying this time, but also feeling pangs of regret that after solstice days are shortening and everything is slowly creeping downhill again.

Nothing better than some finger food to chase that thought, to prepare one day in advance and to take to a beach slightly cooled the next day or to a porch at sunset. It's a vegetable tart without a crust that I've described before (here), but last night I made it without crust and with variations. Use any vegetable, seasoning, flour and cheese of choice.

Crustless Leek Tart, with variations - Original recipe by Lucrèce Roegiers of Yggdrasil

6 leeks (I only had 4)
olive oil,
salt, pepper
dry herbs and spices of choice
50 g quinoa flour (variation) (or any type of flour, but use something gluten free for a change)
2-3 tablespoons breadcrumbs
3 beaten eggs
200 g fresh goat cheese (variation)
a few nibbles of grated young pecorino (variation)

Preheat the oven at 180 °C.

Stew the vegetables in some olive oil over moderate heat together with spices and herbs, (limited) salt and pepper, until tender. Remove from the heat.

Add the flour and bread crumbs to the vegetables, mix well, add the eggs mix well, and add the goat cheese and other cheese with a fork. Move mixture to buttered round tart tin.

Bake for 30 minutes, let cool.

This is so good cold the next day! Perfect finger food in honor of a Great Ocean.

Remarks:
I did prefer it with the 50g semolina flour that I used last time
I copied a trick from Joanna at Joanna's Food that I have to use with crusts: I sprinkled some oatmeal flakes on the bottom. Joanna has several fine crust recipes that are very worthwhile.
She lists them again in her new blog An English Kitchen.
Yep, the veggie tart is here to stay all summer.

Two omelettes

Forget the ocean, though it's near. Forget the pizzazz of Silicon Valley. Sunny dust settles in the tiny farmer's town of Pescadero. The American flag stands exceptionally tall. At Duarte's Tavern, locals greet each other, greet the owners and have a second breakfast.
It's not yet eleven and too early for artichoke soup, though the kitchen is full of Spanish clatter. Pans sizzling and bread ovens warming up. I ordered the Mexican omelette: a perfectly folded thin omelette enveloping one long green pepper.
When I read Jason Epstein's account of making omelettes au bain marie, and over low heat, Duarte's omelette sprang to my mind. And when a friend gave me some very fresh eggs, I tried my hand at it.
As I prepared it without butter, my first attempt still ended up as scrambled eggs.
At Duarte's I had room left for Olallieberry pie, freshly baked and still hot. Thanks, Tea and Cookies, for luring me to the delights of Northern California!

Getting chummy with young herring

The week before an early Easter: fresh fava beans and green peas, daylight saving time, Spring cleaning, eggs, tulips, and fish with an MSC label - Marine Stewardship Council. The supermarket had MSC labelled young herring -maatje in Dutch- so this fish was game for lunch. Good fuel for the afternoon chores.

Young Herring (Maatje) Salad

Taking the three main ingredients from a salad by Michael van Straeten in his book Super Salads -chickpea, red bell pepper and herring- then doing my own thing.

1 yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 red onion, chopped
2 young herring fillets (2 maatjes), cut in pieces
1/2 can of chickpeas, rinsed well
1/2 cucumber, chopped
sesame seeds
pumpkin seeds
A few salad leaves
chives, chopped
argan oil (for its nutty taste)
pepper
a dash of chipotle chili powder (for oomph)

Arrange the salad leaves on a plate, and fill with the chopped vegetables, seeds and onion, which all have been mixed and coated with argan oil. End with the herring on top.

Devour, then continue working.

Side Order of Stuffed zucchini

Spotting some round zucchini at the supermarket resulted in a simple gesture later at home: stuffing them. An easy side dish for meat (see next post). Explaining the procedure takes longer than preparing.

Side Order of Stuffed zucchini

Serves 4

4 round zucchini
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
optional: fresh herbs (e.g. sage) or parsley
cheese (soft -pâte molle- I used Pas de rouge -cow's milk, with red washed rind)

Cut of the heads of the zucchini, then with a knife cut loose a quadrangle, then scoop out the zucchini flesh with a tablespoon until you arrive at a nice stuffable round hole.

Steam these zucchini bottom up with the lids quickly, perhaps only 2 minutes, until 3/4 done. Everything should still be firm.

Meanwhile stew the chopped onion, garlic together with the chopped flesh of the zucchini (the firm parts with less seeds). Season, add herbs or parsley and pieces of cheese at the end until the cheese melts. I used some slices of pakhsoy as decoration (and not sage, as I wrote previously).

Fill the zucchini with this mixture, and serve. Variations are legion.

Beef stock, I ought to fire you!

Actually, it's Bienstock, I ought to fire you, a line by Sweet Sue in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot. Nothing more than a silly association to hide that this is a month in which cooking is desperately vying for my prime concern.

Bouillon soup: the beef broth with vegetables all-in-one and eaten mostly on weekends, with different vegetables, and a lean piece of beef cooked along, nick-named bouilli (cooked): beef from a shine bone, but used boneless. The type of meat that even after having cooked so long looks somewhat grey, but is amazingly tasty and tender. Great to eat cold with mustard. Here's one from memory (a rarity in these pages). A lot of hassle to prepare, having to cut so many veggies, but the first spoonful of Taste makes this worth your while.

Vegetable Beef Soup ("Bouillon")

Serves many

1 piece of soup meat (beef), "bouilli"
1 entire green celery
2-3 leek
2 small turnips
1 kohlrabi
1 onion
1-2 garlic cloves
(optional and no item in my youth: 1 sweet potato)
2 bay leaves
a few cloves
1 tablespoon thyme
pepper, salt

Brown the pieces of beef briefly in the oven or fry them briefly in a pan, or skip this step.

Put the beef in a big cooking pot filled with water, and let this come to a boil. Remove white foam.

Cut all the veggies in desires shapes, and add them with the herbs to the soup.

Let this soup simmer for 1,5-2 hrs.

Remove the bay leaf.

Now here was my trick the next day: I had this soup with slices of avocado and a dollop of home-made tomato sauce, and a bit of celery leaf on top. Yummy!

Red beet salad with vinaigrette

The smells of the Catalan beef stew prompted me to make another dish redolent of the past: the vegetable soup based on beef stock that I have seen made at my grandmother's and mother's a thousand times on weekends (see next post). Meanwhile I prepared myself a small beet appetizer, again from Françoise Bernard, but hardly a gesture to need a book for.

Serves 4

1 big cooked red beet, diced in small cubes

For the vinaigrette:
salt
pepper
1 tablespoon vinegar
3 tablespoons olive oil

Whisk these ingredients vigorously, then pour over the diced beet. Decorate with a salad leaf or cress.

All winter I stored cooked beets all in my fridge, without ever touching them. Until now. So something must be stirring among dull roots.

Bebopping with Korean food

Dr Ben Kim's recipes have recently been enhanced with step-by-step pictures, and this week I was lured by Bi Bim Bap, Korean vegetable palette with eggs sunny side up and a bit of hot sauce (I used harissa mixed with olive oil). See the recipe here, and see my result in these pages. True Asian cooking, as it takes time and a lot of different cooking pots are used: to steam zucchini and spinach (I used Swiss chard), and stew onions and carrots, but it's an easy dish and a yummy reward. I learned a trick for making non-stick eggs sunny side up in a normal pan: fry over low heat.

Serve on a sunny plate.

Pumpkin Gratin

Another year, another time for cooking 101: with Cuisine: 1000 recettes/recipes by Françoise Bernard. A present. I sighed in desperation: I've long run out of storage space for cookbooks. But I was quickly won over by the simplicity of the descriptions and pictures, which lure one into action. This pumpkin gratin was almost a no brainer for my brain that is quite unable to store recipes. Almost. So this shiny cookbook did take some spitter spatter.

Pumpkin Gratin

Serves 4

1 kg pumpkin, diced
3 big potatoes, diced
1 onion, chopped
30 g butter
80 g grated cheese (I used parmesan)
3 tablespoons bread crumbs
salt
olive oil

The recipe calls for boiling the pumpkin, potatoes and onion for 25 minutes in some water, but my method is stewing veggies in their own juices with just a little olive oil. This takes longer, about 40-45 minutes, but saves a lot of flavor.

Preheat the oven at 250 °C (yes, 250 °C, very high)

Remove the veggies from the heat. Mash to purée consistency. Add 2/3 of the butter and 1/3 of the cheese to the puree, and mix it in well.

Oil an oven tin, pour in the vegetable purée and add the bread crumbs + 1/3 of the cheese on top. Divide the remaining 1/3 of butter in little nibs on top.

Put in the oven, "for a few minutes" the recipe says, under the grill. This takes a good 10-15 minutes, but do watch your oven.

On a day with temperatures knee-deep in minus, a good dish to share with friends.

Signature or Upgrade? Green Swiss Chard Vegetable Tart

This week an artist friend refused to help me to hang art works because my house was too messy (books and paper, not enough storage), too studentlike on account of a bric à brac of furniture, in short, not up to par with the beautiful and luminous home it is. So the art plan is deferred until Spring, and I have to do basic storage homework.

His passage made me more conscious about the fact that I have been living as if I had to pack my bags anytime soon. I also don't have a complete set of tableware to dine in style. Honestly, I haven't truly been bothered.

It also questioned for me what I'm doing in these pages.

If there's one dish I had triumphantly wanted to declare my signature dish, it's the vegetable tart, which I easily roll our from scratch. But isn't my cooking a bit too simple and crude...? Isn't it time to move up a notch...? More importantly, can I spend the time to become a true amateur cook?

The answer is: no, and definitely not right now. This is a blog mostly about simple and healthy food. Becoming an amateur cordon bleu would have to be a very very slow process, which would begin with mastering the basics. But this artist's critical passage has sent ripple waves through my existence. A great gift to close a year.

Green Swiss Chard Vegetable Tart

Courtesy of my friends at Yggdrasil - a didactic place devoted to permaculture and green living, who shared their pie and veggie tart recipes with me.

Yggdrasil's Basic Pie Recipe

200 g sieved wheat flour
100 g cold butter
pinch of salt
1 dl cold water
oat flakes

Combine the ingredients and form a ball, let this ball rest 30' in the fridge, better still, an entire night.

Preheat the oven at 200 °C.

Cover the dough roller with flour, roll out the dough to 2 cm thickness (a bit less than 1'').

Oil the tart form, put the dough in place, and and sprinkle oat flakes on the bottom. This insulates the dough.

Pour in your filling, then fold the ends of the dough over the filling.

Bake for 30' in a 200°C oven (I baked at 180 °C)

My filling:
Braised green Swiss chard leaves combined with 150 g soft goat cheese, 1 egg, and 1 teaspoon of Hungarian paprika powder.

Cooking With Leftovers: Vegetable Crumble

Oh, yes, I admit to a foible, a weakness, a peccadillo. Sometimes I buy vegetables too much in advance of actually using them. I swear I try to avoid that, but it happens. This situation calls all hands on deck: the greens are plucked away from storing cabinets and the fridge, peeled, rinsed and cut, in short: used. They all end up in a dish called Vegetable Crumble. It's pleasant to barely manage a crumble on top with some leftover ingredients, because after that, we are entitled to shop for new fresh produce.

Vegetable Crumble

(From Puur - Pure, November 2009)

1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1/4 teaspoon chilli flakes
pepper
olive oil
Any vegetables you have, cut in pieces and put in an oven dish (I used leftover pumpkin, 1 kohlrabi, a big piece of root celery, and 2 parsnips)
1 onion, in wedges
1-2 cloves of garlic, chopped

Crumble:
100 g cheddar cheese (I only had 30 g parmezan)
2 tablespoons of fresh coriander (I choopped up green celery leaf)
2 slices of old bread (I used 2 tablespoons of oat grits)

Preheat the oven ay 200 °C.

Prepare the vegetables, and combine them in an oven dish.

In a mortar, combine the spices, pour this over the vegetables, and drizzle with olive oil.

Bake for 30 minutes.

Basically, I didn't have enough crumble, but who bothers? I already have Saturday's luncheon.

Endive Crust: A Great Filling

The picture of a savory crust with Belgian endive and apple or pear paste in the free magazine Puur (Pure) of this month prompted me to repeat the gesture. I prepared this for lunch the night before. While I wasn't so keen on my own rather hard crust this time, nor on this fairly sober move with steamed endive, I was very pleased with my own filling: tart and sweet at the same time. Plainly steamed endive clamors for tart sweetness. Here's the recipe with my changes.
Endive Crust

puff pastry, ready-made (hey, we don't usually do ready made!)
5 Belgian endives, halved, and steamed
4 tablespoons apple or pear paste (pictured)
100 g blue cheese, crumbled
1 tablespoon rosemary, chopped finely
pepper

My -saltless- crust:
250 g flour
100 g butter
10 cl water
1 teaspoon of paprika powder from Hungary
Form a ball, let it rest for an hour, then roll it out, prebake for 15' at 200 °C.

Preheat the oven at 180°C. Roll out the puff pastry in the baking tin, and poke holes with a fork.

Steam the endives, drain well before putting them on the crust.

Divide the crumbled blue cheese and apple or pear paste over the tart. Season with pepper and chopped rosemary.

Bake for about 30 minutes at 180 °C. Sprinkle with a few walnuts or serve with a salad with nuts.

Here's my own filling:
200 g goat cheese, crumbled
1 tablespoon of pickled whole lemon from a fancy food store (which does give some salt to this dish), chopped
1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary
1 big tablespoon of apple-pear paste
Combine everything, divide over the crust.

Great filling! Pickled lemon and apple-pear paste are a gesture I'd repeat.

Crustless Leek Tart, Greek style

You come home on a Saturday that has been fraught with activity after a full week, and the onset of colder weather makes you crave hearty food. But you don't want to slave away. The crustless leek tart Greek style by an acquaintance of mine was just something that filled the ticket. The irony is that I had bought a ready-made crust for another tart, and my tired brain had absentmindedly unpacked the crust already. So I baked a pleonastic tart: a filling that is almost like a crust + new crust. But it's all about what's inside this baked goody.

Crustless Leek Tart, Greek style

6 big leeks, also the green parts
pepper and salt
2 bay leaves
50 g semolina flour
3 eggs
100 g grated gruyère or other cheese (I used parmezan)
2-3 tablespoons breadcrumbs
180 g feta

Preheat the oven at 180 °C.

Clean the leeks, cut them in rings. Add the bay leaves, and either steam or stirfry the leek until they are done. Remove the bay leaves, season with salt and pepper (no salt necessary on account of the feta). Add the semolina, and mix well.

Beat the eggs, and add them to the leek-semolina, mix again. Add the grated cheese, mix.

Coat a cake tin with butter, and sprinkle it with the breadcrumbs. Add the leek mix to the tin. Cut the feta in pieces, and divide over the tart.

Bake for 30 minutes. Serve warm.

The kind of comfort food that makes you feel grateful that you still lifted a finger to make it. Never mind the crust this time.

Marie-Rose Somme's Young dandelion leaf Salad (Fall version)

It's always good to leave sweet dishes behind, and gasp to return to savory plenitude. Salad of young dandelion leaves is a Springtime dish out of De keuken van ons moeder - The kitchen of our Mom cookbook. Salade van molsla stems from a 60-year old Mom from the Ardennes who picks young dandelion leaves in late February, early March. As meal salad, it is redolent of the the famous Salade liégeoise with green beans. Here, I used chard. This Mom advises to use green endive in other seasons. Beware: saturized fat content.

Marie-Rose Somme's Young dandelion leaf Salad (Fall version)

Serves 4

2 kg potatoes
100 g young dandelion leaf salad (Spring), substituted with kale leaves (Fall)
4 hard-boiled eggs, sliced
12 bacon strips
2 scallions, finely chopped
butter, vinegar, pepper, salt, nutmeg, olive oil

Cut the potatoes in cubes, and cook them.

Finely chop the dandelion leaf and divide with the eggs on the plates. (Braise the kale e.g. with garlic).

Fry the bacon on butter, and divide over the potatoes.

Quench the pan with vinegar, and pour this over the salad. Season, and drizzle over some olive oil. Eat at once.

Note: I left out the eggs.