More about me

With a little help from my friends: Christmas

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Man, did I have a weekend full of food!! I think by the time we finally get too Christmas I’ll be as stuffed as a Turkey. Saturday  night was without any doubt a night I will remember my whole life (although some parts got washed away with lots of wine). Saturday we had a Friends Christmas party at my friend Stijn’s house… Although when I entered it seemed more like Santa’s workshop :-), Everybody was doing something , besides me, as I had already prepared my dessert at home.

The plan of the Christmas celebration was that we had teams of 3-4 people each making a course, as otherwise the same people as always would be cooking. I really like this concept, as this way people who don’t know how to cook are actually forced to help and maybe thanks to this night feel like cooking more, even after this evening  🙂 (mmm, not sure who this message is for 😉 )

We started with some bubbles!!  (What else?) For people who want to know, we had the ‘Sierra Salinas’ cava. At first I actually thought we would have more than enough bottles (was I wrong); The appetizers was the task of my lovely girlfriend Delphine and the charming Saskia, who had really outdone themselves, as they served us a wide variety of verrines , toast with paprika caviar, tapenades,  spoon bites, etc…  A real success!! Good job ladies

The first course was a creation of host Stijn (that you might remember from one of my previous posts) and his team. This team even did some show cooking 🙂 they had salted a salmon themselves … and as everybody knows at some point you’ll have to wash off the salt from the fish, now this was some showcooking!! Don’t try this at home kids!! The fish was too big for the sink, so the next best thing was the bath  🙂

I can assure you that the result was yummy and a feast for the eye!

And so the night continued in harmony and I might even say crescendo! Now it is up to my buddy Laurent and his merry men :-). They prepared a Jeroen Meus classic ‘Chicken stew prepared with old Geuze beer’. And Yet again my friends surprise me with their skills and finger liking result!!  To accompany this dish, my friends served a Cabernet Sauvignon Terrapura

The moment supreme was without any doubt the dessert 😉 😉 no no, just kidding. For the dessert I was really lucky to be able to work with 2 lovely ladies!! We decided to make ‘Speculoos cheesecake in a jar’ where I replaced the red fruit with caramelized apples and pears. Amandine made an apple turnover according to a family recipe (but maybe I can convince her to do guest cooking on my blog to see how she makes it?). And last but not least Stephanie made some yummy looking cupcakes!!

We also exchanged gifts! The fun part about that was that nobody knew for who they were going to get a present… I had to buy a present for my friend Carlos, and I must admit that I‘ve been sneaky to find out what he wanted. Let me explain, I was already planning to buy wine, but to know what kind he liked I took him to a wine tasting (but he didn’t know at that moment that I was his secret Santa).  I received a beautiful wine decanter!!

I really had a WONDERFUL evening!! Thank you, you guys rock!!

My Cups n’ cakes workshop experience

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A few weeks ago I received an invitation to follow a workshop to make cupcakes at my company’s head office. Obviously I immediately excepted the invitation as it doesn’t happen every day as usually it are work-related workshops 🙂 .  Our Sensei for the evening was the lovely Karolien from cups ‘n cakes, who is a real pro, if you look at her website you see that she creates the funniest creatures.

Making cupcakes might seem easy at first, but I must admit that it really takes more patience en craftsmanship than one would think 🙂 . The theme  of yesterday’s workshop was ‘Sinterklaas’  as you can see on the above picture.  Step by step we got guided into the world of cupcake making and learned how to make a worthy  replica of the original cupcakes. (and i learned that I needed patience)

Making cupcakes or better, decorating them was a first for me, it really fell like being back in kinder garden playing with Play Doh 🙂 … Funny stuff :-)!  My actual result well, I wouldn’t call it a real replica, my creatures seemed to be under the influence of some kind of drug  (especially my Sinterklaas, he looks like a creature in Spongebob squarpanths)… You be the judge .

On the picture below you can see on the right the original and at the left the one I made, but I think you’d already guessed that 🙂

My best cupcake of the evening was without any doubt the one with the roses! At first I really thought that I did a great job, this until I looked around and saw what wonderful things my colleagues had made!! I think some of them are really gifted (or just have a lot of patience). Really, I saw one person making a mermaid, little ducks, hearts, etc…  At some point it started looking like Santa clause’ north pole workshop 🙂

I really had an amazing night with lots of laughs! I can really recommend it to everybody who wants to have a fun team event or learn to make workshops to do so and contact cups ‘n cakes!!

A great dinner at my friends’ house

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Friday I was at a dinner party of some friends of mine, who had decided that they would cook for a change. Which came as a very nice surprise as for some reason people always feel nervous when they are cooking for me?? I really don’t know why as I’m really not a difficult person….

Anyhow it was really great to not having to cook for a change and just sit back and relax. I must say they have really outdone themselves , they have prepared a royal feast with a lot of love and care. Knowing they don’t have a real cooking experience, made it even more special. They started with a duck salad with pieces of apple, walnut & bacon with a coulis of Gorgonzola cheese… I know some people might be afraid of the strong taste of the Gorgonzola, but I must admit that it gave a nice harmony in this dish.

So a great start was already set! Now up to the main course…  Here they choose to make a  Chicken stew prepared with Old Geuze beer and Peperkoek (this is a kind of breakfast cake spiced with cloves, cinnamon, ginger, succade and nutmeg). Again a really nice preparation! Funny enough that this was a dish that I wanted to prepare this week for me and my girlfriend 🙂 but they beat me to it 😉 It was a sweeter dish, this because of the ‘3 fonteinen old Geuze’ beer and the ‘peperkoek’. This they made a day before (which is best for a dish like this, then it can rest over night .

But the real top of the evening was the dessert, a kiwi tartlet . This was made with a crust of petit beurre cookies  with pastry cream and on top of that slices of kiwi (can also be replaced by passion fruit or raspberries…). Really yummy, just thinking of it makes me want one (ok two) again.

They served a red Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon wine. TWO THUMBS up for Laurent and Stijn!! Thanks guys you really did a great job. Now next time I’ll have to cook for you guys I will be nervous :-).

Stijn and Laurent got their inspiration in following books.

For the Duck Salad: La cuisine à quatre mains

The main course : Dagelijkse kost 2 by Jeroen Meus

For the Dessert: De Desserts by Kookschool

The missing ingredient

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I don’t know about you guys, but I honestly find it very difficult to find cooking inspiration when coming home after a hard day of work …

The best source of inspiration and creativity is of course using cookbooks or magazines…  But everything has to go quick since you are hungry and just want one thing, quick food 🙂 But lots of times you encounter another problem when you finally found a recipe… You don’t have all the ingredients that are required to make it L I know I’ve encountered this already lots of times in the past …

What happens then, is I start using my imagination of what things I could replace with ingredients I do have at home and hunger is the best sauce to make you cook faster 🙂 These usually give me the best tasting dishes.

Let me give you an example, a few days ago I had bought a celeriac (knolselder) and needed to find a recipe, as I didn’t want to make a puree or a soup with it… So I found this really nice recipe in Weekend Knack special (Belgian Magazine) “cod with celeriac chips and choron sauce”. But problem n°1, I didn’t have the cod, but I did have was Pangasius… so I figured I’ll just use that.  In the original recipe for the Choron (Béarnaise with tomato), it said that I had to use fresh tomatoes… same story, so I replaced it by tomato purée  (which worked just fine).

So the Knack Weekend recipe à la Spinelli looked like this 🙂

Not bad for some made in max 30 minutes…

For the celeriac chips, you just cut the celeriac (after peeling it) like you would cut fries… put it in a mixing bowl, add some curry powder, salt, pepper and some olive oil. Heat a regular pan or you can also use a chip pan 🙂 throw them in and bake them as you would with French fries.

For the fish, you take any fish you want (sole, salmon, cod, etc…) it really doesn’t matter as this dish can go with everything. You can bake it in a pan, poach it or which way you would prefer for preparing the fish.

For the Sauce. Take 3 eggs (always 1 for the pot + 1 per person, so in this case it was for 2 persons) fill one of the broken eggshells and fill it with white wine (do this 3 times as you used 3 eggs) . Melt 250g of butter… I know it is a lot, normally  you won’t use it all. This depends of how thick you want your sauce to be (as the butter will thicken it). Put the stove on medium heat. Start whisking the eggs by forming an 8 (more or less) . You will see that the sauce starts binding, you know when it is ready, because than you will see that the whisk shape will stay longer in the pot…. Take of the heat and gently add the melted butter (not all at once, little bits at a time). You will see that the sauce will start thicken. When you think it is good enough for you, you add tarragon, salt, pepper, tomato purée and if you want some paprika powder… And voila your dish is ready.

Moral of this story, try to be creative in the kitchen… Don’t worry if there is an ingredient missing, I’m sure you will have something in your fridge or  closets you can use…. And no recipe police will arrest you 🙂

My Zia Livia

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So finally we arrived in ‘Monfalcone’ (where my aunt lives) and the first question she asks me ‘Hai fame?’ (are you hungry)hahaha, really unbelievable. But I think even if I would say NO, she would still start preparing something, just in case. Anyhow, in this case I was indeed hungry 🙂

So lucky for me she had brought all lot of ingredients from Torino and started cooking immediately.

Zia had brought the biggest paprika’s I had ever seen! Apparently the ones from Piemonte are much better than the ones you buy elsewhere. When you peel them, there is still a lot of flesh left on them …

So with those ones she made peperonata. To accompany this, she made a ‘arrosto’, that nooooobody else can make like her. It is so soft and tender, no fat and the best gravy with it …. As primo she made some fresh pasta (she had made it before leaving for Torino, as she knew we would be joining her home) with a fresh ‘salsa pomodoro’. She didn’t make dessert 🙂 we just had some fresh peaches … Why does everything taste so much better in Southern Europe???

 

When I stay at Zia Livia’s house the n°1 concern every day is what will we eat 🙂. As I’m her favorite nephew, she always makes ALL my preferred dishes 🙂lasagna with asparagus (she had put some fresh ones in the freezer to be able to make the lasagna when I would come), cannelloni, faraona , and the list goes on and on 🙂ok ok, I’m spoiled, especially knowing she goes to farmers to get me the best ingredients and makes all the pasta herself. You might not think this, but she is 78 years old!! (and she is more active than me 🙂 )

I so love my Zia Livia!! So my first day at her house ended in a way I like very very much 🙂 (tooo bad you guys can’t taste all this food, but trust me it was good!)

The sky is the limit

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Peter Goossens, Sergio Herman, Heston Blumenthal , Massimo Bottura, Anne-Sophie Pic’s … all chefs of the 15 best restaurants in the world (from the list of 50 best restaurants). When seeing these people create a dish, it  is like watching Michelangelo  paint the Sistine chapel ceiling. They really  create pieces of art … and a whole different level of cooking.  I hope one day to be able to try these restaurants (another reason to play the lottery), for the moment my limit is 2 Michelin Stars.

Talking about 2 Michelin stars, a young talent that I admire is Thierry Theys (from restaurant  Nuance), he is 26 and already has 2 Michelin stars and I’m sure the 3rd will follow very soon. I’m really excited that I’ll be going there in October as everybody who has been there agrees with the magnificent food price/quantity/quality. 

A restaurant that I have enjoyed several times was Wouter Keersmaekers’  “Schone van Boskoop”

When I hear chefs  like Wouter Keersmeakers, Peter Goossens, Peter Coucquyt etc…. talk or see them cook, I feel the same experience as I had when seeing the Foodpairing workshop.It is really fascinates me how they can match science and cooking in a harmonious way and always try to find new things. (these chefs sometimes try to create new things together with Foodpairing)

An example why they are the best of the best:

Peter Goossens wrote a new cookbook (related to a program he had), where he makes a dish in the classical way and afterwards he makes a dish with the same main ingredients, but in a gastronomical (3 Michelin Star) way.

Steak with french Fries

These chefs prove that if you want to be and give the best, that passion is the best way to achieve it.

The classical highway of cooking….

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In one of my previous posts, I talked about my examples of Italian cuisine. I also want to share with you some of my other examples outside the Italian cuisine. Some of you might know that I did chef-school and learned a lot about the classical French kitchen with Auguste Escoffier ‘s cooking methods as a guideline. I’ve never regretted having done chef-school, as it has given me a great basic knowledge of cooking to build on.

Having the classical French cuisine as base, I really admire great chefs that try to continue Escoffier’s work. A great example of someone a person like th is is Paul Bocuse who has always been seen as Escoffier’s successor continuing his life work.

Chefs  that also can be seen (according to me) as successors are people like  Johan Segers (from  restaurant ‘t Fornuis in Antwerp). Seeing him cook gives me the feeling of a child in a candyshop. The same goes for Marc Paesbrugghe, a chef who actually gave back the 2 Michelin stars awarded to his restaurant “Sir Anthony Van Dijck” as he wanted to change his concept and not be part of the French guides anymore…. But you can still see the classical French cuisine in his dishes. One of my favorite Johan Segers dishes would be the caramelized ham with carrot puree (link is in Dutch, but if you want the translation, let me know and I’ll provide it to you)

Rick Stein  is also somebody who fits the profile. With the only difference that for him it is not necessarily the classic French cuisine, but more every country’s landmark/classical dishes. Like a Good shepherd’s pie, fish & chips and traditional English dishes. But he also always tries to find new tastes and the origin of some tastes during odyssey through Asia or Southern Europe . You should try the “Escalopes of Salmon Troisgros” recipe. I’m sure you’ll like it! Let me know…

1 thing they (and me) have all in common, is having respect for your products and keeping it “simple”.

Obviously there are a lot of other great chefs who base their cooking on classical methods, but I would be too difficult to list them all.

Who would your examples or great classical chefs be?

The greatest of Italian Cooking (to me)

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I love Belgium, France, Thailand etc… as well as their gastronomy. But Italian cooking and basically everything (or most) things Italy has to offer, is closer to my heart (big surprise) and will always stay my nr 1 (mmm, maybe to chauvinistic?)

 When it comes to Italian cooking I have 2 big examples (ok, 3 if you count my dad). My biggest example is without any doubt my “Zia Livia” (my Italian aunt), who I will introduce in one of my next posts , as I will be cooking with her in Italy very soon.

The other big example and/or person I learned from a lot is Antonio Carluccio…. (But I presume he’s an example for  a lot of people). Since I was a young child, I always used to watch Mr. Carluccio on BBC. Even though back then my English wasn’t that great, I could still follow as lucky for me he also spoke Italian in his shows + the look in his eyes and the food spoke for itself J.  You can just see that he enjoys the cooking so much. The only time I think even Mr. Carluccio was 100% convinced eating, was when he had got to try the Sardinian cheese “Casu Marzu”. He now recently was on tv with his longtime friend  Gennaro Contaldo, who’s also a great chef. When watching them I immediately think of the Italian version of Statler and Waldorf (muppet show), judge for yourself in this footage from the two greedy Italians . Watching a show from Mr. Carluccio is like being in Italy, sitting next to him and enjoying the trip together.

Three recipes that I want to share with you, that for me are absolute Master dishes are “Fiori di Zucchini Ripieni” or the “Linguine alla Mollica” or the ‘Trofie al pesto’, you will find the recipies on Mr. Carluccio’s website. The simplicity of this dish shows what italian cooking is all about (but if I should really give all his recipes I love, the list would be endless). Try the 3 recipes I shared and I’m sure you’ll agree and get Carluccionized J.

Not that I don’t like other Italian cooks, but he’s just Antonio Carluccio! The only thing I regret is that I won’t be able to enjoy their cooking, as I believe neither Antonio nor Gennaro have a restaurant anymore (if I’m not mistaking)

Thank you!