Lots of Cooking!

In a nutshell, the rest of Belgium was amazing. We ate great fries in Brugge (and Antwerp), great waffles, and had an INCREDIBLE meal at a lovely restaurant in Brussels. We are SO sad to be home.

But, since I haven't started classes yet, we've had some opportunity for cooking. Here's what we've made:

SOUPS

It's the time of year where soup is divine. Plus, I find it an excellent lunch. So we've made the following soups:

• Vegetable Soup - a big, big pot. I used it as a basis for a really lovely minestrone soup (which is quickly becoming something I'm REALLY good at)
  
• Egg Drop Soup - with lots of spinach. Really, a lovely treat
• Alma's Cooked Water Soup - From a Lidia Bastianich cook book. Basically, water and chard. Then, you use the broth to poach eggs for a great meal. It's a keeper, and will likely be better at the end of summer when chard is actually in season...

STIR FRY

Along with the egg drop soup we made a stir fry of our own creation, with lots of veg. Super tasty and really simple

COUSCOUS

I tried a Vegetarian Times Israeli Couscous salad that turned out great. It had couscous, saffron, tomatoes, leeks, fennel, arugula and a sauce from veg broth. Again, might have been better when leeks are in season (although I LOVE winter, I hate the lack of great produce), but still, a real winner. We might make it with less couscous and more veg (or a protein source? Chickpeas!!) in the future.

CHILI

Last night we made another VT recipe for chili with dark ale. I guess Belgium got to us?? It was simple - black beans, corn, tomatoes, chipotle peppers, cumin, onion, garlic, red pepper and beer (we used Brooklyn Brewery's Dark Chocolate Stout, since we have it) and let it get super thick. It was good, but a bit too bitter for me. (Darn sweet tooth!)

PIZZA

Last weekend my sister was in town and we invited our cousin to join us and her boyfriend for dinner. We had 2 bottles of wine, really good bread and cheese (thanks cus!), salad (thanks again cus!), minestrone and "make your own pizza." That was a hit! We had sauteed veg (mushrooms, onions, peppers), lots of seasonings and cheese. It was a hit! A really great thing to do for dinner.

Tonight is a bean casserole. The beans have been soaking and I'm excited to start cooking it. Next week, food prep will be mostly on the weekends since I start class again.

Thoughts on Brussels

The Pedant has written about some of the many things we've done and eaten in Brussels. Basically, this city is lovely. It's small enough to walk everywhere and the architecture is beautiful. We seem to miss good weather: when we were here 2 weeks ago it was snowy and cold; this week it's been in the 40s but rainy and foggy. It's not too bad though. TP talked about chocolates and beer and other Belgian foods, I'll talk about the other foods we've had and thoughts about the city.

1) Pastry: We had a pain au chocolate and a pain au raisin the first morning we were here from a small bakery in the center of the city, Lowry. They were both very tasty and perfectly flaky. We also woke up after a nap yesterday and came down to the main room of our B&B just as the staff were having their King Cake for Epiphany. How could I object when they offered us to join them?? I've never had king cake before, but it was very good. The crust was flaky and there was a really lovely almond filling.

2) Sandwiches: As a cost saving measure, we try to eat on a budget during meals. Also, we don't really know how to rate restaurants - many just look fair and super touristy. Plus, I don't eat Mussels which is a big thing at these restaurants. We've eaten some great sandwiches. Thursday for lunch we had sandwiches with our fries. Tasty. Today, we had a cheese or ham-and-cheese sandwiches at a little Sandwich near the Central Station. It was nothing fancy, but very simple and tasty.

3) Chocolate: What can I say? I walk into a store and get overly excited. I've eaten so much already...and we have bought many truffles to take home. And there are 2 more cities we have to visit!

4) I am in awe of Belgians - they are able to eat chocolates, waffles, fries, nutella and then drink beer and are all THIN. I guess if I move here and eat all this stuff, I won't gain weight, right? Right? Right??

5) The beers (well, lambics since I dislike beer) are often in smaller bottles here - 25 cL (about a cup or so). I think it's a great idea. I would totally enjoy a lambic or the Hogaarden Rosee we had at lunch with a meal more often since it's less than a bottle at home. That means a) fewer calories and b) less of an opportunity to get drunk. Really, much more civilized.

Brussels Travel Tips

1) Service at anywhere sit down is friendly but leisurely. They don't feel compelled to give you your check or follow up with you. Like, ever. However, once they come around to your table, the serving staff are your bestest friends ever.

2) The Brussels Central (Bruxelles Central/Brussel Centraal) train station is like an alternate universe version of New York's Penn Station where everything is modern and clean, it's not too crowded, and there are informational signs everywhere.

The Brussels Metro system is cleaner than the New York subway, but smells just as much like pee, if not moreso, as if someone decided to go all Mannekin Pis all the way down each walkway. Also, you don't need to swipe your ticket all the time, just have it validated in case someone checks.

3) The road structure of Brussels completely thwarts the non-SAS or Green Beret in keeping a solid direction sense, especially on a cloudy day. You will find yourself heading in the exact opposite direction for several blocks, but then, since everything in Brussels is right next to everything else, you'll pretty much be where you want to be anyway.

4) 25 centiliters of beer is remarkably cheap in Brussels supermarkets. Go buy plenty; it's less than $2 a bottle, which you basically can't get for beer of any real quality in the US.

5) Coca Cola is cheaper anywhere but vending machines, which are cheaper anywhere but the airport. Coca Cola "Light" (what we call "Diet") with lemon seems to have real lemon juice in it and is worth drinking.

6) The Magritte museum is closed this January, but that's probably for the best, given that it likely has a Magritte-style approach to geometry, and is therefore a madhouse of floating items, faceless men, openings to the sky where items should be, etc.

Enjoying the Fruits of War and Colonization

Here we are in Brussels, a land made tasty by the subjugation of faraway lands. We have chocolate (gained in Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, grown by forced African labor for many years), coffee (more conquering and plantations in Africa), french fries (potatoes gained from Spanish conquest of the Andean peoples), and pastry (gained during brutal French and/or Austrian occupation of Belgium).

Honestly, you don't read this blog to learn about the historical stuff we saw, although the ruins of Coudeberg Palace and the comic strip museum are pretty awesome. So let's talk about food and drink.

FRITES:

We went to Fritland, just off the Grand Place (the city center in Brussels with all the 17th C. buildings). You have two fry options at Fritland - fries on a plate, or fries in a sandwich. The sandwiches are full of things that are either grill-fried or dunked in the same fry-o-lator as the french fries. You can also, instead of a sandwich, get fried foods along with your fries.

The fries are awesome. There are too many sauces for us to rate (we had mixed feelings about the "curry ketchup," and whatever kind of spicy mayo "samourai" is, it's okay, but not awesome), but the fries are crispy-tasty-riffic. You will, however, order too many. The fry portions are big, and unless you are a massive glutton, one container of fries (or a sandwich-full, as "sandwich" means "foot of baguette-like bread with stuff in it") is already too much.

GAUFRES (Waffles!):

The most common waffle here is a large, puffy thing that people put various toppings on. We ignored many waffle places for not looking tasty enough (the truck with the Smurfs on it outside the Musical Instrument Museum, the waffle place down the street from the Central Station which everyone on Tripadvisor hated, the waffle place advertising "Australian" ice cream), and bought a waffle with whipped cream and strawberry slices on top at Elizabeth near the Grand Place. We didn't go to the one at Leonidas off the Grand Place because I kept making 300 jokes to myself in my head.

If you can master the serrated-edged plastic fork that they give you with your waffle, the waffle is a tasty, pre-sugared delight. Do eat it sitting down, though; it's tough to cut with your funny plastic fork while standing.

BEERS:

You get a beer with your entrance to the Brewer's Guild Museum. The Sherbs and I both got a Bell-vue Kriek (cherry lambic), which, despite the bizarre lambic ritual that they do here (pour from tap, scrape off foam with knife, dunk bottom of glass in cold water to wash off scraped foam dribble, dry off bottom of glass on cloth), is pretty tasty. Frankly, we haven't had a kriek we didn't like - Bell-vue, Lindeman's, and Mort Subite "X-Treme" are all pretty tasty and cherry-flavored. They're still a little more beery than a "malt beverage," but that, I think, makes them more flavorful.

There are also framboises, which are lambics with raspberry flavor. Both Mort Subite "X-Treme" and Hoegaarden Rose are pretty good; Hoegaarden is less sweet, for those who like that sort of thing.

Not recommended: Delerium Tremens's "Cactus" lambic. It's green. It tastes more like agave than you want a fruity beer to taste.

In the lambic family is gueze, which the Sherbs calls "beer for people who don't like beer"; it's lighter and sweeter than regular beer. La Morte Subite's house brand is pretty good in this regard.

Beer-Glazed Pinto Beans and Penne, Pedant Style

New protip: do not wipe your brow after slicing hot peppers from the CSA. It burns. For a while.

Was out of ideas for dinner, and forgot I had tuna casserole in the fridge, so I made pasta with a variation of Bittman's beer-glazed black beans for the sauce. First I threw some hot peppers from this week's CSA box into a pan of hot olive oil and ground black pepper. Then I sauteed the too-sharp red onion remainders from last week. Once that was done, I added a cup of Amstel Light (I drank the rest), orange blossom honey, pinto beans, and red pepper flakes (to ensure spiciness). Into this I put nearly-cooked whole wheat penne.

It's a little sweeter than I expected, but it has a nice burn on it that makes it quite tasty. Works really well with parmesan (what doesn't)?

Cookin' With Beer, continued

Made Bittman's spiced squash tart last night for a gathering tonight. Hope it works out; I tried to slice the squash as I was cooking the onions and I think I burned the garlic.

As the Sherbs pointed out, we went on a bit of a beer foods kick recently, which is kind of funny as the Sherbs doesn't like beer and I rarely drink it. Not only did we make tasty beer-sauced mushroom tempeh (which really could be anything in the mushroom gravy; white wine would work just as well, as would a tasty stock), we made our regular favorite, beer-glazed black beans.

The beer and black beans we made was pretty tasty, in my view, but using Heineken (and some Rolling Rock when we ran out of Heineken) instead of a darker brew gave it less of a malty, wheaty taste, and highlighted the spice more. Still good, but not with a hint of caramelized porter sweetness.

Hearty Stew!

Another Vegetarian Times Win: Mushroom Tempeh Something with Lager (I can't remember the exact title!). Basically, a delicious stew with cremini and shiitake mushrooms, tempeh toasted in oil and given a bit of flavor with soy sauce, lager and time. It was really tasty. A bit bitter for my tastes, but mixed with the brown rice we made it was excellent. Hearty, thick, comforting. And after going to work in snowstorm yesterday, just what The Pedant and I needed!
[Note: When linking to the Heineken website, I needed to be of "legal drinking age." Odd! Furthermore, their website sucks. I was going to link to the lager we used but I can't find it, navigate or handle it. Lame.]

Short Update

I have to catch up on a lot of blogging.

Before anything else, I want to say that taking day old beer-flavored black beans from Mark Bittman's cookbook and folding them into scrambled eggs with feta cheese is super-tasty. You should all try it.

Party Aftermath

Okay, time to take the bumper magnet off the car; election's over, don't need people to know who I voted for through Christmas.

Sadly, The Sherbs did not become a member of the Arlington County School Board, even though I wrote her in; she was outvoted by 30,000 and 40,000 votes, respectively, by the two incumbents (and only people on the ballot). Maybe next time.

As for the party itself, the foods worked out. The pizza was very tasty, mostly thanks to Costco - adding Dole pineapple chunks and fake ham didn't ruin it, although the cheese didn't get as brown as I would have liked. The Vietnamese rolls were pretty good, although not as good as party food as I'd have hoped; rice paper is not a tortilla, it sort of sticks and stretches as you eat it, so you really need a fork. Wegman's makes great honey roasted peanuts.

I drank a bottle of Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout, which is sort of a Presidential election tradition for me. It is my favorite chocolate-flavored beer.

Why Can't They Just Hand Out Free Samples To The Masses, Like A Huge Ice Cream Shop?

And no, the answer is not because they dream about killing us.

The real question, of course, is "why must the DC craft beer festival have $85 tickets, thus putting it out of the price range of the casual beer festival goer?"

I guess I'll have to wait 'till June 21 & 22, when the Safeway National Capital Barbecue Battle goes down - it has $10 tickets, with kids (even fat kids) under five for free. Also, it includes the word "battle." As you know from prior posts, we love things that involve food and battles.

Who's with me for barbecue?

Free Beer Thing in the Mail

So, the Sherbs and I sorted through our mail after our Israel jaunt, and we found a mysterious brown package in the mail. It was too small to be a bomb, but we just had no idea what it actually was. I opened it up, and found a triangular piece of metal.

Since I do not live in a Dan Brown novel, it was not the key to an ancient treasure, but instead, I said,

"Hey, it's the free beer thing I ordered!"

A while back, Bass Ale had a promotion for a "beer brolly" which allegedly aided in the creation of black-and-tans. (It, sadly, expired yesterday.) All you had to do was sign up and eventually you get a metal device which makes the beer strata of the black-and-tan more likely. Which I just did.

Users of the brolly have had mixed results, to say the least. And the Sherbs doesn't drink beer, much less "the stout of your choice" (as Bass's parent company does not own Guinness). So we won't be trying it out immediately. But it's cool to have; it sits on our booze shelf next to the Patron Silver and the butterscotch schnapps we got in duty free.

Aubergine Victory!

Eggplant in miso glaze was a tasty success! The glaze was essentially Asian restaurant salad dressing without the ginger, and who hates that? Especially with sesame seeds!

I accompanied dinner with a pint of Black Sheep Brewery's Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale, which was like a less bitter Bass. Wasn't a perfect match for the eggplant, but it was a good ending beer for the day.

Soups

As the cheerful receptionist at the pest control people warned, the bugs are back. Not as many visible this time, except for last night when I found some examples on me. Out came my portable chemical arsenal. We haven't seen any since.

Before the holiday and the recurrence of our bloodsucking nemeses, we made many tasty soups. Actually, the Sherbs made many tasty soups, with my input being limited to menu selection and ingredient procurement. We (she) remade one of our old favorites, the beer and cheese soup, which is a soup that (as my father says) is better the next day. Also when you disregard what the low-fat cookbook says and sautée the vegetables in butter as opposed to just trying to make a weak vegetable stock with them. The beer choice is critical, though - a more bitter beer will leave the soup bitter.

Also made was another old favorite - the One Pot Cookbook's parsnip soup. Parsnip is a good major flavor - better than potato. It was a good soup, too.

Of both soups, we have plenty frozen up, so I don't expect we'll need to cook too too much over the next week. We're entertaining tomorrow night (hopefully they'll drink some of the wine!) and we're not eating the frozen soup then. Instead, it'll be something with udon.

Stuffed to the Gills

I have eaten. Probably too much.

Let me not recall the gastronomic excess of today - it would be familiar to most celebrants of the holiday, except for a selection of wheaty Belgian beers and some espresso vodka - and go to a happier time, two days or so ago, when the Sherbs and I made a vegetable bread pudding in the slow cooker.

It was very tasty; basically it was soaking bread in pureed white beans, then slow cooking them. How could that be bad?

BritBit!

I guess it's kind of silly to say "UK blogs are making a fuss about rarebit," since the whole concept began in Wales, but the Guardian has a picture of a particularly cheesy example, with links both the Guardian's own rarebit and a UK foodblogger's attempt at same (with delicious pictures).

The rarebit recipe looks pretty darned tasty, especially on some brown bread. I wonder how it would go with canned brown bread, a food I have not eaten since childhood. It was awesome in its 50's-style futurism; the bread is a cylinder, because it's in a can! It lasts forever! It tastes vaguely sweet and metallic!

Also, smaller rounds mean more servings, or for use in our home tasting menu.

Good Rarebit!

The rarebit experiment was successful and tasty, with three caveats (all of which I take responsibility for as executive chef):

1) The Teet's house brand of prepared horseradish made the sauce kind of bitter.

2) Some asparagus were insufficiently steamed.

Other than that, it was a beer and cheese sauce over white asparagus, broccoli, and oven-roasted potato slices with salt, pepper, and rosemary. How could it be bad?

Mixed Food-Like Liquids With More Than Dr. Pepper

Weirdest Dr. Pepper recipe concept so far: "root beer jelly" with Dr. Pepper substituted in. Pectin makes any beverage a spreadable treat!

In more palatable foods, evidently Elvis Presley liked a tablespoon of beer mixed in with his maple syrup while it was being heated. I think the earthy taste of beer syrup would go well with whole wheat or buckwheat pancakes, although I'd still like to put a giant unhealthy pat of butter (or a moderately-sized pat of I Can Believe It Is Simulated Butter) inside the stack to melt milk-fatty goodness throughout.

Desperately Trying to Become the World's Repository of Dr. Pepper Recipes

People who tell you that dropping a shot into beer makes it taste like Dr. Pepper are lying to you. Also, why are people making Coca-Cola® and liquor taste like Dr. Pepper when they could just buy Dr. Pepper?

In Dr. Pepper food adventures news, the Dr. Pepper steak marinade (which, as you'd know if you clicked on the link, is primarily Dr. Pepper, lime juice, soy sauce, and "hot sauce") might work if the author told us what "hot sauce" meant. Some people think it means Tabasco®. I, personally, prefer Crystal Louisiana Hot Sauce, which as far as I can tell is basically cayenne peppers and vinegar. However, the more I think about it, the more it's probably a good idea for this marinade to go with a chili paste from your local Asian market.

In my mind, the flavor you'd get then is like the sweet but hot and spicy beef jerky I ate in Hong Kong, whose name I don't think I ever knew. I just referred to it as "Chinese Death Jerky." It had whole hot pepper seeds clinging to the sides, under the sugar crust.

Anyone know its real name?

I Thought it was About America's National Pastimes In Japan, But No, It's Ethnography

Sherbs has, knowing that I have some minor interest in Japanese society and culture, sent me an article from the New York times about a guy who came to Japan to preserve their folktales. My interest is piqued, as it seems he took down some ghost stories. I've liked Japanese ghost stories since I started collecting Narumi Kakinouchi comics about embittered little vampire girls.

Of course, I must apologize to Sherbs for initially thinking that she sent me an article about the Matsuzaka beer controversy. Because, as we all know, Sherbs loves both baseball and beer with a passion.