Fall menu: hors d’oeuvre and soup

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My cooking class was canceled for today! Due to three non-functioning elevators. Must be the lamest excuse I’ve heard since ‘soccer game is canceled because of the rain’ in US High School. But, no class. Thank you, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie for putting down a brand new ‘cook tower’ for the Anderlecht hotel school with really bad elevators.

Anyway, this means I have time for a new blog post! I’ve been waiting for a while until I found time to write something about the fall menu I’ve been working on the past two weekends. Seasonal cooking is not just hip this days, but also more environmentally responsible. So here we go! I made two menus: one for a lovely evening at home and one for our ‘housewarming dinner’ with the parents…

Hors d’oeuvre: herb-filled portobello mushroom (recipe courtesy of delicious. magazine – no picture of my own, they were gone before I could find my camera, sorry!)

Ingredients for six people:

6 portobello mushrooms

4 spoonfuls of fresh herbs (I used parsley and mint, but try your own combination if you like!)

3 spoonfuls of (old) bread crumbs

40 grams (more or less) of freshly grated parmezan cheese

olive oil, salt and pepper

Recipe:

preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Remove the stems of the mushrooms and chop them coarsely. Put the mushrooms with their hollow sides up on a baking sheet and sprinkle with some olive oil and salt and pepper (this is not in the recipe, but I find otherwise they’re a little dry). Mix chopped mushroom stems with chopped herbs, cheese and breadcrumbs and stuff the mushrooms with this. Sprinkle with more olive oil and put into the oven for 15 minutes until the stuffing is golden brown.

Great as a hors d’oeuvre, but my guests found it a little difficult to eat without fork and knife. Better serve it on a plate. Very veggie-approved!

For the entree, I made two types of soup. I’ll give the tomato soup recipe here and keep the pumpkin-carrot-sweet potato soup for another time.

 

Tomato soup with mozzarella and basil garnish

Tomato soup with melting mozzarella balls and basil garnish (mozzarella idea from delicious. magazine)

Recipe (for a good amount of soup)

This soup is bound by using a bit of flour and making a sort of roux with the basic soup vegetables already in it. Start by melting some butter and add a chopped onion and some chopped celery. You can add some thyme, parsley and laurel (bouquet garni). Then add two spoonfuls of regular flour and stir around for a minute or two so the starch is ‘cooked’ and won’t taste of flour. Add in a small can of tomato concentrate and stir for another minute. Then add in a kilo (about 2 pounds) of flavorful tomatoes (I used the last-of-the-season cherry and plum tomatoes from my parents’ greenhouse) and let heat on the fire. Add in a 500 ml can of chopped tomatoes and about two liters ofcold vegetable stock, I use two cubes per liter (for a roux, one of the two parts always needs to be hot while the other is cold to make it work, if you want to know why better ring up a scientist friend ‘cause I have no idea) Let it come to a boil and simmer for a while. Add in pepper, salt and herbs to taste (if the tomatoes are sufficiently tasty this is hardly necessary) and mix the soup with a blender or mixer. If you don’t want tomato skins, put through a conical strainer. Little trick: put your mixer into the strainer, the soup will go through much faster! (You can see in the picture that my soup is kind of thick because I have no conical strainer – yet!)

Heat up some small mozzarella balls (usually bought to skewer with cherry tomatoes but also delicious as garnish!) in a warm oven for a few minutes until slightly melted and then add into the soup. Garnish with a bit of fresh basil. Yum!

Now I’m about to catch up with some episodes of inspector Frost – as soon as I find time (or as soon as the school’s elevators refuse to function again), my very own recipe of blackened salmon with pumpkin and sweet potato fries and Jamie Oliver’s red wine and mushroom risotto will follow!

Friday Bio Lunch

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It’s Friday! That means the end of the work week is near. Oh, sweet weekend, how I’ve missed you! But Friday also means I’m often alone at the office. That’s okay, it gives me the opportunity to get some tasks done like typing out reports. But it also means I’m totally free in my lunch choice! (well of course I can’t take the metro to the other side of the city, but I can pick from some of the various lunch places in the vicinity.) Our regular sandwich bar around the corner has very good sandwiches, but their salads are a bit overpriced compared to what you get. Besides that, I try to find lunch places that use bio ingredients. So, a few Fridays ago, I found the BioLounge! Time for a little review (no photos available, sorry).

My absolute new favorite lunch option is their salad bar. At the BioLounge, you can choose between two types of cardboard boxes: one of 5,50 euros (definitely large enough for me) and one of 6,50 euros (a bigger one, for very hungry people). You’re free to fill these yourself with a choice of bio veggies and salads. These consist of about ten different kinds: cold potatoes with spices and raisins, a kind of tzatziki with yoghurt and cucumber, plain lettuce with tomatoes, green beans (I don’t usually love beans, but there’s something really tasty about these ones – I think it’s garlic), pasta salad with basilic and pine nuts, cold rice with veggies, carrot-and-coleslaw-salad, cold lentil salad and some great vegetable beignets.  The options vary a bit daily. As toppings, they offer sesame seeds and two types of balsamic crème. I usually sprinkle my salad with the raspberry-balsamic.

So, their salad bar is really delicious and you’re free to fill your box with whatever you like. They also have quiche, wraps, sandwiches and the inevitable sweets. Cheesecake with a speculoos piecrust (which seems to be very popular in Belgian lunch places these days), apple pie, moelleux… All very tasty and a little waistline-hostile. Since it’s Friday and we all deserve a treat once in a while, I went for the lemon pie. At first tasting, it’s quite sour (which tends to happen when lemons are involved) but I don’t mind that. The crust is soft and nothing really special. Overall, the lemon pie is very tasty but slightly too sour and I personally would have liked the crust a little crispier. My sister’s lemon squares (which are just as sour but more balanced with a sweeter, crunchy crust) definitely win this one.

Another great thing at BioLounge is their packaging: the salad and pie is packaged in thin cardboard fold-yourself-boxes with biodegradable plastic. If necessary, you can get a brown paper bag to transport your goodies home (or more likely, to your office) and some wooden cutlery. That’s laudable, only too bad the city of Brussels doesn’t do green waste (except for garden waste during the summer). So it always hurts a little to throw away the cardboard box with the rest of the trash. Something for Brussels policymakers?

The BioLounge: really tasty salads, sandwiches , wraps and bio drinks for very good prices (cheaper than Exki)! It can be found at Onderrichtstraat 116 and is near Vrijheidsplein, Koningstraat, Congreskolom, Noordstraat, Madou… Check it out, if you like, and let me know what you think.

The First Post: three uses for tortilla wraps.

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So, I guess this will be my first post. Very exciting! Why am I starting a blog, you might ask. I ask myself the same question as well: I don’t exactly have a history of sticking to blogs. I abandoned my last blog, the one I started when studying in Spain (in 2008), after about one post (in fact, I don’t even recall the blog’s name – shame!). Even though my life might have been mildly adventurous even now and then, I was never really compelled to keep a diary after the age of 11. And every time I buy a very pretty journal, promising myself to use it for meetings or notes, I tend to fill 20-ish pages before it ends up in my library on a shelf, for the sake of prettiness.

So far, history doesn’t predict good things about this blog. But perhaps this time will be different. This time, the intention to start something has been itching at me for quite a while. I don’t want to have a blog about myself: it is gonna be about food – in Brussels. Last year, I started a catering course in Leuven. In July of this year, we moved to Brussels and I’m continuing my cooking lessons in a new city. The more I am immersed in the language and ways of food, the more I become interested by it. I wouldn’t say I really am a foodie – but I’m definitely aspiring to be one! Moreover, I’m very eager to start exploring Brussels and its culinary opportunities. Therefore, this blog will be about food, about Brussels, and about food in Brussels.

Time to stop blabbing, and start a first post about food! My favorite magazine, delicious., has dedicated itself to ‘no waste’ this month. Personally, I hate wasting food but like most busy people, I tend to find some milk that has gone bad, or cheese that has started sprouting hairs, or very interesting ingredients purchased for one special dish and then left behind to grow mouldy in the back of my fridge every once in a while. Therefore, I love recipes that constitute more or less the same ingredients, but do something differently with them, or use up leftovers. Over the past two weeks, I worked my way through a few packages of tortilla wraps (the very common supermarket kind).

your average supermarket-tortilla wraps, the kind that I used (available at Colruyt)

It started with my housewarming party, where I served a whole array of hors d’oeuvres/amuses (are they not the best course? I sure think so), including my standard hot tomato salsa. Since I have a habit of munching down those lovely-but-greasy store-bought tortilla chips, I looked for a healthier alternative. Of course, Martha Stewart was there to help me out. In her Hors d’Oeuvres cookbook (or, my Bible, you could say), she explains how to make tortilla chips from (old) tortilla wraps, as is actually done in the original recipe in Mexico.

How to make healthier tortilla chips from wraps:

-take some tortilla wraps and cut them in long strips (2cm width) or triangular shapes. Brush with a bit of olive oil and sprinkle with a little coarse salt. Put them on a baking sheet in a preheated oven at 175 degrees Celsius (around 375 Fahrenheit) for 5 to 10 minutes, until they start to get brown and crispy-looking. Take them out and serve with tomato salsa, guacamole, humus or whatever dip you can lay your hands on.

Of course, since the party got busier and busier, I got lazier and lazier concerning healthy tortilla chips and ended up tearing open a bag of store-bought ones when all the healthy ones were eaten. So I was stuck with some leftover wraps. After a few days in the fridge, I found an opportunity for a pre-Belgian soccer game-dinner (that sounds a bit strange – I just mean a dinner before heading off to the Belgium-Kazachstan soccer game). The oven is turned on as hot as possible (220 degrees Celsius in my case, or about 400 Fahrenheit) and the wraps become pizza crusts!

-How to make pizzas from leftover wraps:

Take the wraps (it’s actually good when they’ve been in the fridge for some days and have started getting a little hard) and put some tomato sauce (this can be anything from just plain passata to herb-pasta sauce, which I happened to have around) on them.  Not too much, or the pizza will get soggy. Add your favorite toppings! In my case: eggplant, tomato, bell pepper, anchovies, mozzarella cheese, feta cheese… The anchovies were replaced by bacon for my not-so-vegetarian boyfriend (I don’t eat meat, but anchovies are definitely a weak spot). Put on a tray in the oven for about 10 to 15 minutes, depending on the oven’s strength, until the cheese has melted and it looks like a pizza. Enjoy!

Pizzas made from wraps. Top: the one with bacon, bottom: the one with anchovies

Since we were joined for dinner by some soccer-loving friends (before heading off to the game), I ended up opening a new package of tortilla wraps. Um, okay, so there I was, stuck with a new open package. Time to make a third recipe: an all-time favorite. This one comes from a Weight Watchers cookbook (the one about oven dishes). The tortillas get a whole different twist as a Mexican oven-baked wrap. Once again, a favorite at home! And even better: you can reuse a whole bunch of the ingredients from the pizzas!

Oops, this one was so tasty I didn't manage to take a picture before one wrap had disappeared! It looks a bit strange but definitely yummy... also great for non-vegetarians (you might add some ground meat, but not really necessary)

Weight Watchers tortilla wraps for two persons:

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius (375 Fahrenheit). Take a can of red beans and a can of corn and  drain them. Cut 30 grams of feta cheese into small cubes. Cut up an onion, garlic (very fine) and two red or yellow bell peppers into small cubes. Heat a bit of olive oil in a non-stick pan and fry the vegetables for a few minutes, until slightly tender. Spice with pepper, salt and cumin (this dish made me discover that cumin is a very Mexican spice! Your kitchen will immediately smell like a Tex Mex restaurant, but healthier). Add the beans, corn and feta cheese to the mixture in the pan. Take two or more wraps and fill them with the mixture. Roll them tightly (not necessary to tuck in the ends), put the rest of the mixture into an oven-proof dish and  put them into the dish. You might have to keep them closed with some toothpicks. Pour tomato sauce (passata or whatever you have around) over the wraps and sprinkle with oregano and some more feta cheese. Put the dish into the oven for about 25 minutes. Et voila, there is your healthy, vegetarian, Mexican oven-baked wrap! For me, this recipe is a great reason to eat some beans once in a while, since I don’t eat them very often, even though I’m a vegetarian.

All right, that’s enough for one post. Let me know what you think, or if you’ve tried one of these recipes!