pear-shaped potatoes

pear-shaped potatoes
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

This was one of the dishes we had at Christmas. Very cute looking, they are potato mash in the shape of a pear, with a little stalk made of thick spaghetti (Buccatoni 5), crisped up in a hot oven.

I found the recipe at the food blog of the Ministry of Food and Drink, a popular Dutch food blog [ministerie van eten en drinken, where Ellen explained these pears are a Luxembourg speciality, sold in shops all over the holidays. They are quite easy to do. Make a mash of potatoes: cook potatoes in boiling water until done (15 to 20 minutes), then put them through a ricer and add butter and milk until you have a good mash. Add salt and a little nutmeg for taste. Let the mixture cool slightly until cold enough to handle (or make the mash beforehand).

Scoop up a piece of mash with your hands, about the size of a large egg. Shape it into a pear. This is fun! I kind of patted it into shape and put them on a plate. When you are through with your mash, beat 2 eggs with a little water and cover the pears with the mixture. Then dip into breadcrumbs. I used the Japanese panko crumbs, which turn out very crispy (they are highly recommended for other frying activities, too). Snip off sticks of a thick spaghetti and stick into the top of the pear to resemble the stalk. Butter an oven tray (or use a non stick sheet) and put the pears on. All can be done beforehand - you can make this for a large group of people as a kind of side dish; you don't have to worry about last-minute kitchen chaos.

Preheat the oven at 200 C, take your tray of pears, put a little molten butter over the pears to help them crisp up. Bake in a hot oven for 25 to 30 minutes. The spaghetti stalks will have blackened outside, with a little luck you can even lift the potato-pears by the stalk and serve them on everyone's plate.

I will now go out to buy stuff to make oliebollen (oil fritters) for the New Year. See you in the next year!

Korean salad (again)

Korean salad by kattebelletje.

Outside the weather is cold. But I have been eating this crunchy salad for two days in a row now. I had it a year ago in on a cold night in Beijing, when we had dinner in a Korean BBQ restaurant, and the taste has lingered in my mind since then. The ingredients don't look very spectacular, but the sweet and sour crunchiness makes it irresistible, especially with some scattered peanuts on top (I love peanuts!) The salad is a great accompaniment to a meal with grilled fish or meat, or perhaps even a simple plate of jiaozi (Chinese dumplings).


After studying the blurry picture I made of the salad in Beijing, I tried to figure out what vegetables were in there. I added almost everything I saw, except the red cabbage (which, I guess, was blanched). This time, I used:

• one crop of little gem lettucce
• half a cucumber
• 10 red radishes
• 3 leaves of pointy cabbage
• the leaves of the radishes (optional)
• one spring onion
• some cilantro
• two handfuls of raw peanuts.

Make a vinaigrette (or aigre doux) of half a cup of a light flavoured vinegar, like the Japanese Mizkan brand, and 4 or 5 tablespoons of white sugar. Put in a small saucepan and heat slowly to let the sugar dissolve. Let cool. Add some grated ginger, just half a centimeter, and half a clove of grated garlic. Cut the spring onion into small chunks. Season the vinaigrette with a tablespoon of salt and a couple of drops of sesame oil. Take a salad bowl and add the vinaigrette, add cucumber slices, halved radishes. Now tear the salad leaves in chunks and add them. I cut the cabbage in square pieces and blanched them, but I guess you can have it without blanching- I will try this the next time.

Cut the other green leaves and add it to the salad, stir to combine. Let the flavours mingle for 20 minutes (the red color of the radishes will color the vinaigrette a beautiful pink). Add chopped cilantro. Fry the peanuts in some hot oil (careful not to burn them) and drain on kitchen paper. When cooled, add to the salad, get your chopsticks out and munch away! I am sure you can't stop until the plate is clean!

Sichuan Sauerkraut

Sichuan Sauerkraut
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

I think about food. I think about food a lot. Even when commuting on a train, I think of food, and of ways of getting or cooking food. Sometimes I just think about lists on what to buy in the supermarket. But sometimes flavour combinations pop into my head and I start to map them out. This is one of them!

I thought of how much I like the Sichuan style dry-fried beans. Basically, it uses garlic and ginger and dried shrimp and sugar an sesame oil to flavour string beans, which then take on a whole different flavour. Then I thought of sauerkraut and klary koopmans' recipe on baked sauerkraut. Then this new idea hit me: to fry sauerkraut with the Sichuan string-beans flavour!

For this recipe you will need: 1 packet of sauerkraut [450 grams]; I prefer organic; 2 cms of ginger, chopped; 2 mashed cloves of garlic, some chili oil flakes, a tablespoon of dried shrimp (put to soak in boiling water); soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil and cilantro.

Drain the sauerkraut, you could also give it a rinse in water to get rid of some of the sour flavour, if you think it is too strong. Then heat a few tablespoons of oil in a frying pan and fry the sauerkraut slowly for a while. Take out. Pour in new oil and on a low fire fry chopped ginger, mashed garlic and your soaked dried shrimp, chopped. When fragrant, add some splashed of soy and add 2 tablespoons of sugar. You can add more to your liking later on. Return the fried sauerkraut to the pan and stir to combine. Fry longer until the sauerkraut takes on the flavours; I like it to be quite dry. Add chili flakes. At the end, add half a teaspoon of sesame oil and taste for flavour. Don't probably don't have to add any vinegar or salt, because it will have plenty of those flavour already! Put on a plate and add some chopped cilantro.
I love this dish. I like the savoury vinegary flavour of the sauerkraut, but making it have a dry, a little charred texture, and adding the Sichuan flavours, bring out a whole new twist.
Have it as a side dish to a Chinese meal, or eat it as a starter. This is my contribution to fusion: sublime Sichuan Sauerkraut !

bacalhau fritters with aioli

bacalhau fritters with aioli
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

I had a packet of salt cod in the pantry, waiting for something nice to happen to it. I think I bought it somewhere in an oriental store, but you can find it in some supermarkets or other ethnic shops as well. It is such a basic kind of foodstuff; the salt keeps the fish forever. I was given a nice bacalhau recipe by a friend of mine from work, involving bacalhau flakes and potato strips and garlic and so on; but in the end I happened to watch Rick Stein's cooking trip in Spain and Portugal and he was saying these fritters were third on his list of all-time seafood delicacies, so I was inspired to try his recipe, or what I remembered of it.

You will need: one package of salt cod (I think it was around 500 grams). Start to soak the pieces in cold water for about 12 to 24 hours. Just start a day ahead and ignore eager meowing cats or frowning housemates who doubt the end result will be nicer than cat food. Change the water a couple of times during the day.
Rinse the salt off the cod and cook the fish in boiling water for 15 to 20 minutes until you can flake off pieces of fish. You will have to get rid of all skin and bones and ugly pieces. Put in a bowl.
Take 4 to 5 medium size potatoes and mash them. Mix with the cod flakes. Add pepper (no salt needed, the fish is salty already!), nutmeg and chopped parsley to your liking. Add some milk to make it into a good mash, add two tablespoons of flour, and add two raw eggs. Mix to combine.
Make small balls of the mixture and fry in hot sunflower oil until brown on all sides. Serve with a green salad and aioli; I used the shortcut of adding one crushed clove of garlic to a couple of tablespoons of good mayonaise.
Great taste, especially with the aioli, salty, but softer taste from the potatoes, you can keep on eating these forever!

plastic mussels

plastic mussels by kattebelletje.

What is this? Using an empty mussel shell to retrieve meat from the shell is an old trick, very easy to do. It can be one of the joys of eating mussels; you don't need a fork or a spoon, just the mussels themselves. They do not only provide you with moist and delicious mussel meat, but also with a tool to eat all the other mussels with! You can pick your favorite shell, large or small.

Well, not at Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands. Through the plastic of the bag of fresh mussels I noticed their Albert Heijn logo on one of the mussel shells. I thought they had managed to stamp their logo on somehow.

But when I opened the bag, it turned out they added two dark blue plastic mussel shells to a bag of fresh mussels. They looked cute, sure. And funny. But, thinking for a while, I wondered what the idea behind all this was. Instead of using the filthy? unhygienic? outdated? original mussel shells, we could use their logo'd tools instead?

Why, Albert Heijn?