Vol-au-vent with chips, all homemade!

This is a classic dish. Very few restaurants don't serve this and I don't know anyone who doesn't like the taste.

When we were a lot smaller and I didn't cook yet, we never had this homemade. we always bought it in the shop, in these vacuum-sealed packages out of the freezer. The substance was thick and jelly-like. We liked it just because we didn't know anything else. 
It was only about 8 years ago, when I first took the challenge to prepare it all by myself, that I wondered why we never did that before ... 
Since that day, I always prepared it and I haven't heard any complaint. Haha!

This is a little more elaborate, but when you're having vacation, you don't really mind about having a little more to do in the kitchen. Besides, my sister has to be spoiled as she has to get through resits this month. 

Ingredients for 4:
- 4-6 chicken drumsticks
- 400 grams minced chicken
- 1 egg
- breadcrumbs
- pepper and salt to taste
- 2 litres of water
- carrots, leek, celery for the stock 
- bouquet garni (bay leaves/thyme/rosemary)
- spoonful of pepper corns
- 250 grams mushrooms, sliced (optional)
- butter
- flour
- 100 ml milk
- parsley for serving

Along with chips (homemade) and puff pastry cups.

How to:
Cut the carrots, leeks and celery in large chunks. Add them to the water, the bouquet garni and the pepper corns. Put on the fire. Once the water has come to a boil, put the chicken in. Let it all simmer on medium heat for at least 45 minutes or until the meat comes easily off the bones.

Take the chicken out but don't pour away the stock, you'll be needing it later on. When they've cooled down enough, you can tear off the meat (throw away the bones, but I tend to make our dog really happy with the skins of the chicken when making this!).

Mix the egg, salt, pepper and enough breadcrumbs to get an easy to handle mixture, to the minced chicken. Make small balls with this. The smaller they are, the longer it takes to roll them, but the result will be tastier looking.

Boil the meatballs in the chicken stock. Once they come to float, they're ready. Take them out of the stock and keep aside.

Now make the sauce: Melt a spoonful of butter in another pot and add the same amount of flour to it. Stir continuously as this mixture easily sticks. Now pour in the milk. keep stirring quickly, béchamel sauce binds very quickly!

Pour in a ladle of the chicken stock (only the liquid, no chunks) in the pot. Stir again. When the sauce begins to thicken, add some more stock. You should have about half to 3/4 of a litre of sauce in the end (approximately, no scientifically proven measurement!).

Now you can spice up the sauce with salt and pepper to taste.

You can add the sliced mushrooms, the meatballs and chicken meat also. Stir carefully and set aside. This is much better prepared a few hours in advance, the taste gets much better.

What with the left over stock? Don't throw it away yet! It's really good for soup. I made tomato soup with it for example:

To serve, you bake off the puff pastry cups and fill them with the sauce. Decorate with a little cut up parsley.

Make homemade chips and a salad, and you're ready to dig in!

Smakelijk!

Apple pancakes, Ijeoma style

This afternoon I'm away 'till after dinner. So if I wanted some warm food at home, I had to take care of it by myself. For some reason, I had a huge craving for pancakes*. 

* In Belgium, we usually mean crêpes when we say pancakes. 
They are thin, larger and less fluffy than the American ones.

It was lunchtime, and I started baking, and I shared the dough that I made for at least 8 pancakes with my mum and grandmother (who came in at just the right time ^^).

As there were these good apples, I made apple pancakes. And I added some cinnamon powder to the dough to match the flavour of the apple. 

Ingredients for 8 large apple pancakes:
- 200 grams flour
- 500 ml milk
- pinch of salt
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
- 2 or 3 large apples
- butter
- icing sugar
- blueberry jam

How to:
Make the dough for the pancakes by putting the flour and the salt in a bowl. Mix these well.
Then add half of the milk and an egg. Stir carefully so that all the flour gets wet. This makes lumbs less likely. 
Add the rest of the milk and the second egg. Keep stirring until the dough is as smooth as possible. 
Mix the cinnamon powder to the dough.
Peel the apples and slice them thinly. 
Heat a low-rimmed skillet and add some butter to it.
Bake the sliced apple pieces (enough for one pancake, not all of them at once!) until just tender.

Pour the pancake dough onto the apples in the skillet. Now you should wait until the downside has browned and dried enough before you turn the pancake upside down.

When the pancake is ready, put it on a plate and serve with dollops of blueberry jam and lots of icing sugar.

This is such an easy thing to make, and even though it costs next to nothing to prepare it, it can compete with any pastry!

Smakelijk!

Wholesome vanilla-chocolate buns

Remember my post on my birthday party? The one for which I baked 7 different kinds of bread? Well, it wasn't fully to my my sister's consent. The reason for this was that there was nowhere a chocolate bread to be found ...

She's a chocolate addict. Not so much as in her childhood, during which she couldn't take her hands of anything containing chocolate (even though she was allergic to the thing!), but still enough to be disappointed about having to eat all sorts of bread without that specific ingredient. 

To make things up with her I decided this morning to bake chocolate buns for her. I woke up as early as 5 a.m. this morning, for I don't know what reason. So as I knew the others wouldn't get up for at least 3 hours, I had enough time to spend some time in the kitchen making the buns.

I'd just made up my mind about this when I found out that the plain flour was all finished. But there are always solutions to these kind of problems: a combination of whole wheat flour and vanilla flour would do.

Ingredients for 4 buns:
- 70 grams whole wheat flour
- 50 grams vanilla flour (custard powder)
- 1 large tablespoon of vanilla sugar
- 3,5 grams instant yeast
- 40 grams lukewarm milk
- 25 grams butter
- 1 egg
- 100 grams chopped plain chocolate
- 1 egg yolk
- powdered sugar for serving (optional)

How to:
Mix the milk, egg and the yeast. Mix in another bowl the flour, the custard powder, the sugar and the salt. Mix both mixtures with eachother and knead the butter in. Knead at least 5-10 minutes so that the dough comes together nicely.
Let the dough rest for about 10 minutes.
Knead again and add the chopped chocolate now.
Let the dough rest for 30 minutes.
Knead again and divide it in 4 pieces. Shape them whatever way you like.
Let the dough rest for 45 minutes. Spread some egg yolk onto it so that it will get nice and shiny in the oven.
Bake the buns for 10 minutes in a preheated oven at 190°C. Raise the temperature to 210°C and bake for another 10 minutes.
Take out of the oven and let cool. 
Serve with some powdered sugar on top.

At least my sister can't blame me for not thinking about her this morning! 

Have a nice meal! :)

P.S.: they're nice but to be eaten in small amounts. That's because the whole wheat flour doesn't rise as easily as white flour ;)

Smoked salmon wraps with a big salad

Hot, hot hot. I'm just sitting in the garden reading one of my books. From time to time my mum or sister shouts to get my attention: 'Sunscrean!' or 'Shadow!' or 'Don't forget to drink!'. When I'm reading, nothing can get me out of my comfortable chair ... 

But I don't forget to eat. Most people lose appetite, but that doesn't happen to me I think. The only thing is that I really want to eat fruits, lots of them. I don't feel like eating anything else. 

For dinner, I didn't want anything cooked. Just raw vegetables and - as it was a long time ago - smoked salmon. To make the dish complete I had tortillas and a tzatziki-like dill and cucumber sauce.

It's ready in a blink of an eye. So you'll be free to read, play, enjoy ... or do anything else you want this Summer's day :D

Ingredients for 1:
- 2 small or 1 large tortilla wrap
- 5 cm of a cucumber
- 1 small pot of plain yoghurt
- some crushed garlic cloves
- teaspoon of dill
- ground pepper
- 70 grams (2 slices) of smoked salmon
- lots of raw vegetables for your salad! (I had cherry tomatoes, beetroots and carrots)
- chives for serving

How to:
Peel and cut the cucumber in very small pieces. Add them to the yoghurt, the garlic, the pepper and the dill. Set aside in the fridge until you need it.

Make a salad and dress it on your plate.
Make the wraps by putting the slices of smoked salmon and the sauce on the tortilla(s). Roll them up and you're ready to serve. Sprinkle the chives on the salad. It gives an extra garlic-like taste to the vegetables.

Great!

Pretending you're in Zanzibar with pilau!

Summer's heat is melting everything and everyone that dares to come out. Temperatures will rise even higher this weekend, and it made me think of a wonderful destination: Zanzibar.

We've lived in Tanzania (Arusha) for three years for my dad's work. I was 12 when we moved there, and that was the exact age I became a regular cook at home. I experimented a lot, with some of the most disastrous cakes you can ever imagine and 'accidents' such as a full deep frier falling down which flooded the whole of our kitchen with oil ...
Luckily I also made some good to excellent things. Otherwise my parents would never allow me to continue.

Each year - around my birthday - we had our little holiday on the island Zanzibar. There we enjoyed the arabic tinted kitchen and especially lots of fish. 

I very much liked the fish pilau at Dolphin Restaurant in Stone Town. It was a very old building with loads of cracks and an African grey parrot that could talk to the customers and broke down the ceiling. I have such good memories of those holidays!

When we left for Belgium, I missed the spicy dishes a lot. It took me a long time for finding out where to get the right ingredients, let alone to find the correct recipes.
After endless searches on the internet, I found something that sounded about right to me. It's this recipe I took as base for my own Zanzibar pilau.

I meant to make it for the four of us, but after serving it seemed as if I had still enough for at least one or two more people. So keep in mind, when you decide to prepare this for 4 people, that you reduce the amounts :)

Ingredients for 5-6:
- teaspoon of cumin seeds
- teaspoon of black pepper corns
- teaspoon of ground ginger
- half a teaspoon of salt
- cinnamon stick
- ground cinnamon
- 5 cloves
- 10 cardemom pods
- 5 cloves of garlic
- 300 grams rice
- 250 grams tomatoes, chopped
- 1 apple or handful of raisins
- 900 ml of fish stock (1 and a half cube in the water)
- 400 grams (or more if you like) of white fish, diced
- olive oil
- 1 onion
- for serving: a little parsley and slices of lemon

How to:
Heat the stock with all of the spices. Once it all cooks, keep aside. Heat a pan and fry the onion, chopped garlic in it with a little olive oil.

Add the fish and turn them around quickly. 

Now take all onions, garlic and fish out.
Put the rice in the same pan and stir so that all the rice can get covered in the olive oil.
Pour in two thirds of the stock-spice mixture. Spice things up with salt and some extra pepper (if you like it hot). Let all of it now simmer  with the lid on. 
Add the apple and/or the raisins and the tomatoes to the rice. After a few minutes, you can add the fish, onion and garlic too.

Check with a fork from time to time so that you can add more of the stock-spice mixture when the rest is soaked up. 
When the rice is done, put the pan with the lid in a preheated oven at 200°C. 
It's ready when the rice is dried up.

Chakula tamu!

How to prepare chicken as if it were ossobuco ...

I'm going to babysit this afternoon. The whole afternoon, so no time to cook tonight. As my parents both have to work and my sister has to study for her exams, I decided to make something I could do in advance. A kind of stew or something alike.

I've always looked at recipes for ossobuco, liking them but never tried or tasted them. When I went for the weekly shoppings, I thought of taking ossocuco home. But as luck isn't very reliable, the shop didn't sell ossobuco (neither the veal nor the turkey kind).
I took home chicken insead. I reconed that if there is turkey ossobuco, chicken pieces - parts of another kind of bird - should do the same trick.

For the rest, I just follow the same steps as if preparing the real thing.

Ingredients for 4:
- 4 large or 8 smaller chicken pieces (with bone)
- a few sticks of celery
- a few carrots
- large onion
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 200 ml white wine
- 1 can (400 grams) peeled tomatoes
- 1 small tin of tomato purée
- a little flour
- salt and pepper to taste
- 4 bay leaves
- teaspoon of thyme
- olive oil
- 350 grams of tagliatelle
- zest of 1 lemon
- handful of parsley
- 1 clove of garlic

How to:
Cover the chicken in a thin layer of flour.
Heat the oil in a pot (large enough to place each piece of meat next to eachother) and fry the chicken so that it browns on each side. Spice things up with pepper and salt. Take the chicken out of the pot and add all of the diced carrots and celery and the chopped onion and garlic. 

Once they have sweated a little, put the chicken pieces on top of it all. Add the wine, the tomatoes, tomato purée and the herbs. 
Lower the heat and let all of it simmer for 2 to 3 hours.

Before serving, taste whether it needs more pepper or salt.

I made the whole thing in advance. By doing it the night before, I didn't have to hurry to the kitchen in the morning before leaving for the babysitting, and the tastes would be able to combine more beautifully!

To serve, cook the pasta according to the instructions on the package.
On the plate, put some of the pasta, a piece of chicken, the sauce and sprinkle it all with a mixture of the crushed garlic, the lemon zest and the chopped parsley. These last things form the so called 'gremolata'.

Appetitoso!

Teriyaki chicken legs and vegetable stir fry

What to eat? What to eat?
When Summer comes and temperatures rise to nearly 30°C, the great hunger people have during the cold Winter times seems to disappear. A great no go for the hearty Belgian dishes with lots of pork, beef and potatoes floating in heavy sauces.

For me Summer means you have to look at more exotic kitchens to get your inspiration. People there always have these kind of temperatures, so their food fits the season, I recon.

As I still had an unopened bottle of teriyaki sauce and chicken legs, the choice was evident: teriyaki chicken. To be served with lots of fresh vegetables and ...

Something new for me: rice noodles (mihoen). I saw it in the supermarket, on my search for a side dish to my teriyaki chicken legs and stir fry vegetables. 

Ingredients for 4:
- 4 large chicken legs
- teriyaki sauce

- neutral oil 

- ground ginger

- pepper/chilli

- 400 grams mixed vegetables like carrots,  leeks, soy sprouts, ...

- 250 grams rice noodles

- soy sauce

- chicken stock 

How to:

Rub the chicken legs with the teriyaki sauce, some ground ginger and some oil. Put them on an oven tray and let them stand for about 3 hours in a 150°C oven. They will brown evenly if you turn them around 3-4 times during cooking. If they're becoming too dry, rub them in with the juices in the tray or with a little extra oil.

Put some oil in a frying pan and fry the vegetables you have cut in matchstick-size pieces shortly. Add some soy sauce and ginger to taste. Be careful with soy sauce as it may be too salty in the end (I used reduced salt soy sauce).
Prepare the noodles as mentioned on the package. Use the chicken stock for extra taste.

Drain the noodles and add them to the vegetables. Stir quickly so that the tastes combine (I didn't do that - forgot! - and the noodles were kind of bland. But if you forget too, just turn all things round on your own plate: more messy but alike). 

Chicken enchiladas with guacamole

After a long period of 'boerenkost' (my dad's favourite food: daily meat, vegetables and potatoes, can be translated as 'farmers' food') I felt it was time for something else. 
I'm a fan of all sorts of kitchens, especially spicy kitchens. Mexican is one of them. I love the use of cilantro, and the Mexican kitchen is full of it.

Today it's chicken enchiladas I'll make. It's my own adaptation of the dish so please don't blame me for messing with the recipe!

Ingredients for enchiladas (4):
- 4 large or 8 small tortillas
- 4 chicken fillets
- olive oil
- chicken herbs
- pepper and salt to taste
- chilli flakes or harissa to taste
- 2 cans of peeled tomatoes
- 2 large sweet red bell peppers
- 1/2 teaspoon of oregano
- 1/2 teaspoon cumin
- 250 grams grated cheddar
- hot chilli powder
- fresh cilantro for serving

How to:
Bring the peeled tomatoes, the chopped garlic, the chopped peppers and the herbs to a boil in a large pot. Let it all simmer for at least half an hour or until the flavours have combined and the peppers have become soft. Blend the sauce a little so that the largest chunks are gone.
Cut the chicken into small cubes and rub them in with some of the chicken herbs.
Heat a skillet and fry the chicken in some olive oil.
Now take a tortilla, dip one side of it in the sauce, fill it up with some of the chicken, another little bit of sauce,  a bit of the grated cheddar and - if you like it hot - some hot chilli powder.
Roll the tortilla up so that you get a large roll. Place it in a greased oven tray and cover the wrap with sauce and some cheddar.
You do this for each of the tortillas, until all ingredients are finished.
Put in a 200°C oven for about 45 minutes.
Before serving, sprinkle with some fresh cilantro for colour and extra taste.

Ingredients for guacamole (4):
- 2 avocados
- juice of 1 lime
- pepper and salt to taste
- 2 large tomatoes, peeled and deseeded
- 1 small onion
- handful of fresh cilantro
- tabasco (if you like it hot)

How to:
Cut the avocados in half. Take the stone out by putting a knife in the middle of it and pulling the knife with the stone on it out. Don't throw away the stones!
Use a spoon to take all the flesh out of the avocados. 
Mash the avocado with a fork.
Cut the garlic, tomatoes and the onion in very small pieces. Add them to the avocado.
Spice things up with lime juice, salt, pepper, tabasco and cilantro.
Put the stones of the avocados back in so that the nice green colour stays.

Sublime!

Chocolate chip cookies with a twist

It's good outside so I decided to take my book out in the garden to read it there. I didn't think it would get that hot in the sun, though. I really had to get inside before getting a sunburn. But what to do when you have time off and you can't do what you had in mind? Right: you get creative in the kitchen :)

Creative to do what I wanted to do (baking chocolate chip cookies) without the necessary ingredients (no vanilla extract, no plain chocolate, ...). Substitutions would have to do.

Ingredients for 8 large cookies:
- 105 grams butter
- 120 grams white chocolate with rice crispies
- 50 grams milk chocolate with hazelnuts (like the one from Côte d'Or)
- 60 grams white sugar
- 1 egg
- 160 grams flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

How to:
In a small pot, melt the butter and the white chocolate. Take off the fire once they've combined and add the sugar and the egg. 
Then put the flour and the baking powder in. Mix well.
When your dough is cooled off, you can throw in the hazelnut chocolate you've cut or broken into small pieces. Stir again so that the chunks are all over the dough.
Line a baking tray with some non-stick paper and make 8 large heaps of dough, evenly spread out over the tray.
Put in a 230°C preheated oven and bake for about 10-15 minutes.
The cookies are still gooey when ready. They set and get crispy when cooled off completely.

My parents' found them delicious. My mum really liked the nutty taste. She thinksI used the real nuts ;) My dad didn't say anything but just ate 2 large ones in about five minutes time!

my sister and one of the cookies ...

Birthday party!

Friday I turned 22 years old. Yesterday, the 5th of August, we celebrated. I invited quite some people but I didn't think everyone would be able to come. 35 people came and with the ambition to prepare all the food by myself, it was the largest party I organised yet.

Originally - that is before I knew that many people could come - I wanted to do a Middle and South American night. I looked up recipes from all over the continent, from Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, ... But as we didn't have pots large enough for the crowd, I switched plans for something less complicated. 

I was to make a buffet of different kinds of bread and side dishes to go along with them. 
To serve with the coffee, I made biscuits and as dessert I made fresh pineapple and chocolate ice cream.
The ice cream was a total experiment: I never made it and we don't own an ice machine. When I told my uncle I made my own ice cream he laughed and said 'Yeah, that won't be much of a success ...!', but when he tasted it he was delighted. Haha! 

Top-down, left to right: buttermilk-poppyseed bread, walnut bread,
multigrain bread, Colombian torta de choclo, raisin bread and saffron bread

Loved making all of it, but it took a full day and a half to do so.

Especially the saffron bread was liked by everyone. Therefore I put the recipe on the blog.

Ingredients for a large saffron bread:
- 700 grams white flour
- 450 ml lukewarm milk
- 1 gram saffron powder
- 3 tablespoons sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 7 grams instant yeast
- 25 grams butter
- 1 large egg
- 1 egg yolk

How to:
Put all the flour, the salt and the sugar in a large bowl. Mix well so that the salt and sugar have been taken up completely. Make a hole in the heap of flour and place small chunks of butter around the hole. Pour in the yeast, milk and egg in the hole. 
Now start kneading with your hands. It's quite a sticky kind of dough, but add a little more flour if you're unable to shape the dough. 
Put the ball of dough aside in a warm enough place for at least 1,5 hour. Cover the bowl with a clean towel to prevent it getting in touch with too much cold air.
Knead the dough again for a couple of minutes. Now you can shape the dough to your liking. I made a round bread yesterday, but any shape is possible (but make sure it's shape is not too uneven so that it can bake properly without getting burned a a side while the other side is still raw!).
Set aside for another 1,5 hour. In the meanwhile you can preheat the oven at 230°C. 
Take the egg yolk and spread it on the risen bread with a brush. The yolk will make your bread look nice and shiny.
Put in the oven for 15 minutes. Then lower the temperature to 200°C and bake for another 25-30 minutes. The bread is ready when it's golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped.

It's a bread that has a hint of sweetness so it's delicious with both salty things like cheese as well as with sweet jams, chocolate, ...

Smakelijk!

I must say that the party was a succes for me. 
I loved it and I have to thank all my friends and family for coming! I'm sorry I didn't have the time to talk to everyone properly. 

Fish on the BBQ

Barbecue today, according to me just the way a hot Summer's day should end. 

My parents are meat lovers, so they had a good steak and pork ribs. I looked in the freezer for some inspiration and found fish fillets. Now the problem was what to do with them. Plain is nice, but then you don't have BBQ every night, right?

In our house there are always oranges around. For my glass of fresh orange juice, my daily morning shot of vitamin C to start off ;) That was ingredient one. 

Second were fennel seeds. As I' was the only fish eater today, I didn't have to care about the others that don't like the taste of them.

A little olive oil, salt and red pepper finished my marinade.

Ingredients for 1:

- 1 white fish fillet

- juice of 1/4 orange

- red pepper to taste

- salt to taste

- dash of fennel seeds

- 1 tablespoon olive oil

How to:

Take a piece of tin foil large enough to wrap the fish later on.

Put the fillet on it and cover it with all the other ingredients.
Close the foil to make a package, fish en papillote. A quarter of an hour on the roster and ready to serve. 

Why make something difficult when you can do it easy? At least you have the rest of the time off to relax. Never waste a good Summer's day!

The fish and the marinade is very light. So it's a good recipe for people that don't feel like dining heavily. Of course that depends also on the side dishes ... ;)