ASPARAGUS!

It’s asparagus season, and we’re eating a lot of it. Steamed, baked, roasted. It’s everywhere. Green, white, tiny, enormous, baked, grilled, roasted, in soups and salads. In Germany it’s called Spargel. I love that word--it sounds like sparkle, and that’s what happens when the asparagus hits the market. It’s the official signal that Spring is here.

In our markets there are mostly white asparagus, often bigger around than my thumb. Its flavor is more delicate than the green kind, and it’s highly prized. I confess that I prefer my asparagus green, though. It has more flavor, and I like its slightly bitter tang. However you buy it, there are many ways to eat it. We’ve had most of them this week, and I finally used the last of it in a tart.

Well, ok, in truth it’s a quiche. Or, as a friend of mine once called it, a 'quickie'. Waaay back when I was in grad school, quiche wasn’t really well known in the Southern part of the US. I went with a friend to a restaurant much prized by poor students. This restaurant was a favorite because it was sort of ferny and bright inside, and it served cheap but ‘cheffy’ food (or at least our idea of cheffy food). We went there for special occasions. I’ve forgotten what this occasion was, but I remember that my friend took one look at the menu and said to the waiter, “bring me some of that quickie Lorraine”. He never lived that one down.

When I made the crust for this I used some of the duck fat I had left from the cuisses de canard. I wanted the flavor of the duck in the crust. If you leave that out, this dish is vegetarian. I used half butter and half duck fat. When I do this the next time I think I’ll use less duck fat--the flavor was good, but a little too strong for this. Next time I’ll use 2 tablespoons duck fat and 1/2 cup butter. Since I think you may not have duck fat sitting around in your fridge, I’ve written the recipe using only butter.

My tart pan is 27 cm / 10 1/2 inches wide, and shallow. The baking time wasn’t very long, and the crust wasn’t as brown as I’d like it. Next time I’ll blind bake the crust so that it will be browner. I’ve adjusted the recipe for that as well.

Asparagus Tart

Crust:

350 g / 2 cups flour

2/3 cup butter, chilled

1/2 tsp salt

4-5 tablespoons ice water

Filling:

100 g / 4 oz gruyere cheese, grated

4 eggs

a good pinch of cayenne pepper

fresh ground pepper

3/4 cup milk

3/4 cup cream

5 cherry tomatoes

8 spears broccoli, crisp-steamed

Preheat oven to 160 C / 375 F.

• First, make the crust. In a large bowl, mix the flour and the salt well. Cut the butter into small cubes and add to the flour. With your fingers, crumble the butter pieces until they resemble fine sand. You can also do this with a fork, but it’s not as much fun. Add ice water, one tablespoon at a time, until you can make a loose ball of the dough.
• Form the dough into a ball, and roll it out to fit your tart pan. (Unless you have a pan as large as mine, you’ll probably have some left over.) If there are holes, be sure that you patch them well.
• Put a piece of baking paper in the pan and fill with beans or pastry weights. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and remove the weights and the paper. Let it cool.
• Put the grated cheese in the bottom of the pan.
• In a large bowl, beat the eggs and add the cayenne, the milk, cream, and the pepper.
• Arrange the broccoli spears in the pan on top of the cheese.
• Carefully pour the egg mixture over the broccoli spears. I used a funnel to pour it into the center of the tart so as not to disturb the broccoli or cover it with the egg mixture.
• Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and arrange the halves between the asparagus spears. I also used pieces cut from the spears to decorate the spaces.
• Bake for 30 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

NOTES:

• If you don’t have gruyere, cheese, you can use any mild hard cheese: swiss/ementhal, gouda, cheddar...
• I don’t peel my broccoli--it seems like such a waste. I break off the hard part at the bottom and eat the rest. Sometimes the result is that it’s hard to cut with a fork...
• Because of the duck fat that I used, this crust is very short, and was sticky to roll out. I rolled it between two sheets of plastic wrap, but next time I’ll chill it first.

Under the Little Big Top

I love a circus, don’t you? When Dan had an office in Montreal, we used to spend a certain amount of time there. One of the things we loved to do was to see Cirque du Soleil. The things they did were astonishing, magical. I remember once there was a man who flew. Really flew. He began by walking around the enormous ring, his hands through some gymnast’s rings that were attached far above him. He just walked in a big circle. Then slightly faster, and faster, till he was running. Then he simply lifted his feet in that amazing gymnast’s move until he was horizontal in the air, arms out to his side. He was flying. Magic. I was entranced.

While this was among the simplest things I ever saw at Cirque du Soleil, it is among the most amazing. A man and some rings. That’s all it took for him to fly. Well, no, it also took hours and hours and weeks and years of training, but all that was behind the scenes. All we saw was the magic. That’s what Cirque du Soleil is: magic. The circus grown up.

This is a far cry from the circuses I grew up with: Barnum and Bailey’s best. Lions and Elephants and horses and trapezes and tightrope walkers. Men who ate fire. Jugglers. Clowns. The guy who got shot out of a cannon. A different kind of magic, but still magic to a child’s eyes.

This week in my town there’s a circus. It’s a traveling circus, moving around Belgium and spending ten days to two weeks in the smaller towns. (You can find their fascinating--in French, though--history here.) They set up in a big parking lot, with their Big Top and their trailers and they set about to entertain us. To bring us magic.

Saturday was a gorgeous day here. The air was warm, even if it smelled faintly like a cold fireplace from the volcanic ash. The sun was shining and the sky was perfectly blue. No clouds. No airplanes dragging their contrails. Nothing to mar the perfection of a sky of the sort we rarely see in Belgium. It was lovely. Dan and I went out to dinner and then treated ourselves to the circus.

We got there early, as soon as it opened, because we enjoy watching the preparations and seeing the audience file in. It was a small tent, and at capacity probably held 200 people. It was about 2/3 full, and there were lots of children. There were sparkly toys to tempt the children, and cotton candy to make them sticky. In the middle of the tent there was one ring, filled with sawdust.

There were big cats. No lions, but leopards, cougars and a puma. One of them refused to perform. Oops. Cats will be cats, after all. There were other animals too: a black stallion who performed dressage moves under the direction of a beautiful lady dressed like a Spanish Princess. The kids (big and small) all said AAAAH... There were donkeys, and a pony, some llamas and even trained steers (a first for me!). And an elephant, of course. There were the usual mishaps with animals: the llama pooped and the kids said EWWW! The elephant peed and the kids laughed. We understood the reason for the sawdust.

At the intermission, the elephant was still in the ring and they brought out an enormous tub full of carrots for her to eat. As she stood there placidly munching away, the kids could come and have their photos taken with her. One little boy didn’t quite realize what would be expected of him till he was really close, and then he took one look at the elephant and would have nothing to do with her. He was saying, NO! NO!, and his mother was trying to calm him. The elephant took hold of one side of the carrot tub with her trunk and moved it to the side, farther from the boy, and continued to eat. She’d seen this before.

The performances were a far cry from Cirque du Soleil: this was a different kind of circus, with a magic all its own. It was small, personal. It was a circus for kids, and for the kid in all of us. The woman who showed us to our seats was the acrobat. The man who took our tickets was her assistant. The ringmaster was selling refreshments outside. The Spanish Princess was also the tightrope walker. The big cat handler scooped up the poop. The curtain to the backstage was slightly tattered.

The juggler dropped his pins. Some animals refused to perform. The tightrope walker danced on the rope, on her toes like a ballet dancer. We held our collective breath when she bobbled, conscious of the possibility of failure. We were thrilled when she arrived at the far side, and applauded wildly. The acrobat shinnied up a long pole balanced on the forehead of her assistant. At the top she hung by her feet from some rings, and the kids said, OOOH! When she finally came down we could all breathe again.

This is the kind of circus you’d run away to. These were the kind of performances you could imagine yourself doing if you spent hours and hours and weeks and years training. OK, not the shinnying up the pole bit for me--too high. Not the tightrope either. But the Spanish Princess role I could do. The cats too--I could do the cats.

I think that’s the magic of this kind of circus--you can imagine yourself being there, traveling from town to town performing for children who will say OOOOH, and AAAH, and EWWW and even NO! NO! For the space of a couple of hours you can imagine yourself living a different life. Under the Little Big Top.

DUCK REDUX: Duck and Lentil Tarts

Leftovers. I love ‘em, don’t you? I mean, what’s better than finding food already cooked in the fridge? That way you can re-combine it with new ingredients and make something au pif, something on the spur of the moment, something that’s never been done before. Or at least not this week.

Because there’s normally only two of us eating here, we often have leftovers. When I made cuisses de canard confit, there were leftovers. The next day I used them to make these little tarts.

To make the tart shells, I put some puff pastry in a little tart tin (these are 11 cm 4.5 inches across) and covered it with another tart tin. I weighted the top one with beans and baked them for about 10-12 minutes. This kept the puff pastry from puffing up too much, and kept the form clean. One note: on half of these I trimmed the puff pastry before I baked it, so that there was no overhang between the tart tins. On the other half, I left some puff pastry hanging out, thinking it would make a pretty puffy collar for the tarts. WRONG. The puff pastry sort of melted down around the sides of the bottom tart tin, making it impossible to get the tart shells out of the tins. We had lots of puff pastry crumbs to sprinkle on salads...

These little tarts are pretty hearty. They’ve got lentils and duck and veggies in them, and with a salad they’re a nice lunch. They’d also do for a first course if the main course was light.

Duck and Lentil Tarts

3 small carrots

2 stalks celery

1/2 bulb fennel

1 leek

1 Tablespoon duck fat

250 g / 1/2 pound lentils, cooked

1/4 cup cider vinegar

2 Tablespoons olive oil

juice of 1/2 lemon

shredded meat from 2 cuisses de canard confit

Salt and pepper to taste

4 pre-baked tart shells

• Chop the carrots, the celery and the fennel about the size of the end of your little finger. Include the green tops of the celery.
• Clean the leek: cut off the tough part at the top and cut the leek in half lengthwise. Holding the two halves together, wash the leeks under cold running water, making sure to check between the layers where there’s often sandy dirt lurking to chip your teeth. When they’re clean, cut them crosswise into small strips.
• Melt 1 tablespoon of duck fat left from the cuisses de canard in a large-ish pan. Add the vegetables and cook till they’re softened, about 7-10 minutes.
• Add the lentils, mix well and drain if necessary.
• In a separate bowl, mix the vinegar, olive oil and lemon juice. Pour over the lentils and vegetables and mix well.
• Add the duck meat, fill the tart shells and garnish with whatever greenery you have.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

NOTES:

• For me, this is essentially a leftover dish. I used the vegetables I had. You could also add tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, onions instead of the leeks.
• Duck and lentils are a classic pairing here, but you could use chickpeas or white beans instead of the lentils. You’d be kicked out of the confrerie des amateurs du canard, but you don’t really care about them, do you?

Home again...

Home again, recovering from jet-lag and finally unpacked! We got home to find that our wifi router had committed suicide and we spent a lot of frustrating time trying to restore internet service. It's interesting to come face-to-face with how much we depend on the internet in our daily lives--from email to lesson preparation to blogging.

In any case, we're back now and I'm off to try to catch up with what you've been doing. I'll leave you with some eye candy from our visit with the grandkids. Enjoy!

STUFFED ZUCCHINI

Note: We're still on holiday. This is the last of my pre-programmed posts. I'll be home soon with fresh ones!

Do you see these things? Aren't they adorable? I love it when I find these in the market. They're perfect for stuffing. They're also perfect for playing zucchini bowling, but that's another story. Today we'll just stuff them. Not in the rude way, of course.

This is a great weeknight dish. It's not too hard to prepare and it uses up leftovers. Perfect for when you're getting ready to leave on a trip and you need to clean out the fridge. Or just when you have some leftover rice and sausage.

I used a sausage that we have here that has swiss cheese in it. Any fresh sausage that you like can be used. Italian Sausage would be very good in this. Merguez would be awesome.

If you can't find these round zucchini, you can make these with the long ones. Just cut them in half, hollow them out, and stuff them. Not in the rude way, of course. If you use the long ones, you won't have the cute little hats to put on them, but you could top them with some grated cheese. I think grated cheese makes up for a lot of things.

Stuffed Zucchini

8 round zucchini or 4 long ones

350 g / 12 oz sausage

1 medium onion

1 large tomato

1 ½ cups cooked rice

• Preheat oven to 160 C / 350 F
• Cut the tops off the zucchinis and hollow them out with a spoon. I used a grapefruit spoon because it has those little teeth to help scrape the insides out.
• Crumble the sausage into a pan and cook over medium heat till it releases some of its fat.
• Chop the onion and put it in with the sausage, cooking till the sausage is beginning to brown and the onion is soft and translucent.
• Chop the tomato and add to the pan with the rice. Cook till the tomato releases its juice and the mixture is moist, about 1-2 minutes. Don't worry if the sausage isn't fully cooked—this is going in the oven to cook some more.
• Stuff the zucchini with the mixture (not in the rude way, of course) and put it in the oven for 40-45 minutes, until the zucchini are soft.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don't.

NOTES:

• I think if you put these in the oven in a dish with a cover they would probably take less time to cook and they wouldn't risk drying out. I'll have to try that next time and let you know.
• Obviously, you can add anything you like to this mixture. Peas, cut up green beans, leeks, bell peppers. If you want a little crunch, you could add pine nuts. If you want it spicier, you can add some chili peppers. Just remember that when you put it in the oven it will dry out, so you want the mixture to be really moist when you put it in the zucchini.
• If the mixture is dry, you can moisten it with stock or wine or tomato juice.
• Pasta would substitute nicely for the rice.

What would you put in it?

LANGUAGE LESSONS: Logical Consequences

NOTE: We're still on holiday. This is a re-write of an early post about the problems of trying to solve linguistic challenges using logic. Enjoy.

One of the interesting things about living in Belgium is that we are exposed to different languages every day. Everything we buy has two or three languages on it: French, Dutch, and often German as well.

Our daily language is French. When we leave our house we're in a world where very few people speak English. Consequently, our French is very good today. When we first came here we thought our French was pretty good but we quickly found out that what passes for 'good' in DC doesn't work so well here. There are accents. There are idiomatic expressions. There's all that vocabulary and advanced grammar that we didn't need in DC, like "if you had done what you promised we wouldn't have this problem today". Come to think of it, that would have come in handy in DC too. In any case when we first moved to Belgium we had a lot of language learning to do.

Some lessons came from professional teachers. Most came from innocent bystanders. Some of those work in my local supermarket. Shortly after I arrived here, I approached the manager with a can of chickpeas in my hand. I wanted to know if they were organic, and I hadn't yet learned the word bio (which seems to be the western European word for organic). But I figured I could approach it logically and use the fancy English word with French pronunciation (it works surprisingly often!). So I screwed up my nerve and in my very best and most polite French asked the poor man if there were any preservatifs in the can.

He was stunned by my question. He got up on a veryvery high horse and wanted to know why I'd ask him that kind of question? What kind of place did I think that was? He also said a lot of other things that I didn't really understand, but thankfully the words 'get out' and 'never come back' didn't seem to be there. At first I thought it must be an organic supermarket and he was very proud of that fact. But even that wouldn't really explain his reaction...

I was perplexed until I went home and got out my trusty dictionary to discover that the word I wanted was conservateur. In French, a preservatif is a condom. Oh. Well. At least now I know that there are no condoms in the chickpeas here. That's a relief.

It's not only in French that we made mistakes. I should say MAKE mistakes, because we still do. On one of our early jaunts to explore our region we went to Aachen, which although it's in Germany, is only about 25 km from here. We had no German at that point beyond Ich bin kein warmduscher (I am not a sissy). While this is kind of fun to say, it doesn't get you very far. Not even to the tourist office, as it happens...

In the end we managed to find the tourist office and asked for all the tourist information in French so that we could practice, and we dutifully followed the tourist trail reading all about somebody they called by his German name: Karl der Grosse. We read that Karl der Grosse had founded the city in the late 700's. All the history of Aachen seemed to be bound up with Karl der Grosse. We didn't really know who he was, but decided that we could use logic to figure it out. Our logic went like this: in French, grosse means 'fat', so he must have been fat...that didn't really help much, but we continued to follow the tourist trail where we saw Fat Karl's house (hmmm....he was rich) and Fat Karl's cathedral (hmmm....he was holy) and Fat Karl's crown (hmmm....he was royal). We were beginning to think that maybe we should know who he was when we finally stumbled on a statue of Fat Karl.

You know what? HE WASN'T FAT AT ALL! However, he was veryvery tall. That's when we realized that French and logic were no help in Germany. Grosse doesn't mean 'fat' in German. It means 'tall' and 'big' and ....'great'. That's when I remembered having seen a statue somewhere with the name 'Carolus Magnus' on it. Oh, no. It wasn't Fat Karl at all. It was Charlemagne.

When we travel now we make sure that all of our papers are in order and that we have a good dictionary with us. 'Cause you never know.

I will admit, though, that I still think of Charlamagne as Fat Karl.

CLASSICS: Pimento Cheese

Having grown up in the Southern part of the US, I have some special food prejudices. I love spicy food. I will make a beeline for a coconut cake. I like my tea strong and iced. No sugar (I know). My lifetime ambition is to make good fried chicken (I'm not there, not by a long shot). In the summer, I could happily eat BLT every single day. And I love pimento cheese.

Pimento Cheese. Pimiento cheese. However you spell it, I like it. Dan, who grew up in San Francisco, looks at a Pimento cheese sandwich and says, “eh”. He doesn't hate it, but he wouldn't go out of his way to make it. Or to find it.

I think that's because he didn't grow up with it. The food of our childhood can take us back to happy times, to carefree days. So what if those days really weren't exactly carefree? In truth, while I was learning to love pimento cheese I was also learning to fear Sister Saint Dominic and Wednesday detention.

Today the good Sister is mercifully faded in my memory, while pimento cheese is crisp and clear. It speaks to me of picnics, of swimming holes, of summer. It's March and here in Belgium it's cold. Wet. Last week, I needed a blast of summer. I also needed to clean out the fridge before our trip. Looking around my kitchen, what did I find? Roasted peppers left over from Ajvar. Cheddar cheese. (OK, it's supermarket cheddar, and Belgian supermarket cheddar at that, but it's what I had.) Some pepper cheese from the cheese guy at my Sunday market. And mayonnaise. I always have mayonnaise.

So I whipped up a bowl of pimento cheese. It was very pretty. It was delicious. I ate it on sauerteigbrot―bread we get in Germany that's made with 100% rye flour. It's a dense bread, leavened with sourdough. When I lived in DC, I used to buy this bread at Wholefoods. I like bread that I can slice myself. I can make the slices thin or thick, depending on what I'm using them for. Here, I sliced them thin so that the pimento cheese shone.

If you didn't grow up with pimento cheese, you don't have to despair. You can start now to make memories with it. You can make picnic sandwiches. You can make fancy pants sandwiches too! Perfect for tea, or just to spoil yourself.

Pimento Cheese

1 red bell pepper

120 g / 4 oz sharp cheddar

80 g / 3 oz pepper cheese

2 – 3 Tablespoons good mayonnaise

• Pre-heat the broiler / grill of your oven.
• Cut the peppers in sections, and remove the membranes and seeds. You want these segments to be fairly flat, so that the heat will reach them uniformly.
• Arrange the peppers skin side up on a baking sheet. I used a non-stick baking sheet. If you don’t have one, you might want to line yours with aluminum foil. This gets a little messy.
• Slide the peppers under the grill and watch them closely. Mine take between 5 and 10 minutes to be done, depending on whether I remember to pre-heat the grill. They’re done when the kitchen smells like heaven and the pepper skins are lifted and blackened.
• Meanwhile, grate the cheeses.
• Put the peppers in a paper bag and close it up. Yes, they’re hot. Yes, there’s steam. Using tongs is highly recommended. Set aside to cool.
• When they’re cool, take the pepper pieces out one at a time and remove the skin with a sharp knife. Usually you can just pull it off, but if the pepper curved under away from the heat you may have to scrape it a little. If it’s really stuck, don’t worry, just leave it. You won’t notice it.
• When all the peppers are cleaned, put them on a big chopping board. Chop them fairly fine. At this point the peppers have been transmogrified into pimentos.
• Mix the grated cheese with the pimentos. Stir well.
• Add the mayo and chill until ready to use.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don't.

NOTES:

• Of course, these measurements are approximate. I used the cheese that I had. You can add more or less cheese, mayo, pimento. You're the boss!
• This is wonderful with whatever hard cheese you have. If I don't have a pepper cheese, I add a pinch or two of cayenne. Just because.
• For this, I think you need an old-fashioned box grater. You don't want this cheese to be finely grated, so this is not a job for a microplane.
• The cheese and pimento alone (without the mayonnaise) is excellent in a grilled cheese sandwich.
• Like many things, this is better next day. I just make a double batch so that there will be leftovers, because once this is ready I don't want to wait to eat it.