Oat Shortbread Cookies and Vitamin O

Many years ago, when I was in Grad school, some friends and I began to think seriously about nutrition. Grad students on the whole aren’t known for their interest in nutrition, but we discovered a vitamin that’s not very well known: vitamin O. Vitamin O deficiencies are pretty common, and can have serious affects on your social life. Your body can’t store it, and so you need some every day. Jogging or other strenuous exercise completely strips your body of it, as do exams. Vitamin O is very important for mental health. And we WERE studying Psychology, after all!

An Adoption and a Giveaway

One of the things I love about bloggers is the mutual support we give each other. We also often give this support to new bloggers. I like to find a new blogger and comment on their posts, encourage them, add them to my blogroll, and generally watch them become established. I do this to 'pay forward' the support that I received when my blog was new. This is one thing I haven't had the time to do in the past few months, and I miss it.

I love the idea of community. In the bloggy world, we make our own community—we find bloggers who have similar interests, and we simply visit them and chat a little. We get to know each other, we email, maybe we visit in real life. That's how we make community in the real world as well! 

Oven Braised Pork and Winter Vegetables

The weather here has been very wintery—it's put the BRR in NovemBRR! Rain, cold, fog. Perfect weather to hunker down and stay home with something warm and hearty for dinner. Me, I also want something easy. Something that I can stick in the oven and not think about. This is the perfect thing! 

Transit Problems

Indigestion. Heartburn. Nausea. Insomnia. Headaches. Stomach cramps. (I'll stop there) Welcome to my world. For the past few months I've been having a lot of problems with indigestion and with what in French we call le transit. 

Needless to say, I haven't been cooking a lot of new and exciting things. I've just been trying to 'deal with' some pretty bland and uninteresting food. And we've been doing a lot of tests to figure out what the problem is. Or what the problems are. 

Spiced Nuts

One of the lovely customs here in Belgium is that whenever you're invited to someone's house for dinner, you take a gift. Nobody ever shows up empty-handed. This gift can be flowers, a plant, a bottle of wine, or something else that you know the host/hostess will like. Often it's chocolate.

When we go to someone's house, we normally bring chocolates. This past weekend, however, we were invited for dinner and we couldn't take chocolates--we were going to the home of our chocolatier! He certainly had enough of his own chocolates to satisfy him, and taking chocolates from a rival wouldn't have been very nice. So...what?

What's better than something from the kitchen? Pillsbury's jingle aside, there is (for me) something special about a gift from the kitchen. No, not wooden spoons...

Spicy Cheesy Lamburgers

My friend Françoise is the source of many good things for us. She's brought us friendship, good advice, English novels, the odd vocabulary lesson, and lots of good food tips. Recently, she shared with us some cheese that a friend had brought her from Turkey. We don't know the name of the cheese, but it was a hard, crumbly, salty cheese—sort of like Feta but with a more buttery flavor. At my house we just called it Turkish Cheese.

At the same time that we received this wonderful cheese, I found some lovely ground lamb. I wanted to make some lamb-burgers, and I was thinking of the wonderful spices in some of the Moroccan dishes we can find here. I wanted something a little hot, a little exotic. This buttery, salty cheese fit right in with what I had in mind.

Mirabelle Crumble

One of the joys of late summer here is the fruit. I love the peaches, nectarines, raspberries and of course the blackberries. One fruit I didn't appreciate till we moved here are plums. There are so many types: Red ones, purple ones with yellow flesh, the green Reine Claudes, and the tiny yellow Mirabelles. 

I love it that fruit and vegetables here have proper names. I used to just buy plums. What kind? Uh, purple ones. Here, we call them by their names. Reine Claude in French means Queen Claude. Don't ask me why you'd name a Queen Claude, but I guess someone did. In any case, she turned out to be agreeable enough that they named a lovely little green plum after her. I like the name Mirabelle better, I think. Not so royal but veryvery pretty. Like the plums themselves, tiny bundles of sunshine.