September 28, 2011

Elderflower Mojitos

Elderflower Mojito


I love these vintage-y Stella Artois glasses, especially to showoff this awesome elderflower-gin mojito based cocktail to celebrate the arrival of second summer. Seriously, take a look at this weather:



Elderflower Mojito
Ingredients: listed in order of use
Yield: one cocktail, 25 cl, or about a 8 oz glass

bunch of sprigs of fresh mint
1 shot, or approx. 1/8 cup cold gin (I'm going to assume vodka or rum would work as well)
1 shot, or approx. 1/8 cup elderflower drink concentrate/syrup. You can buy the elderflower stuff at IKEA.
1/3 cup ice cubes, crushed if possible
wedge of lemon
sparkling water to fill to top of glass

Directions:
  1. Fill the mint leaves at the bottom of the glass and muddle them together with a back of a spoon, or with a pestle. Top with the gin and elderflower. Mix together. Top with ice cubes, a lemon wedge, and enough sparkling water to top off the glass. Garnish with a fresh mint sprig.

September 27, 2011

Black bean salsa with avocado and cukes

Black bean salsa with avocado and cucumbers

Black bean salsa

This is a simple healthy fresh black bean salsa. It's perfect with chips or as a side. If using cucumbers, it stores up to 2 days. The cukes add a nice crunch, but can be omitted (I'm sneaking in more garden produce). The avocado hits the spot. This recipe changes with whatever I have on hand. Tomatoes, a combination of bell peppers, or corn can be used as well.

Ingredients:
Yield: approx. 2 cups

1/2 cup or more of dried black beans, soaked and cooked, or 1 can black beans rinsed and drained
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped fine, about 1/2 cup
1/2 of a small red onion, chopped, about 2 T
1 clove garlic, chopped fine
1 small lemon cucumber, seeds removed, chopped fine, or 1/2 red yellow bell pepper chopped
1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 canned whole jalapenos, chopped, or 1 jalapeno seeded and diced.
chopped cilantro to taste
1 tbsp or more of fresh lime juice
1/4 tsp salt, or to taste
1/2 of a ripe avocado, small dice. I like to cut all the way around the avocado, peel apart the two sides and gently make dices in the avocado flesh. Then I use a spoon to scoop them all out. This works well with ripe avocados.

Directions:
  1. In a medium sized mixing bowl, add in cooked black beans, the chopped red peppers, onions, garlic and cukes (or yellow bell peppers if using). Stir to combine.
  2. Add in apple cider vinegar, jalapenos, lime juice, salt, and cilantro. Stir together and adjust for lime juice, heat, and salt.
  3. Gently stir in avocado cubes, and fold gently to combine all ingredients.  

September 17, 2011

Beer Post: Cafe Nieuwhuys and Brewery

I love visiting breweries. It never gets old, and to see and meet the brewers of a beer, and to hear them talk about their craft always makes me appreciate beer that much more. In Belgium, where beer is the norm, I'm constantly impressed at how gracious small family-owned breweries are when they open up their breweries and take time to give you a personalized tour. Nieuwhuys brews one of my favorite darker beers, Alpaide, a porter-esque dark beer with a hint of hops, and a neutral malt backbone.

Karl surprised me with this visit in June. We rode, along with our bikes, on the train from Leuven to Tienen, and took the fietsnet bike numbered trail that connects all of Flanders. It's approx. 11 km round trip, and the ride goes through Tienen before taking you through beautiful country-side. If you are coming there from Leuven or any surrounding towns, make it a full-day beer-bike Belgian country-side tour. Round-trip from Leuven is 45 km. Summer is excellent for long bike trips with the daylight lasting until 10 pm. Fruit trees of apple, cherry, and plum fall lazily into bike lanes. Hoegaarden is small; there is a cathedral, botanical garden with a nice terrace, a Saturday market in the middle of town which you can't miss, 2 breweries, and mostly homes. The visitor center is in the middle of town and can suggest sites. I almost forgot, of course, there are places to sample frites met curry mayo too!

To use the Fietsnet (bike net), type the location you want to go into the right hand side search box labeled Zoek op plaatsnaam (search a place). So in this instance, Leuven. The map should zoom or hover to that location. Click the red number. Then in the Zoek op plaatsnaam type where you want to go, e.g. Hoegaarden, or wherever it is you want to end up. Click the red number. A route will appear under Wegbeschrijving (or route details), located just under the search box. Fietsnet generates a route based on the route. When you're on your bike you follow the numbered trails. If you need to make any changes to the route, for instance to only be on paved bike lanes, then you can select it on the map manually. You can export to a gps, save the map on your iphone, print it, or just write down all the numbers. The Fietsnet does not have any maps for the Brussels region, or Wallonia, but it connects up with Holland. The Fietsnet is the best thing ever, and shouldn't you be shaking your fist to the sky and screaming why don't I have this where I live?!?!?! The bike trails can vary immensely, mostly it is paved, but you can end up on cobblestone, or dirt paths, but nothing too crazy.

The brewery is located in a converted, modernized, and revamped farmhouse. They have a couple of small-scale fermentation tanks, which they also use to distill genever. Nieuwhuys invested in a small bottling machine, but they still do a lot of the transfer of bottles by hand. In between the bottling area, and the fermenting and mashing quarters, is a fancy fully-equipped brewers lab. The owners and brewers of Nieuwhuys were both into their careers, when the husband began brewing beer full-time. They set up their brewery to literally exist in the shadow of the larger brewery (Hoegaarden), but to serve as a place to get together and enjoy the finer things. It is a charming, welcoming, and friendly brewery. Pick up bottles of the Alpaide blonde or dark, and the Rosdel, and perhaps a few of their fine Speculoos genevers?

To set up a visit, call ahead. You'll probably be given a time, and when you arrive, you'll do the beer sampling first. The Cafe Nieuwhuys serves food, so you can sit down to a fine meal inside or out (I recommend the Thai curry). The Nieuwhuys beers aren't too widely available, although beer cafe's with a monster beer menu will likely have it. In Leuven, I've found it at De Weiring and DeFiere Margriet. Nearby, it is stocked at ABS beer store in Winksele. 

Rosdel
Rosdel

Cafe Nieuwhuys
Alpaide, blonde and regular

Alpaide
Alpaide

Speculaas genever
Speculaas genever, essentially gingerbread flavored liqueur

Nieuwhuys Brewery

Nieuwhuys Brewery

Nieuwhuys Brewery
Brewery lab

Nieuwhuys Brewery
The lab looking towards the bottling areas

Nieuwhuys Brewery
Bottling

Nieuwhuys Brewery
Bottle capper

Nieuwhuys Brewery

Nieuwhuys Brewery

Cafe Nieuwhuys
Cafe Nieuwhuys

Knooppunt
Fietsnet numbers for the fietsknooppunten

Fietsnet
Typical bike trail on the fietsknooppunten

Fietsnet
Passing country-side


Exploring some old cathedral and abbey ruins in Tienen

September 10, 2011

Multiple Garden Friday Updates: September 10

As soon as June rolled around I got totally and completely lazy with the garden updates. The good news is that everything grew remarkably well. In fact, it was better than I had planned it would be. The abnormally cool July (the average temperature for July was 18º C/ 64º F) kept things from drying out, and extended the life of my sugar snap peas. The sugar snaps were over run by pole beans, but before I could notice any of it, the beans were growing like weeds. The garden grew despite weird weather, lack of attention due to many vacations, the abundance of snails, and my irregular watering schedule.

Gardening is a full-time job, but the rewards are plentiful and better than you can imagine; even if you grow food in small spaces and only have room for containers.

Here were the "harvests."

Remember the garden looked like this at the end of June.

The first week of July I was collecting many delicious looking veggies:
There's mint, chard, snow peas, lemon cucumbers and bush cucumbers, and broccoli. 

If you ignore broccoli it grows fibrous and tough, but it looks pretty with flowers:

and since you grew it, you'll eat it, and mmm the fibrous tough broccoli is so good in risotto:
Spring vegetables based risotto with roquefort cheese

Strawberries make a small come-back with the cooler weather of July:
DSC_0272

In August, I failed to take pictures of the garden, but I didn't fail in taking pictures of all the garden produce making it's way into various meals:
Remember pesto with gnocchi? Tomatoes placed strategically:
dinner

While my outdoor basil was destroyed by slugs (or lack of watering), my indoor gave a steady supply (as pesto!):
Fresh basil almond pesto

it also dressed up potatoes and garden grown green beans:
DSCN9646

And then when you go out of town, but you have too many cukes lying around, refrigerator pickles:
Easy refrigerator pickles

Get your friends to make fresh homemade cheese croquettes and then sit outside for al fresco dining and then oooh and aaah at how overgrown and crazy the garden looks (do you see the cabbage still growing, and the pole bean takeover of the fence?):
DSCN9616

The best part of going out of town is coming back to a garden bounty. I'm just in time for a new month of photogarden documeting:
Garden goods first week of September
beans, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, mint, lemon cukes (not pictured, bruschetta made from huge handfuls of deliciously overripe (as if there is a thing) tomatoes.

My new favorite vegetable: garden grown fresh beans

Lemon cucumbers with mint

Now, it's time to dust the seed packets off and get to the fall plantings. 

September 8, 2011

Sweet potato pineapple muffins

Sweet potato with pineapple
Sweet potato with pineapple and fresh ginger.

Sweet potato with dates
Sweet potato with dates. Look at that fine crumb. 

Prepared muffin pans with oat-brown sugar topping.

Filled to just about 1/2 inch from the top, leave enough room for them to rise.

Fresh baked muffins, mmm lekker. 

Sweet potato and date muffin

In keeping with my goal of testing recipes multiple times, these sweet-potato pineapple muffins have been baked 4 times. The recipe has been adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The original recipe calls for 1/3 cup of candied ginger. Instead, I used 1/3 cup canned chopped pineapple, or dates. I add in 1 T of fresh grated ginger, along with 1/8 tsp fresh grated nutmeg.

Muffins are quick breads meaning that they don't need to leaven or rise. To bake muffins, mix together all of the dry ingredients in a bowl, and all of the wet ingredients in another bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and with a large spoon (not a hand or stand mixer) combine the wet and dry together with swift quick strokes. Avoid overmixing. The batter is ready when all of the flour is incorporated into the wet, a good rule of thumb is that the batter looks slightly undermixed. Drop batter by the spoonfuls into a greased muffin pan.

In general I try to make healthier modifications, but I find the proportions of this recipe work out nicely, and they aren't too sweet with a 1/2 cup of brown sugar, or heavy with 1/4 cup of vegetable oil. Subbing in whole-wheat pastry flour is fine. The pineapple and sweet potato make a delicious moist end product.

Sweet potato pineapple muffins
Yield: 1 dozen muffins

Ingredients listed in order of wet and dry:

Dry
1 and 3/4 cup all-purpose flour (can use whole wheat pastry flour)
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg

Wet
3/4 cup cooked sweet potato, mashed (canned or cooked pumpkin would work too)
1/3 cup canned chopped pineapple, or dates, or candied ginger
1 tbsp fresh grated ginger (leave out if using candied ginger)
1/2 cup buttermilk (see note below)
1/4 cup vegetable oil, plus a tiny bit extra to grease muffin pan
2 eggs, beaten
a heaping 1/2 cup of brown sugar (yes I know it's a dry ingredient, but add it to the wet ingredients first)
Note: if you don't have buttermilk, yogurt thinned with water works, or add 1/4 tsp of vinegar to a 1/2 cup of milk. Stir the milk and vinegar together and let stand 10 minutes.

Directions:
Set oven to 375 ºF; grease a muffin pan or line them with muffin liners. 
1. Combine the dry ingredients from flour to nutmeg in a medium-size mixing bowl. Stir together to ensure that it is well mixed. Set aside.
2. Combine the wet ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Stir together to combine. A sturdy spoon is sufficient as muffins do not require a hand or stand electric mixer.
3. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. You should add the dry ingredients all at once. Stir together, scraping down the flour from the sides of the bowl. The mixing is done when the flour is mostly all incorporated into the wet batter. Undermixing is fine, but don't leave any huge clumps of flour.
4. Drop batter by the spoonful into a prepared muffin pan. Bake 20-25 minutes until a toothpick or fork inserted comes out clean. 

For the oat-brown sugar topping:
2 tbsp butter, softened
2 tbsp oats or more
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp brown sugar or regular sugar
small dribble of vanilla extract

Combine all the ingredients. A fork works nicely to mash everything together. Distribute evenly over muffin batter once they are in the muffin pan. Seriously, I've been making this topping since my 9th grade home-ec class.