Jota, Slovenian sauerkraut stew

What can take you home the fastest – a car, a plane, or homemade food? For me food would be the answer to this question. It’s a funny feeling when you eat something from home in another country, it’s comforting, makes you feel like you’re home (not that I don’t feel comfortable where I am now, but home will always be home). When I moved to Belgium I realized that I miss the food which I hated as a child, but came to love growing up. I also realized I never watched my mother or grandmother make it, even though they told me countless times: “Come and watch me cook, you will need it one day!”. My answer to those comments was always: “I don’t like that food, I don’t need to learn how to make it.” Cooking was the last thing on my mind when I was a teenager. Well now I’m on my own and I sometimes regret I didn’t pay more attention in the past.

Apple compote

Autumn is here. You can feel it, you can see it and you can smell it. And everybody talks about it, some being ecstatic about it, going all crazy for plaid and pumpkin and others (like me) trying to find little things that would make it more cheerful, because what lays ahead are just dark mornings and cold. There is one good thing about autumn – apples and pears (and cuddling under the blanket with hot chocolate of course).

Kookeet 2015

Yesterday I went to yet another food festival. They are all tactically organised in September. The summer, and with it bikini season, is over and everybody starts to eat a bit more again. This one was called Kookeet, which means cook-eat in Dutch, and was organized for the fifth time this year. It was an event where 30 top chefs from Bruges presented their creations to the general public for, as their website states, democratic prices. 

Pasta with Tubby custard

My mother always worked on weekend mornings. Our, children’s, responsibility was then to clean the appartment and make sure we had lunch by the time she returned home. As the oldest (and the only one of three that really listened to my mother’s lecturing that happened if things were not done), I tried to do my best to always prepare something for lunch. I was 14 or 15 at the time, and not one of those kids that compete on Junior MasterChef (I guess they are even younger that 15). So you can imagine that my cooking abilities were scarce. I still did my best. Well on one of those weekends I found an old magazine with pasta recipes, flipped through the pages and chose the one that was the easiest to prepare.

Eat! Brussels, drink! Bordeaux

This past weekend I went to Brussels restaurants festival – eat! BRUSSELS, drink! BORDEAUX. This was an event where a wide variety of Brussels restaurants came together in one place and joined forces with wine makers of Bordeaux region, so that the visitors had a chance to try some good food and wine. The weather sucked, at least on the day that I went, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Upside-down plum and coconut cake

When plums hit the stores you know that summer is gone. I am not one of those people that get all excited for autumn and when summer ends, I always get a bit melancholic. Don’t get me wrong, autumn has its perks, but the fact that I have to go trough months of cold, rainy weather does NOT make me very happy, quite the opposite.

KERK Food Festival

Last week Laurens and I visited the 4th KERK Food Truck Festival. This was a small food truck festival, that was organized in a former factory building, currently in hands of a KERK initiative. They organise a lot of workshops, exhibitions, flea markets and other events, if you are interested you can get more info on their website (in Dutch).

Pizza with prosciutto, arugula, goat cheese and balsamic truffle glaze

Ok, who doesn’t like pizza? If you are one of them, this post is not for you. Pizza is one of my favourite dishes and is so versatile. You can make it more healthy or a caloric overload. When I was little, the only time my family went out to eat, was to a pizzeria. This was an event. I would always order the same thing (or my mother would) – pizza Four seasons and Coca-Cola (this was the only time I could have Coca-Cola with my meal, a special occasion). Back then, pizza at home was never so good as in a pizzeria. Now I’m all grown up and homemade pizza wins me over every time. It tastes better, you can put on it whatever you want (or whatever you have in your fridge at that moment) and it doesn’t need much effort to be great. You just need a pizza dough and a good tomato sauce. Oh and don’t forget the cheese, you have to have cheese. All the other ingredients are just extras.

Bolognese sauce

Spaghetti with bolognese sauce, it’s a dish that everybody likes, call it a comfort food if you want. I loved it when I got it on my plate when I was little. I would put a spaghetti in my mouth and then twist my ears with both hands and suck the spaghetti as fast as I could which splashed the sauce all over my face (and clothes, which my mother probably didn’t like). I still get the urge to do that sometimes, but so far I have managed to resist it.