Jeroen Meus's Apple Crumble

Jeroen Meus is one of the local celebrity chefs, much raved about by the BF's mom. His specialty is making traditional Flemish food simple so that people can cook it in the work week.

I'm usually not much of a fan, as I've the same beef with Flemish food as with most "northern" food: too heavy, over-reliance on meat and potatoes, and (this one might be specifically Flemish) sauce overkill.
Our work canteen (with serves a canteen -read bad- version of traditional Flemish food) is no stranger to serving as many as 3 sauces in/on top of a single dish, not counting all the mayonnaise&co sauces you can add yourself...
Don't get me wrong, the Flemish/Belgians have some yummy dishes too (vol au vent, stoverij and waterzooi come to mind, and of course their world famous chocolate, fries, mussels, beer, speculaas...).

So anyway, I had never been inclined to try one of Jeroen Meus' recipes... Until he made apple crumble! Now that's not typically Flemish, but I suppose he wanted to introduce a bit of variation...

Here is the original recipe (in Dutch). I followed it pretty much exactly except for removing a few bits and bobs I didn't like (raisins, cardamom, star aniseed).

Here's a translation:

Ingredients for 4 servings:

For the crumble:
125 g flour
100 g oat flakes
115 g butter
100 g sugar
1 pinch of cinnamon powder

For the apple mix:
4 apples
3 tablespoons of brown sugar (yes I know he's mixing metric and imperial... I just sprinkled some brown sugar over the cut apples)
A slog of rum (he used rum to rehydrate the raisins, but since I wasn't using raisins, I figured I'd just add it to the apples)

Serving suggestion:

With 1 scoop of speculaas ice cream per person (speculaas ice cream is made from speculaas biscuits and is veeerrryyy good, but I just didn't have any...).

Preparation:

1. Dice the (cold) butter.
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, the oat flakes, the sugar and the diced butter.
Add a pinch of cinnamon and mix with your hands until you get a crumbly dough.

3. Preheat the oven to 200°C.
4. Peel and core the apples. Cut into chunks.
5. Butter an oven dish, place the apples in it and stir the brown sugar in the apples.
6. Add the crumbly dough evenly over the apples and bake for 25-30 min.

Verdict:

Pretty good, but a few things to tweak for next time:
- use less sugar in the crumble dough (it was too sweet for my taste)
- either cut the apples chunks smaller, or use a lower temperature and bake for longer (the apples were just about cooked while the crumble was browning a bit).

Damn, now I feel like apple crumble again :S

Pearl brooch

I've decided to try my hand at making a brooch... I bought a few brooch pins and some pearls at Veritas, and used some "fishing line" pearl thread I already had.

Then I just threaded through the pearls, wrapping around the brooch pin in between the pearls a few times to secure them. Triple knotted at the end. That's it!
Really not hard, and I love the look of it:)

Gâteau au Yaourt (Yoghurt Cake)

This is a childhood favourite... and the only thing I could bake until recently:-D
It's dead easy, I'd say "suitable for ages 6 and up";-)
You don't even need a kitchen scale or measuring cup as everything is measured in a yoghurt pot...

I usually follow this French recipe. Here's an English translation:

• 1 yoghurt
• 2 (yoghurt) pots of flour
• 2 pots of sugar
• ½ pot of sunflower oil (or melted butter)
• 3 eggs
• ½ pack (5.5 g) of baking powder
• 1 pack (11 g) of vanilla sugar (optional)

 Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven at 200-220° C.
2. Pour the yoghurt in a mixing bowl.
3. Clean the yoghurt pot and use it as measure to add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl.
4. Mix well.
5. Butter your dish, pour the dough and bake in the oven for about 30 min.
To check whether it's cooked, stick a knife in the thickest part. If it comes out clean (wet but with no dough on it counts as clean), the cake is ready!

Latkes

So... I haven't posted anything for over a month (oops!), but I do have some recipes and pictures and stuff in store!!
Let's start with some latkes that I just made (I have the day off today, yay!). That was my first attempt at latkes and I was without a grater, but they still turned out quite nicely:-)
I used a recipe from yumsugar (one of my fave websites for food-related stuff), but didn't all do the keeping in water/keeping warm in oven stuff as I was only making a small batch for myself...

So I took:
- 2 potatoes
- 1 medium shallot
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon flour (I didn't want to bother converting to metric so I just used what I thought looked like the content of a tablespoon)
- 1/4 teaspoon baking powder (idem, but it's trickier for really small quantities!)
- some rosemary, salt and ground black pepper

The works:
1. I mixed the egg, baking powder, flour, rosemary, salt, and pepper.
2. I cut the shallot into pieces as small as possible (since I didn't have a grater handy, I used multi-blade scissors I got in the food area of a lifestyle fair recently).
3. I peeled the potatoes and gave them the knife + multi-blade scissors treatment too (disclaimer: they needed to be sliced pretty thin... anything over half a cm thick gave me trouble with the scissors).
4. I mixed the shallots + potato pieces with the rest.
5. I heated some oil in a pan and formed little pancakes, which I regularly turned (I think they took about 10-15 min to cook).
This gave me 5 latkes.