Chufi

Hi hazardnc! my favorite Lebanese restaurant in Amsterdam is Beyrouth: Kinkerstraat 18, West, Amsterdam Telefoon (020) 616 06 35 / Fax (020) 616 06 35 I just came home from a wonderful dinner at a Turkish restaurant, Orontes Albert Cuypstraat 40, De Pijp, Amsterdam Telefoon (020) 679 62 25 which is another favorite of mine. Great appetizers and wonderful service. Mamouche is a trendy (with prices to match) Moroccan place. I've never been there myself but heard good things about it. very basic, but cheap and good food, is Eufraat ("assyrian food") 1e Van der Helststraat 72, De Pijp, Amsterdam Telefoon (020) 672 05 79 hope this helps!

It's funny, since my experiments in dutch cooking, where I need to follow recipes to the letter before posting about them, I have become increasingly aware of the fact that so often, I think I am following a recipe, but I'm actually not. You know, so many times you just add some of this and some of that .. and I guess that was what I have been doing with Marcella's recipe for the past years.. but today I did it exactly according to her rules.. actually measuring everything.. and I think this is going to be one of the best I ever made!

This does look easy, even for someone like me who never works with chocolate... 1 question.. the chocolate you use to coat the ganache balls in, is listed in the ingredients as 'more for coating'. How much chocolate would you (approximately)need for that?

Thanks Kevin, it was that picture which made me realize it had been way too long since I made ragu.. so now I have a pot slowly simmering away on the stove.. I have been tasting every now and then for the past couple of hours.. oh how I love this stuff.. I love it so much I think I could eat it without the pasta! Just spooning it from a nice big bowl, like soup!

kathleen, I so enjoyed your blog.. I'm glad the musseladventure went well! And what a lovely picture of you smothered in ferrets. So cute. Please keep on cooking and sharing your experiences with the rest of us, somewhere on EGullet!

I love how the pictures of all these dinners do not just tell a story about the food on the plates, but evoke a whole world behind them.. Wendy, that is a gorgeous dinner that your husband cooked for you.. you both love food.. but that dinner speaks of the love that is in your home, between the two of you.... wonderful.. Our dinner tonight.. all day I had a craving for duck well you know that happens sometimes! So after work I bought 2 duckbreasts and made dinner with those, and bits and pieces from the fridge and the pantry Pan-fried duckbreasts with lentils that were cooked with caramellized leeks and balsamic vinegar. Grilled tomatoes Root mash: celeriac, carrots and potatoes, flavored with nutmeg and cinnamon.

don't forget to buy an extra one to drink while you're cooking!

Yay! Have you decided which beer you are going to use?

smoked eel is a dutch specialty.. it's ususally eaten cold, with bread.. I think the eel rolls were originally made with fresh eel, but because that's only available for a limited period per year, there's now a recipe to make them with smoked eel. Here's what the smoked eel looks like before it's stripped of it's skin.. eel

I hope to keep you happy with lots of new fixes sanrensho.. I was thinking about that. I think smoked salmon will not be able to take the heat of the oven.. I personally don't like smoked salmon when it's cooked. other kinds of smoked fish, yes. Or (for something completely different) this would also be a great dough recipe to use for sausage rolls. The dough is easy, fast, and the finished result is wonderfully light and fluffy.

or maybe Italian amaretti? I never had those, but I'm assuming (from the name) they have that bitter almond flavor?

somebody stop me, please I already baked something with puff pastry three times within the last 24 hours.. here's what i did with the last scraps of pastry that were in the fridge: this was so easy.. just squares of pastry pressed into muffin tins.. The filling is smoked bacon sauteed with little cubes of celeriac, mixed with comte cheese, egg and cream... they were so good I wanted to eat a dozen... maybe it was a good thing we had only 4 for the two of us!

well, as is usual for me, I looked around for recipes and ended up doing something that was a combination of everything I read. Here's what I did, by no means is this authentic poulet au vin jaune.. Season your chicken pieces with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Brown in ample butter. Soak dried morels in hot water (I used 200 grams for 4 people). Deglaze chickenpan with mushroom soaking liquid (take care not to add the grit ). Add about 1/3 of your bottle of vin jaune. Simmer until chicken is done (about 30-45 minutes). Take the chicken from the pan, reduce the sauce, and add enough cream to make a thick sauce. Put the chicken back in, heat through and that's it.. It's basically a very simple braised chicken dish, but it gets its remarkable flavor from the combination of the morels and the vin jaune..

I think I will. Seriously. I might have some storebought for an emergency supply, but I think I will keep making my own.. I have a lot in the freezer right now.. and it's not something you use every week.. so this is going to last me a while.. and then I'll make some more! It just tastes so good.. that little apple tart I made this morning, which was nothing but pastry, an old wrinkled apple, sugar and cinnamon, tasted so fantastic... I do have to say, I don't know about this Pepperidge farm thing, maybe that's good puff pastry to buy. The stuff you buy in the supermarket over here, is pretty bad. I use the store bought puff mainly for quiche-type things. But with this good-tasting homemade stuff, I'm going to think of more exciting ways to use it up. I'm sure it'll keep poppng up in the Dinner! thread...

I love really good full fat quark drizzled with chestnut honey. Or another kind of honey, but chestnut is the best..

So here's what I did with the advocaat I made on saturday. I made some Bitterkoekjespudding Bitterkoekjes are almond cookies/biscuits. I don't know if they are available outside of the Netherlands. They are soft and very chewy.. they taste like Amaretto di Saronno without the alcohol. When you cook them in milk they dissolve. Add cornflour to thicken. Depending on how much cornflour you use, you end up with custard or pudding. Mine was something in between! I also poached some pears and layered everything up in a bowl: pears, bitterkoekjespudding, and advocaat on top

Sid, I think what you are referring to is boerenkoolstamppot Boerenkool is the dutch word for kale, and translted back to English, boerenkool would mean 'farmer's cabbage'. Did it look like this (without the sausage?)

I want those shrimp! Our dinner last night was composed around this bottle we brought back from France earlier this year: A 1996 bottle of Vin Jaune. I made the famous Poulet au Vin Jaune et morilles. But to start a Jalousie au fromage, with Comte cheese and homemade puff pastry. The pastry was the result of the Puff Pastry Party that Megan Blocker, Susan in FL and myself held over the weekend.. details about that in this thread on the plate with a little salad of endive, with a red wine/shallot/ bacon vinaigrette next course the chicken. Oh my god was this good.. luscious creamy sauce and the earthyness of the morels.. this wine is really something special.. it tastes like very old, bonedry sherry.. great in combination with the rich flavors. We drank the rest of the bottle with the main course. on the plate with buttered leeks and steamed potatoes For dessert we left the Jura and came back to Dutch cooking again. In the bowl is first a layer of vanilla-poached pears, then a layer of bitterkoekjespudding - almondcookiepudding, then a layer of advocaat - dutch eggy brandy. Whipped cream on top.

Like Megan, I put most of the leftover pastry in the freezer, but there were still some scraps in the fridge and I decided to play with them a bit this morning (without getting distracted by wine or guests ) I wanted to see how the pastry would behave if you would just bake a naked little piece. here's what that looked like: as you can see it's puffed up nicely, but at the corners, the layers seen to be compressed together. Does that have anything to do with the way I cut it? what is the right way to cut puff pastry? I'm hoping some expert will chime in here. And then I made myself a little sweet to go with my morning coffee. Just a round of puff pastry, some slices of apple, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Pretty.. I love the way the layers are visible on this one!

It was, actually, easier then I had expected. It takes a lot of time but most of that time the dough is resting in the fridge.. With the only drawback that I was using my countertop for the rolling, so that stayed messy and floury for hours, because there was no point in cleaning it in between. The fact that my butter kept leaking through the pastry made me nervous.. had to use a lot of flour to keep it from sticking. I think the problem was that I was too rough with the pastry on the first rolling. You really should roll very gently. I also had some problems figuring out the whole turning thing.. had to call in my husband to help me with that!

OK so here is my end result. I made a Jalousie au fromage bases on a recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.. I say based but the only thing I changed is the cheese.. I was having a Jura-themed dinnerparty so I used Comte cheese. So this tart has sticks of Comte cheese in hte middle, drizzled with a mixture of egg and cream. I'm kind of proud of the jalousie pattern on top.. I'm ususally not very good at things which require some sort of geometrical insight. Closeup: Anyway, here's when the fact that we were having friends over for dinner, we were all hungry, and that I already had 2 glasses of wine when I put this in the oven, takes it's toll.. I really think I should have baked this a litle bit longer. I'm sure it would have puffed up a bit more. As it was, some of the pastry on the inside was a little underdone. Ah well. It was delicious, anyway. Here it is on the plate (in very small slices because it was incredibly rich) served with a little salad of endive, with a sharp red wine/shallot / bacon dressing.

Me too. So thanks Susan, Megan, and Russ! If I had not had this 'date' with you I would have chickened out (again) this weekend. (It was funny, we were having coffee at my parents house Sunday mornng, and I said, no we have to go now because I have a date with someone in NY and someone in Florida to make puff pastry ) Megan, that tart looks luscious. I know what you mean about the butter.. I also thought while I was making it, better not think about all that butter... Susan, I love beef Wellington, what a great idea to use your pastry for that. It looks wonderful. A question for you Susan since you used the same recipe.. I am really wondering how you could roll it out without any flour on your worksurface.. I needed to add a lot of flour because the butter kept coming through little cracks! Do you have some special kind of non-stick countertop..?

Checking in from the other side of the pond... Megan that looks great... very different from mine as you will see below. Wonderful that you took so many pics! I have to confess that I was so nervous about the whole thing that I didn't take as many pics as I had planned. I used MobyP's puff pastry demo as a guide. Here's the dough paste mixing with the flour. I think this looks pretty The dough paste is made into a ball, which goes to rest in the fridge. Then you open up the ball and roll it out to enfold your 500 grams block of butter Folding over the sides. Wait.. this does not look right! Running upstairs to look at Moby's pics on the computer! Yes.. that's better. This goes to rest again. Then I start rolling, folding and turning. I'm having some problems. There are huge airbubbles in the pastry.. .. and at some places the butter is almost coming through: But, I keep going. I find out that rolling the dough very gently is essential. Also, letting it rest and firm up in the fridge for at least 1 hour between turns, helps keeping the butter in control.. After the appropriate amount of turns it looks like this: I cut in into pieces. You can actually see the layers, pretty cool.. I'll post the end result (the baked endresult, that is) tomorrow. Sofar, it was a lot of fun and not nearly as scary as I thought it was. I made puff once before, 10 years ago, and I was a wreck This time it went much smoother..

If I was your sister, I would show up at your place unannounced too.. often.. hoping there would be some of that gorgeous food left over for me.. begging even maybe

I love the fact that there's another camera on the other side of the tray.. apparently people were standing in line to take pictures of this delicacy