The merry merry month of Mechelen*

 Lads, lads, lads I am *loving* Belgian month! May is the perfect month for my 2022 challenge to have fallen on Belgium, given their (and my) considerable enthusiasm for asparagus. The first recipe in my cookbook (Everybody Eats Well in Belgium, one of the best reads in a practical cookbook I have ever known) is asperges a la flamande/op de vlaamse vijse/Flemish-style asparagus. And things proceed well from there. 

 It's such an unfashionable cuisine, but a delicious one - my veganish and veggie weeks are basically identical, there being so much dairy in any given veg dish, the nutmeg grater has never been so active, and when I get onto meat week there should be dishes that are positively medieval in their fruit n spice mix (if I can be faffed, I suspect not, it's not really stew weather). It's a very rich cuisine too, but emphatically less precise than French, which I welcome. Loads of things are vlaams-style but it doesn't mean much that's technical, just how people like to cook stuff in the country.

Anyway. To keep it vegetabley, I have mainly been cooking side dishes, and having them on toast:

Peas with purslane. Yes, just some casual purslane cookery - I can get it from the market, and have only ever bunged it in salad before. But it's good, slightly perfumey and interesting when lightly sweated down with a couple of spring onions to create a base for the dish. 

Then add peas, and chicken stock, and cook for a few minutes. And then add butter, hooo boy.

First serving, I overdid the stock and overwhelmed the toast, turning it into sops. Still very tasty, but I did better the second day. With a bit of parsley, why not?

Spinach with nutmeg cream sauce, with a bit of cheese too. This cooked down nicely, and was even not-depressing eaten out of tupperware as a leftovers office lunch.

 

Soups aplenty: asparagus, for a start, of course. Classic Belgian cookery style - make a roux and then a white sauce base in one pan, cook down asparagus in stock in the other (reserving the tips for much lighter cooking).

Blend the two together, add in the tips, and balance it with some cream. I had nice creme fraiche and did use a fair bit. But not the egg yolk advised in the recipe too - there are limits.

It took the colour out of the soup a bit, but not the flavour. No regrets.

 

And today, lettuce soup. This one's even simpler: sweat off sliced lettuce and spring onions for about 7 minutes. Fish some out for garnishing, then add in flour, salt, pepper, nutmeg and sugar (yes, sugar), plus stock, and cook it for 30 minutes on low, lid on.

Blend, add your saved lettuce back in, add a tiny cautious amount of cream (and again, not an egg yolk for me, it doesn't need it). Very, very tasty, oddly enough.

Perhaps my proudest moment? Leek and potato pancake. This had all the hallmarks of a disaster, being as how I do not get on with pancakes/omelettes/anything than needs turning, and the cookery was so simple I didn't believe it would hold together. 

Sweat down thinly sliced leeks till soft. Meanwhile, grate a load of potato. Put half your potato in the bottom of a hot frying pan, with plenty of fat (yes butter, also oil), season with salt, pepper, nutmeg and thyme. Add leeks in a thin layer, scatter a tbsp flour on top, then add the rest of the potato and season it again. Cook about 8-10 minutes on medium heat, start gently loosening it and eventually flip it onto a plate (praying the while), then shimmy it gently back into the pan with yet more fat. Cook for 8 minutes on the uncooked side.

 Then bask in the glory. Look at this! I managed to get the damn thing more or less out intact. And it's very delicious - again, even as leftovers.

Lastly, here's that asperges op de vlaamse wijze. If you were French and took butter, eggs and acid to make a sauce for asparagus it would be hollandaise. Here it's mashed hardboiled egg with butter, seasoning (guess what? Salt, pepper, nutmeg), squooze of lemon, parsley, that'll do.

Perfect for when you have a load of good asparagus and just want to titivate it slightly. And a damn sight harder to mess up than hollandaise.

 

 

*other glorious Belgian cities are available. I should go to one, in fact, now that it's possible.