Things have been a bit quiet around here lately, mainly because I’ve been working on my travel blog and updating the design to sit alongside this site. My travel blog has been around a lot longer than this one, but I’ve been nervous about making the big changes on that one and have only just plucked up the courage to do so!
Regardless, I’ve still been eating (a lot) and cooking (a lot) and have been in Brussels for the last couple of weeks.
Luckily, I haven’t had many food misses this last week or so, but here’s the run-down of the latest dishes to grace my table and tastebuds.
Food Hit – Belgian Frites
I’m going to write a whole post about these in the future, but for now let me just say that the Belgians do fries better than anywhere else in the world. They take them extremely seriously, using only a particular type of potato, cooking them a certain way and then tossing the fires in salt, before topping with huge mountains of sauce.
I’ve eaten way too many fries since I got here, but they’re so damn delicious I just can’t help myself.
Food Hit – Peach Beer
Ok, this isn’t really a food hit, but I just had to include it. I LOVE fruity Belgian beers (maybe it has something to do with them not tasting like beer?!) but the peach flavour is my absolute favourite.
Belgian fruit beers are called Lambics, and are created in a different way to normal beer in that they are left to ferment naturally by wild yeasts in the air. It sounds a bit weird but trust me, it tastes delicious.
The most popular flavours are cherry (kriek) and raspberry (framboise) and I’ve bought both of those at home in my local supermarket, but for some reason they never seem to have the peach flavour. I have only ever found that once at a small speciality bar. I’m so happy to be able to drink the peach beer again because I think it has the sweetest and lightest flavour of them all.
Plus, the bottles are so damn pretty, I don’t feel like I’m drinking beer 😉
Food Miss – Tofu Noodles
I’ve been on a bit of a tofu kick recently. Having tried it in the past and having though it was rather chewy, I’d been put off it for a long time.
That was until a saw a post on Averie’s blog about broiled tofu that looked delicious and so I had to try it. I added it to a vegetable and noodle dish in Amsterdam and it was very tasty.
Then I got to Brussels and decided to make it again, except this time they only had thin vermicelli-type noodles at the supermarket. I bought them, hoping that it would still taste ok, only for the noodles to go totally soggy and stick together. I know that these types of noodles are primarily meant for soups, but was hoping there’d be enough sauce to make the dish work. Unfortunately they just congealed and although it still tasted ok, the texture and appearance was pretty terrible.
It hasn’t put me off tofu though, just that type of noodle.
Food Hit and Miss – Canned Croissants
Even though we’re in Europe, the capital of great croissants, they get snapped up extremely quickly at the bakeries and it’s sometimes difficult to get your hands on some that haven’t already gone stale.
We bought a can of croissant dough and made our own. Even though this meant that they were fresh when we ate them, I found them a bit small and they tasted more “doughy” than the usual flaky butter pastry I’m used to.
These were a hit and a miss because they weren’t terrible for canned croissants, but they definitely weren’t the best I’ve eaten.
Food Hit – Coconut Granola
This was the first time I’d ever made granola from scratch and it was delicious and so easy.
I’ll definitely be making my own granola again in the future.
So there you have it – my hits and misses for this week. What disasters and achievements have you had in the kitchen this week?
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