Rein's Cookumentaries and other Stuff

Then I would be able to make you all drool again (except for my vegetarian friends, I’m afraid ).  Still feeling the dent in my pocket after the Japanese Splurge, I opted to take a look in my deepfreezer instead today.  Lo and behold, there still was a piece of rabbit lurking behind all the chips, pizzas en fishfingers!  Leftover that didn’t make it to the ‘neighbour dinner’ we had quite some time ago, I remember now.  Well, there’s only that much rabbit 2 women can eat under the disapproving stare of their offspring

As there’s still no offspring here (*sniff* I miss them, especially as it’s Mother’s Day here in Antwerp – yep, only here, we’re special ), there won’t be any disapproving looks either.

I made it in my tajin (best buy ever, seriously!) with a surrounding of carrots, onions, prunes, bayleaves and potatoes.  No defrosting, just bunged it in with the carrots and onions first, with a generous splash of olive oil.  Let it brown, covered on high heat for about 5 minutes, add prunes, bayleaves and the main ingredient, a bottle of brown beer.  Grimbergen this time.  Heh, to be honest, I use that most of the time, it’s one of my favourite ‘stew’ beers   Add some ground pepper, salt and the roughly chopped potatoes.  Let it come up to boiling again and then turn down to half, so it just keeps on simmering.  No need to look after, the tajin drips on the meat and keeps it just right.

Three quarters of an hour afterwards you will be presented with this:

Rabbit stew

As you can see I pricked the potatoes and they’re just right   As they’re usually the last to be ready, the rest will be good too.

I know it’s a weird time to eat ‘dinner’ (it’s 15:41 here now) but during the holidays (and certainly when I’m on my own) we eat when the mood gets us, be it once or five times a day – my body just has to put up with it

I’ll let you know if anything was left

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Report (21:27): it’s all gone now (just had the last bit as a nibble before bed ) and boy, was it good!  Sometimes I amaze myself with my culinairy concoctions   Uh-oh, I just realised that that also means I had about 15 prunes…  I bet no-one wants reports on that, do they?

In just a few days the grapes have begun to ripen, or well, change colour. My brother has told me I should be watering far more to get bigger grapes, but there are so many bunches that I will have an overload already. I will try to prune properly next year, so there will be fewer, but better proportioned bunches next year. I’m already trying to figure out what to do with this year’s harvest – maybe try grape jelly?  I haven’t got the space to put up a still anyway

Loads of grapes - and some brown leaves

That’s what most of my daily life revolves around: “What are we having for dinner tonight?”  Sad, really, but well, you have to eat to live

Yesterday I was so totally out of ideas for dinner, that I went to the local Japanese and told them “Just give me a taste of everything!”, which resulted in ‘dinner for 1′, which costed (ouchie!) 30 euros…  I will only buy this once I think >_<

It could have fed 2, even taking my big appetite into account, but I managed to finish it.  I don’t think Japanese the next day is as good as Chinese the next day, anyway…

Japanese dinner for 1 - could have fed 2, really

In this photo going around the clock, starting top left: ‘ordinary’ inside-out rolls – crunchy but very nice rolls with a dot of sauce (cocktail???) – enormous cone, had to use hands for that – 2 more ‘ordinary’ rolls, but right side out – also crunchy, tasted a bit different from the other one but couldn’t define difference (egg?) – 3 sushi rice balls, one with salmon, one with white fish, one with prawn – I think tuna in a tangy dressing/marinade – carrot spaghetti I wonder how they got those very long threads – pink ginger flower – green wasabi, nosewatering strong – tuna – salmon – flattened squid tentacle slices, chewy, not much taste .

On the menu this box was called: Sushi, Sashimi, Maki, Temaki combo, 25 pieces, for 1 person.  They also added a little container with soja sauce, a pair of chopsticks and a little bag of kroepoek (prawn crackers).  Those I ate later in front of the tv

It was a very nice dinner, but very pricey, come to think of it …  30 euros doesn’t sound a lot, but when you ‘translate’ it back to the old money, it’s 1200 Belgian Francs – wowee, 20 years ago that paid for the foodbill of a whole week!  Is life getting that expensive, or are we just not paying attention any more to what we spend our money on?  This will be only repeated on very special days I think and even then we will be taking something a bit cheaper

Sayonara!