manjar blanc

so.. back from hipeac'07 in ghent

If there's something I love from Belgium it must be belgian beer. Weekend and early week in ghent gave me the opportunity to try out some more variants: rochefort 10, chimay triple and kasteelbier (dunkel), all of which are of the 'tripel' variant, which have stronger taste and are around 10% (which is the reason I didn't try any more :D). Of the three I found the tastes of rochefort and kasteelbier most interesting. Particularly, kasteelbier seemed to me a very fine beer. Have to try it again next time :)

On the other hand I have to make a comment about their cuisine. It's quite ok in general, but beware of the mussles. On saturday I committed the error of eating a full portion of mussles for the lunch. FYI, the presentation was like the following:

Now, after eating this quantity of mussles a la white wine, and an additional portion of Schwarzwälderkirschtorte afterwards :-) , an enormeous mussle ball formed in my stomach, and I could not eat anything else until the next morning. Amusingly I was not really hungry the during breakfast. So, take care with the killer mussles whenever you go to belgium! Of course, it's not my fault for having eaten an irrationally large dish of mussles ;-)

Talking about food, I decided to learn some mediterranean cuisine and today I started with my plan to cook something new (ie, something that I have not cooked before) every weekend. I started with a dessert from tarragona called 'manjar blanc', made mostly out of almonds, milk and sugar. It's very simple but still I found it delicious. Maybe I put too much sugar but that's ok for me. And my family also seemed to enjoy it :) Here's a photo of the final presentation (not that you cannot really imagine much about the food from this photo...^_^)















For next week I want to try out a crema catalana, which I've eaten so many times but never prepared myself.

hasta pronto!