Why is this the first recipe I thought about? I discovered pumpkin, in the sense that I actually cooked extensively with it, only in 1993, during an Erasmus exchange in Amsterdam. In my native Italy pumpkin was rarely seen at our table. My mum made a very nice pumpkin risotto but my father and brother found the sweet side of pumpkin disagreeable and there was always a lot of arguing when mum dished out the orange stuff…

But every Saturday morning, only a stone’s throw from my domicile on Prinsengracht, a small and cheerful market featured prominently heaps of pumpkins and it did not take long for me to be seduced and to work out the local recipe for pumpkin soup: onion, garlic, pumpkin and at the end, lots of fresh leaves of watercress. It was a simple recipe and it tasted best like that. Except that time passed and my perception of what small variations could do to a soup changed completely. Flavor may come across as simple but that does not rule out a complex and subtle balance of different accents.

I have not been back to the cheerful Amsterdam market until May 2010. It was a Saturday and the place was buzzing with activity. This time I was not looking for pumpkins but had a meeting with the person who was to become the co-producer of my film. Tucked away behind a window covered with film posters, Pieter Van Huystee was waiting to hear about the strange project of a musical film on Brussels. There I was, back to a spot I knew well and loved well, with a heritage on my back that I would have never suspected as a philosophy student on an Erasmus exchange.

On May 2011, I was back again in Amsterdam, once again on a Saturday but this time round, the full team was there (producer Maarten Schmidt and DOP Klaas Boelen). We brought Pieter some images to watch and he really enjoyed them. Now we are preparing to go into production proper, so I think that a re-mastered version of pumpkin soup is the fit dish for the occasion.

I have learned a few things about this specific dish in the last two months. First of all I will cook it in a cast iron pot because I turn the fire off at one point and the soup will keep on cooking slowly without “exhausting” the flavor of vegetables. Then I ameliorated the “base”, namely the things you fry together before adding the pumpkin. I use half a big onion, a big clove of garlic, a chunk of sliced ginger and a chunk of sliced…….galanga. Yes, galanga. This exotic root tastes like the inside of an old aunt wardrobe, it is something between camphor and cloves. But you need it because, if used sparingly, it adds an unforgettable and subtle aromatic edge to the whole. So you toss around these in butter + oil until golden and you add chunks of fresh, firm pumpkin, the kind of pumpkin that, when cooked, makes you think of egg yolk. I also use three carrots (good tasting ones). You turn everything around for a couple of minutes and then it’s time to add water. Enough water to cover the vegetables but not much more. Instead of water you can use the cooking liquid of rice or pasta (but then adjust salt, if your cooking water was salty). When it boils, I turn the heat off, leave the lid on and just go on with my business. I add the right amount of salt to the cooked vegetables and liquidize them loosely. I eat this soup topped with lots of fresh purslane leaves. The Portuguese option would be to slice very very finely their pointy green cabbage and add it in raw, as if they were spaghetti.

What has happened in the last year and a half to this poor blog?

Well, I have been working on a film project. This does not mean that I stopped cooking or eating. No, I kept on searching, discovering and enjoying. But I just had to give up the time it took to write it all down and take care of the exciting process of putting a film together.

Except that now, I am being reminded of the fact that making a film is a little bit like preparing a delicious dinner (for your audience) and that some time needs to be scraped aside to document some moments of culinary bliss.

That is how we came up with the idea of a “PRODUCTION COOKBOOK”. In the next weeks and months, until the film is completed, I will write down the dishes that accompanied the production team on their journey at the discovery of Brussels.

So I am crawling out of the shadow and into the spotlight! Don’t worry: you will not get measurements and dry instructions to follow but an insight into my “imaginaire culinaire”.

Fastfood can be close to “haute cuisine”, even if it is a Lebanese pitta. And this is not because the (good-looking) men serving it are wearing white shirts and ties (these gradually disappear from the slightly unbuttoned shirts – courtesy of the hot stoves behind the brave team). But because the spits rotating in the background are not the ghastly re-constituted “meat” we so often seen in other pitta joints. Every now and then a proud own takes real meat, marinates it in real spices, lemon and oil and then piles them up on the spit. The result can be tasted at “L’Express”, just off the Grand Place, and it is one of the best healthy meals downtown – whatever those who associate pitta with grease to appease drunkenness. This is the exception to a rule that dangerously flirts with junk food and deceitful presentation. So many fish joints are popping up on Boulevard Stalingrad. The sight is colorful and exciting, patisseries open until late at night, butchers, tea-shops and then the cheap restos where raw fish is marinating in different mixes at the counter. Well, a marinating fish fillet is the best way to disguise bad fish. It is not necessarily the case but the chances are high. In Portugal, fish is exhibited raw, with the head still on. In China, it is actually swimming in a tank. All the rest, stinks of bad news. Sadly, even when the produce is fresh, you can end up with fish which has been badly cleaned (bitter bits of guts still in the belly) or which is fried with little sense of the difference between crisp and soggy.

Another bad bad habit is that of rising prices unreasonably. It is happening everywhere around the city center, where a Vietnamese soup can easily cost you 8 euro and where the fab Chinese handmade noodles went up 40% in price, while the broth accompanying them remained the same artificially flavored gurgle. The worst of the worst is Mamma Roma. They have three branches and make the best pizza in town. But since 6 months or so, their price soared so much that a tiny square of pizza will easily be around 4 euro. Shame to you Mamma Roma, you surely don’t deserve your name!

Coffee is still awful in most places. Everyone prances around their Italian coffee machines but then staff (and owners) do not know how to clean them, how to filter the water, how to grind the coffee, how to set the temperature and so Brussels must be one of the worst coffee capitals in the world. In 2003, you could already find much better coffee in a place like Tokyo (which does not really have a coffee tradition to speak of, but they are very careful in cleaning, maintenance and copying good stuff). Nowadays you can find better coffee in places like Cologne, London or Stockholm, so really Brussels is a sham. Except for Cafe’ Blomkvist, which pushes the average up by a few notches. Owned by a passionate Swedish coffee-lover, this is a gem of its own kind and coffee flavor reaches poetic heights.

Chocolate is becoming a sour affair. Marcolini is almost unaffordable and the staff is just ridiculously snob about clients. This is why I always take pleasure in visiting them after a day of manual work, wearing smelly dusty clothes and looking like a tramp.

There is a new chocolate shop by Laurent Gerbaud near Central station but unfortunately this well packaged chocolate tastes disappointingly bad, dusty and lacking in flavor (I have not tasted the new Domori range, maybe that is better) and no addition of the usual chilies or nuts or yuzu or bergamot does not help either. These days, my chocolate cravings find satisfaction in the pralines of the Italian Guido Gubino, who takes on the great Piemontese tradition of chocolate making with hazelnuts and who created a surprising salty praline (which is a bit of a slap in the face of the Belgian nation).

Some years ago, even the giant pot got too small. I split Ernest in two. Both continued to grow and also to strangely react to my absence. Every time I left for a few days, I came back to find both Ernests had collapsed one of their spiky branches to the ground. The branches would then gradually lift back to their original position, ready to collapse the next time I left.

Ernest has been the terror of many of my friends’ kids. It luscious green leaves have attracted many innocent hands and triggered many sharp shrills. I tried to give at least one of them away but no one would take them. So recently, when a Mexican friend mentioned the fact that cactuses are eaten raw in salads, I thought I saw the light! Let’s eat it, I proposed. My friend’s wife was worried that maybe that my German specimen may not be edible but I manages to convince her. Armed with a thick red rubber glove, Osvaldo cut off one of the leaves and proceeded to skin it with a sharp knife. The operation could be carried out with some difficulty. The juicy cactus was cut in strips and combined with onions, peppers, salt, pepper and lime juice.

We all had a taste: it was delicious. But then Osvaldo daughter took a bite and began to look afraid: she had caught a thorn, right in her throat. Her mum took her to the bathroom and managed to retrieve it with a pair of tweezers. It was my turn next, I suddenly felt a sting on my tongue and saw one of Ernest’s yellow thorns sticking out from its pink protuberances. The delicious treat was quite insidious but nobody dared give it a try after that.

I was quite impressed by my plant’s successful attempt to divert any culinary longing for it. But I have not given up turning up occasionally with better skill and equipment in order to replicate a delicious, but thorn less, salad.

Kishk is one of those amazing foods that are created to overcome a situation of poverty and which turn out to be ecologically meaningful and incredibly rich in taste. I tried it for the first time at the Slowfood Convention in Torino, where a Lebanese delegation had come to present this traditional product from the village of Majdelzoun, near Tyre. Kishk tastes like fresh goat cheese. It is often flavored with herbs and spices and preserved in olive oil. When I asked how it was actually made, I discovered that there was not a drop of milk in it and that it was actually made by fermenting wheat, or more precisely by fermenting bulgour (which is parboiled wheat) in salty water for several weeks and by rolling the fermented paste into small balls. Wheat was the only product readily available to poor farmers and fermentation, being a reaction with the microorganism that live in the surrounding environment, made up for a unique and complex flavor. The rhythms of making kishk were adapted to the times of harvest and of grinding the grain in the mills. The mixture was left to ferment in the normal environment (no fridges) and it adapted to those conditions. Basically, a tale of great resourcefulness.

It is really surprising to be confronted with a grain product that tastes so much like cheese and that draws so much of its character from…the surrounding air. Especially at a time when dominating discourse on food relies on refrigeration and sterile environments – as if the history of our foods was not the result of a clever bond with the life that surrounds us (micro-organisms, yeasts and bacteria included).

A few months ago, I tried to make my own kishk, adapting a very reliable and simple recipe from the book “Wild Fermentation” by Sandor Ellix Katz. Basically, all I had to do was mix buttermilk and wheat in a jar, knead it once a day for about 9 days and then let it dry in the oven until I could roll it up into balls. The experiment was very successful. I then tried again using yogurt instead of buttermilk but the mix develop almost an alcohol-like smell I was not too fond off. I then tried buttermilk mixed with cous cous, and the texture of the kishk was even smoother and more pleasant in taste. With or without spices, it is a very delicious grain-cheese that one can make at home with very little effort (the main thing is to choose a glass or ceramic container, place it in a clean and warm spot and cover it with cheesecloth so that the mixture can breathe).

Why make kishk at all? For me it is all about the pleasure of a unique flavor that develops over time and which is always different. It is also a form of resourcefulness, making the best out of very simple ingredients. And also an adventure, trying to understand the process behind food.

more info on KISHK recipe

On the same day, we were introduced to a Syrian recipe of stuffed fermented aubergines. These could be bought in a Brussels store at the beginning of Ch. De Louvain (metro: Madou). The shops’ name is “Naya” and it is opposite snack “Anatolia”.

I actually managed to get there a couple of days ago. I wanted to check this temple of fermented vegetables and other wonders. Actually, the jars of pickles vegetables reminded me of an Iranian shop I visited in Utrecht. Basically, I think there is a sort of “golden rule” or “golden proportion” ruling over which foods will be imported from far away countries and also how good they will be. It is only the most loved ones that make it all the way, preferably if canned or in jars (the perfect counter-example to this are African grocers. They import raw vegetables, which often really suffer as a result, such as bundles of royal fern buds or amaranth leaves…). But then, my guess is that the canned versions or the most loved foods are the industrial versions or foods that are most consumed in an homemade version. I have not been to Iran or Syria but if I think of the South of Italy or Morocco, it is clear that any food is at its best when home made, by women who have time and experience to do it. In Brussels, the cakes eaten at Moroccan weddings are not made by a famous Moroccan patissier but by women gathering together for that purpose.

Anyway, back to my Syrian shop, it sold several fresh unexpected leaves, like red basil, tarragon and dill. Also several intricate versions of loukums with pistachios and almonds. Plus whole candied fruits (these were really industrial specimen using a sugar that reminded me of aspirin). In the back shelves I came across the famous aubergines, a paste of goat milk called “Iranian suace” and lovely globes of lebneh, a cheese made out of strained yogurt. In short, a minor paradise or food gateway to the Middle East.

watch video

Miso is one of those foods that take one right at the heart of the whole thing, meaning right at the heart of Japanese cuisine. It is a simple and straight road, so simple that one wonders.

Miso is a fermented food. It consists of beans, rice and salt. Nothing more. Most of the time the beans in question are soya beans but you can make miso with lentils, barley, chickpeaks, aduki beans and so on. The rice is not ordinary rice but it is “inoculated” with a fungus called KOJI (Aspergillus oryzae). Basically the cooked rice is left in a warm environment where the mold or fungus would naturally grow on its surface. The the rice is dried and broken into chunks that will be added to the salt and cooked beans. The paste takes months or years to ferment, depending on the salt content (more salt = slower fermentation).

I go into these details because MISO is really the result of a tranformation operated by a mold, reacting with the surrounding environment. In a traditional miso workshop, the containers for miso were made of wood. Wood is the king material of natural conservation and diplomat of bacteria and molds. Just think of the fact that cheese, wine and other products of fermentation are kept in wood. Back to miso, the wooden vats contributed to give it a more complex flavor. On the top of these vats, liquid would rise and drip from the cracks and this liquid is TAMARI a dark, salty sauce that is at the ancestor of soy sauce. The mold or KOJI is also used to ferment rice for making SAKE and soy beans to make NATTO. It is a mold that is naturally found in rice straw and this is why in farmhoused miso was made by wrapping balls of cooked beans and salt in straw and hanging them outside in the cold air.

The most informative book, full of beautiful drawing of how a miso workshop was organised and run is THE BOOK OF MISO by William Shurtless and Akiko Aoyagi. A rare book that would be difficult to imagine when one looks at foodbooks that are written today, it is the result of serious research and travelling and it provides a cultural translation of a tradition that reaches back to China in the 3^rd Century B.C.

In Japan MISO is first and foremost a homemade food. It is made once a year, stored and used to make soups, sauces and other condiments. The idea is that every household has its own miso and its own specific soup flavor. The same goes for nukazuke, small pickles made by hand daily using a base that keeps for years and can be passed on from generation to generation.

MISO is not difficult to make and then all one has to do is let it ferment in peace. The resulting flavor depends very much on the beans used, the freshness of the ferment and surrounding environment but it is definitely more complex and subtle than industrial miso or instant miso powder. It is a food that puts flavor in a direct connection with the individual maker, a sort of “foodprint” that is unique.

It is a concentrate that goes into dozens preparations, it is a base. A good miso can be the secret behind the enticing flavor of a salad or a dip. I made the experiment by grating carrots and other vegetables and by mixing with a dollop of different misos and the different quality of the UMAMI food (umami is the “feel good” taste linked to meat, mushrooms, parmesan, it points to a food which is full of natural glutamatic acid which triggers the production of neurotransmitters including serotonin).

I have been making miso at home for the last two years, three batches so far, all very different and also getting better as I try to procure fresh koji, transported by plane from Japanese supermarkets in New York, and taking inspiration from Sandor Ellix Katz’s book “Wild Fermentation” and South River’s “Three year barley miso, traditionally food fired” into use of different grains. It makes a hell of a difference. I even harvested a small cup of tamari in the first stages, when the beans were still wet. And it tasted delicious!

No, im not talking about food on planes but about the fabulous dinner we just had this Sunday at home, in Italy. The part I loved the most was tomalley, the green part inside a lobster’s head, probably its pancreas and liver. It tastes sweet and warms you up instantly. I love to eat it raw but if you add it to a sauce, it lends it an exotic touch. Next on the line we made veal cheecks, slowly cooked in red wine and vegetables for about 4 hours, until the flesh just melts in your mouth. For desserts I adapted a recipe from Nigella Lawson, molten chocolate cakes, to find a giant cake with a generous dash of rose water (everybody begged for more).

Back home in style and good reason to get the flight on Saturday!

Unfortunately the picture is rather small but enough to make out the little balls of fermented bulgur. I tried out the first batch a month ago, using bulgur and kefir. I placed them in a pot which I put on the radiator. The mix had to be stirred once a day and I kept it going for 8 days or so. The second time I used yogurt instead of kefir but then there was a quasi-alcoholic thing going on, so I think that kefir and buttermilk are a better and safer bet.

The experiment worked out fine in the end. I dried the fermented mix in the over and rolled into balls, trying to re-create the flavor of the KISHK AL KHAMEER I had tried in Torino a year ago. Below some info from the Lebanese Slowfood Presidium:

Definitions and Traditions
Kishk is a food product made from fermented milk and crushed wheat (burghul). Davidson (1999) distinguishes between 2 types of kishk that were first documented in the 13th century. They are:
* Kishk al khameer or fermented kishk, which is burghul fermented in water and later dried in the sun and ground into powder. This kishk originated in Hawran in southern Syria, where it was the staple food of poor farmers;
* Kishk al laban or yoghurt kishk, which made by fermenting burghul in yoghurt. It is believed to have been developed as a later variation of water-fermented kishk. This richer-tasting, more costly product was favored by the wealthier classes.

Kishk al khameer production has virtually disappeared from Lebanon, although anecdotal evidence indicates that the very poor who cannot afford to purchase milk may still make it for their personal use. There is no information in the available literature besides that of Davidson (1999).
Kishk al khameer is also sometimes known as kishk al fouqara. This should not be confused with a dessert known by the same name in Egypt and Syria, which is made of milk, sugar, starch, almonds and other nuts (Al-Ghazi, 2001).

small village surrounded with agricultural fields and oak woodlands. It appears to have been inhabited for at least 2 millennia, as it houses several cave dwellings dating back to Phoenician times. The name is believed to be a combination of the Aramaic word “magdla” meaning “the high security post” and of the Syriac word “zuna” meaning region.

It is in these surroundings that Muna al Durr, also known as `Umm `Ali (the mother of `Ali), lives. Muna inherited the kishk al khameer-making knowledge from her grandmother, but she had not considered its commercial potential until she met Nelly Chemali. They partnered in the creation of Earth and Co, a company specializing in natural foods, and started producing kishk al khameer for vegans who wanted to a non-dairy product with a fermented taste similar to that of some local cheeses. They brought their kishk to Souk el Tayeb, Beirut’s farmer’s market, where it came to the attention of Slow Food. In 2006, kishk al khameer became a Slow Food presidium (an endangered food that is being commercially produced).
Kishk al khameer is sold both nationally and internationally, and demand in the Gulf countries is high. The total quantity produced per year is around 500 kg. It is packaged and sold in 600 gram jars. Compiled by Rami Zurayk. Editors: Imad Toufeili (technical), Deborah
Chay (English). Researchers: Sami Abdul Rahman.

Kombucha can be made at home by fermenting tea using a visible solid mass of microorganisms called a kombucha culture or mushroom.

The culture contains a symbiosis of Acetobacter (acetic acid bacteria) and yeast, mostly Brettanomyces bruxellensis, Candida stellata, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Torulaspora delbrueckii and Zygosaccharomyces bailii.

The culture itself looks somewhat like a large pancake, and though often called a mushroom, a mother of vinegar or by the acronym SCOBY (for “Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast”), it is scientifically classified as a zoogleal mat.

The recorded history of kombucha began in Ukraine and Russia during the late 19th century. In Russian, the kombucha culture is called čajnyj grib чайный гриб (lit. “tea mushroom”), and the drink itself is called grib гриб (“mushroom”), “tea kvass” квас, or simply kvass, which differs from regular kvass traditionally made from water and stale rye bread.

In Chinese, kombucha is called hongchajun 红茶菌 (lit. “red tea fungus/mushroom”), hongchagu 红茶菇 (“red tea mushroom”), or chameijun 茶霉菌 (“tea mold”). In Japanese, the kombucha drink is known as “kōcha kinoko” 紅茶キノコ (lit. “red tea mushroom”). Both the Chinese and Japanese names incorporate the characters for hongcha or kōcha literally, “red tea,” referring to what is known in the West as black tea rather than simply cha 茶 tea or lü cha 綠茶 “green tea“. Japanese kombu 昆布 “a Laminaria kelp; sea tangle” is dried and powdered to produce a beverage called kombucha (lit. “kelp tea”). The English kombucha fermented tea name is pronounced like, and confused with, the Japanese kombucha seaweed tea name.

Kefir (alternately kefīrs, keefir, kephir, kewra, talai, mudu kekiya, milkkefir, búlgaros), purportedly from either the Turkish “keyif” (joy/pleasure) or “köpür” ((milk) froth, foam) or from the Persian “kef” (foam) and “shir” (milk), is a fermented milk drink that originated with shepherds of the Caucasus region, who discovered that fresh milk carried in leather pouches would occasionally ferment into an effervescent beverage. It is prepared by inoculating cow, goat, or sheep‘s milk with kefir grains. Traditional kefir was made in skin bags that were hung near a doorway; the bag would be knocked by anyone passing through the doorway to help keep the milk and kefir grains well mixed. Dairy-free alternatives are available, such as coconut milk kefir and soy milk kefir.

Marco Polo mentions kefir in recounting his travels.

Some find kefir too sour on its own and prefer to add flavors or sweeteners. Frozen fruits can be mixed with kefir in a blender to make a smoothie. In Poland, Kefir is sold with different varieties of fruit and flavors already added, both in the organic/ecologic and non-organic varieties. It is a breakfast, lunch and dinner drink popular across all areas of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Poland (second largest producer after Russia ), Norway, Sweden, Finland (especially with Russian and Estonian minorities), Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania where it is known as an affordable health drink. It is drunk the same way as milk, often accompanying pastries and other sweets. In Southern Slavic countries kefir is consumed at any time of the day, especially with zelnik(zeljanica:Serbian), burek and banitsa(gibanica:Serbian), as well as in cold summer soups.