Category: Cheese

Cheese Pasta Vegetables
22nd November 2016

Spaghetti with spinach, garlic and vacherin cheese

I like spinach. I do not believe it makes me strong like Popey the Sailor Man (and he ate them from cans…) but it is healthy. On the farmer’s market in the town here they sell “cold-ground” spinach, big rough leaves with a snail here and there. It will not last when it starts freezing. Start of winter is also the beginning of the season […]

Cheese Main dish Pastry Salad
11th March 2016

Quiche with dandelions, Camembert and salami

When I was young there was a best-selling book called ‘Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” about macho prejudice. Well, I am not a real man then. Quiche, the name, comes from the local dialect in Lorraine that has German influences and sounds a bit like “Kuche” for pie. The Quiche Lorraine is the most famous version, first recorded in the accounts of the Nancy hospital […]

Cheese Main dish Rice Vegetables
26th May 2015

Green asparagus risotto

When the vegetable stand on our market had French green asparagus, I could not resist buying them and decided to make a spring risotto. White asparagus are available in the south of the Netherlands; solid and straight stems that make a wonderful meal with eggs, potatoes and cream. In France, the white variety, sometimes with violet heads, comes from the Loire valley and the sandy […]

Cauliflower Cheese Main dish Soup
29th August 2014

Cauliflower soup with Avesnes cheese and smoked ham

Cauliflower is a very healthy vegetable with anti-cancer and detox properties. However, it stinks when cooking and has a very bland taste. Basically, it is boring and needs something to liven it up. Often it is combined with cheese, as in the British cauliflower cheese dish or the Dutch cauliflower with cheese sauce dish. In France, cauliflower is often prepared with a white sauce of […]

Cheese Main dish Potatoes Poultry
28th August 2014

Chicken with Maroilles sauce

We were in the north of France recently and had lunch with a friend who had prepared a regional dish of chicken legs with Maroilles sauce. Maroilles, named after a town, is a very pungent soft cow cheese that is produced in the Avesnois region in the north. Our host, Nathalie Banckaert, made the dish with chicken legs cooked in a stock with wine and […]

Cheese Main dish Salad
20th March 2014

Burrata with escarole salad

There are plenty of culinary things that I do not know about. We recently had a dinner with a good friend from Argentina in a restaurant with my name (Marcel, 15 rue de Babylone) with which I have absolutely no relation. She opted for a dish because it had “Burrata” in it and I must confess I expected some TexMex ingredient that she, as from […]

Beef Cheese Main dish Pasta
3rd January 2014

Pasta with meat sauce

Sometimes you want something simple and pasta with meat sauce is a kind of comfort food for colder days. I do not like to buy pasta sauce in tins or jars and I did not want to go into the trouble of making a real Bolognese sauce because with the bacon (and mushrooms) it adds up to a rather filling and a bit fat sauce. […]

Cheese Soup Vegetables
23rd December 2013

Creamy roasted garlic soup

This soup is delicious in itself but it is also a very good remedy against hangovers. Perhaps it is an idea to have some ready that you can simply warm up the morning after the evening in the festive season… There are several versions of garlic soup, especially from the southwest of France where they have the tourin – with onions and eggs – or, […]