Sunday lunch at Le temps des cerises

Dear all!

Every Sunday I try to cook something special to go with the right wine. Because we are now in the middle of the white asparagus season, that is a bit of a regional specialty over here, I'm preparing either an entrée or a main course with 'the white gold' while the season lasts. This Sunday I did asparagus with smoked salmon, honey-mustard vinaigrette and North Sea grey shrimp.

Recipe

Peel the asparagus and boil it in salted water

Prepare the vinaigrette: mustard (about a teaspoon) + honey (about a small tablespoon), add wine vinegar, stir until the honey dissolves, add olive oil (softens the taste) and majoram. Make sure the vinaigrette is not too acid or too sharp.

Put a slice of smoked salmon on a plate, sprinkle with the vinaigrette (this really gives a very fresh, somewhat sweet-sour touch to the salmon, but don't overdo, otherwise you risk ruining the delicate taste of the asparagus).

Arrange the asparagus on the plate with the shrimps on top.

Wine

Very good wines to go with white asparagus are Grüner Veltliner (Austria) or dry Riesling (although the list of suitable wines does not stop there of course).  These past few weeks we have been enjoying some excellent Austrian Riesling, apart from the Grüner Veltliner (see picture).

Our main dish today was something quintessentially Flemish, involving (obviously) beer, pork cheeks, a slice of bread with mustard and a bit of brown sugar! : 'Pork cheeks stew with Rodenbach'. Rodenbach is a pretty unique beer, that is hard to catalogue. It also has a 'grand cru' version, and rightly so! A bit acidulous and yet also with a touch of sweetness, it has great gastronomical potential!

Recipe

1 liter of Rodenbach

1 kilo of pork cheeks

1 bouquet garni (thyme, laurel, 1 clove)

parsley

1 onion

1 garlic clove

pepper & salt

a slice of (white) bread

mustard

2 tablespoons of brown sugar

Slice the onion. Bake the sliced onion and the garlic until the onion slices turn glazy and the aromas have sufficiently come out. Put aside and bake the pork cheeks on all sides (so they remain juicy when they are slowly cooked in the beer). Remove the cheeks (still raw inside) from the pan and put them in a casserole with the onion and the garlic. Meanwhile pour the beer in the hot pan in which you baked the meat, so the flavours of the meat can be absorbed by the beer. Pour the beer in the casserole, add the bouquet garni and the parsley and two tablespoons of brown sugar and put a slice of bread with mustard on top. Close the lid and let the stew stir for about two hours at a low temperature (slow cooking). Season with pepper and salt and serve! (with fries, puree, gratin....). The meat will be so tender you can 'cut' it with a teaspoon! 

Wine

A Stew like this one is often served with beer, the Rodenbach grand cru for example, but as this is a pretty tertiary recipe, there are loads of tertiary wines to choose from that go perfectly with it, like for example a beautifully aged (8-10) years Chianti Classico