Beautiful musings of flora and fare.
I fully admit I spoil my kids rotten when it comes to food. I’m often caught making fresh cut fries an hour before bedtime or whipping up cupcakes for breakfast. My husband and I always joke that we are our kids slaves. In a sense I suppose we are. Google’s definition of slave; “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them” and “work excessively hard”. I’d have to say we are definitely slaves to our kids in that case.
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My mother in law would probably pucker her lips till they turned white and wrinkled much like her backside exit if I ever told her what I did to the base of her crêpe recipe. I asianized it.
For the old school Belgian or Frenchie, crêpes are a kind of sacred dish. My mother in law has never deviated from the simple recipe of just flour, eggs, milk, sugar. She normally serves it with some cassonade (brown sugar), nutella or some jam on the table. I remember once serving crêpes for lunch with sour cream, bacon and chives…and yup the puckered backside lips appeared. “Quelle horreur” she exclaimed. Awww…. Always love her candour! She skipped the bacon and cheese and went straight to the cupboards to grab the brown sugar. She refused to even try! Old school and I forgot to mention, stubborn.
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I went about 5 months without speculoos cookies (spice cookies from Belgium) And i was felt lost and unstable without them. I searched online but with little success in Canada. I did try baking some myself from a recipe online but it really just tasted like cinnamon snaps (if anyone has a great speculoos recipe…please PLEASE share!) So of course when my mother in law asked if I needed anything from Belgium before coming to visit, I asked for a modest 5 kilos of speculoos cookies. Needless to say her eyeballs almost popped out over Skype. But she delivered…an entire carry on of speculoos. Yes she can be very useful…sometimes.
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Speculoos are crunchy, spicy, tanned biscuits which I think are originally from the Netherlands. One sees it everywhere in Belgium especially around Christmas. There’s even high-end fancy boutiques that only sell Speculoos (Speculaas in Dutch) stamped with the iconic image of Saint Nicholas.
Being married to a Belgian, we often spend our holidays there with the in-laws. During these trips, we normally stock up on about half a year’s supply of Belgian goods, such as their sauces like Frikot, Americain and of course speculoos biscuits. Our last trip was to Knokke last summer. A beach town north of Belgium, full of Dutch vacationers all garbed in either Lacoste or Polo under white umbrellas sipping Veuve while their kids build sand castles. I suppose I can blame running out of Speculoos on Knokke. We were too busy making our own sand castles and sipping on Veuve as well, that we hardly had time to stock pile on my daughter’s beloved crunchy biscuit.
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