[This article is featured in English, because it is the web extension of an article of The Word #5 which has just been published (pp. 44-45), called Night Shop Dining, abundantly and magnificently illustrated by pics from Ulrike Biets]
In my life as a food-lover, I hardly imagine other people’s life where food is just food and not pleasure, discovery, sensuality and encounters. I eat organic food at home and I spend all my lunches at Brussels European quarters’ restaurants, which I am all testing for my future EuroZone restaurants’ guide. So when The Word comes up with the project of making a proper meal with Night shop’s food, yes, definitely yes, I take up the challenge.
That Friday night, I feel bad because I seriously argued with the boss of a restaurant (named after a nut) in the EuroZone, where clients are treated really bad, my serious quarrel in the last six months of restaurant tasting. But tonight’s challenge will turn healing me by taking me back to the very roots of pleasure of food: purchasing, cooking and eating, surrounded by friends.
We meet at 6pm at the corner of rue de l’étang and rue Gray, just behind Place Jourdan, an area I know too good from my restaurant tastings – you have there the best and the worst places to eat in the European quarters. On my way to the night shop, I enter a new Bulgarian delicatessen shop, Balkani, at the very beginning of rue Gray. A good tip for yoghurt and feta cheese, I’ll remember.
Food is always about curiosity and openness to alien tastes, appearances and consistencies. As one of the co-founders of the Slow Food Brussels’ chapter, Karikol, I always start with my five senses to seize the nature of food. How does it look like? What does it smell? What does it taste? How does is it feel when you touch it? And what can you say or hear about it? These five basic questions take you to a trip to the origin of the food you taste and the answers reveal a lot about how it is made, its basic ingredients, who transformed or produced it, and perhaps whether it is good for you and for all the people who were part of the chain, including the living bodies (animal and plants) who are the base of food.
Not very usual
I usually don’t go to night shops, because most of food there is canned, packed or dry, ‘industrial’ in other words. This is why I go straight to searching for fresh food here. Cucumbers, tomatoes, bananas and onions are the only living beings you can find here, besides the very sympathetic owners. I usually compose my menus starting from one element I really want or I fancy, be it ingredient or wine. Here it will be a cucumber. I prefer to avoid the tomato, because I cannot stand anymore tomatoes without the taste of tomatoes, as I used to have in my parents garden when I was a child, in the beautiful countryside of my so green Auvergne, right in the centre of France.
Having perfected the original recipe of the tzatziki from my best Greek’s cooking book written by Chrissa Paradissis (a best seller in many languages), I look for yoghurt in the fridges and pick up a pot of “dairy preparation” with ‘yog’ in its name – a trick to avoid abiding by the law on yoghurt, obviously.
Then, let’s pursue with Mediterranean food: I pick up a can of MarieThumas canned chick peas for a delicious hummus, although no tahini (sesame paste) can be found in this paki shop.
As for the main dish, I prefer not to buy either a frozen pizza or bolognaise sauce with pasta. Let’s make a real meal tonight, even from here. I opt for making a quiche: simple, tasty and so personal. No problem for finding flour, we have choice between three brands. There are eggs, butter and cream so we need something to put in, which will give its name to our quiche. Hmm, difficult to find a garnish as all frozen boxes are ready-to-microwave dishes, but we finally opt for a frozen ‘forestry’ mix of mushrooms and bacon.
What about the desert? Well, here again, I go away from too-easy ice-cream and prefer to do my own banana sorbet. I told you, I heavily favour fresh food. We have some quality chocolate home, so I don’t need to buy some here, although they have black Côte d’Or. I call my best friend Catherine Piette, also from Slow Food and healthy cooking teacher, to get both recipes of quiche’s dough and the ganache au chocolat (boiled cream and melted chocolate mixed together, so simple) to top up my babana’s sorbet.
We choose a cold bottle of rosé wine, which I know it is good from previous tastings, and let’s go home! Thirty euros or so for a good meal for four people is fine, but we spent almost an hour in the night shop to elaborate a menu that meet my – high - standards, and its components. You definitely don’t get there for food in normal times.
Go home!
If you want to eat well, go home! And cook with love. And take your time. Statistics tell us that the average Belgian now spends as much money for its gsm than for its food, i.e. 14% of its budget. But I consider dinner as one of the most sensual moments of the day – especially if you see it as préliminaire for more horizontal affairs. Well, tonight, cooking will be a moment of creativity, sharing of knowledge, pretext for talking and getting to know people, and finally a great moment of pleasure and joy when savouring the meal. It is everyday like that in my home – I don’t have TV but children and friends.
I start by putting my small pieces of bananas in the freezer. They will be crutched with a mixer just before serving. I do my tzatziki and my hummus so that they can remain as long as possible in the fridge to spread all the flavours of garlic, olive oil, etc. inside their respective hermetically-closed boxes. Then I do my dough which has to rest for half an hour. I use in it porridge oats, a trick from my friend Catherine to make you quiche more crispy and tasty.
In the meantime we eat our dry nuts, of which the night shop had a great range, and drink some light vinho verde Gazela from Delhaize (9 percent alcohol, a little bit more than lemonade). When comes the time of making the quiche’s garnish, we all smell the fishy odour of my scrambled eggs and decide to get rid of them, but rather the ones my friend Emmanuelle (we are at her home) has in the fridge. Yes, they smell fish because the hens that made them are fed with recycled fish powder. And this leads us precisely to where Slow Food starts: observing and asking questions. Looking at the little figures in red printed on the eggshell, they start with a “2”, which means that the hens were grow on the soil. “O”, would mean that they are organic, “1” that they are grown in open air and “3” that they are grow in cages. Read the labels, folks! And make a conscious choice.
The meal turns out to be a success, given the faces of all guests. Tzatziki an hummus are full of flavour on the ready-to-oven bread we bought at the nightshop. The quiche is tasty and crispy. And the banana sorbet with its ganache topping is for dying as the Belgians say it. A very heavy and cold cream of pure banana with a hot and think chocolate cream to end up this surprising meal.
The basic problem with night shops is they have very little fresh food. After this experiment, I can conclude that the best night shop would have either the highest rate of fresh food and of basic ingredients for cooking and not just eating from the microwave or straight from the can. But it proves that if you really want to have pleasure with food, nothing can stop you but your own creativity.
