Taste of Belgium

Winner of The Gourmand Award 2015 Best Foreign-International Cuisine. Belgium is a country that boasts many Michelin-starred restaurants and it is sometimes said that Belgian food is served in the quantity of German cuisine but with the quality of French cuisine. It's a country where home cooks ? and everyone, it seems, is a great home cook ? spend copious amounts of time thinking about, shopping for, preparing, discussing, and celebrating food. With its hearty influences from Germany and Holland, herbs straight out of a medieval garden, and condiments and spices from the height of Flemish culture, Belgian cuisine is elegant comfort food at its best ? slow-cooked, honest and satisfying, perfect for a Sunday lunch, a dinner party, or a casual family gathering. Here in Ruth Van Waerebeek's wonderful compendium of 250 delicious recipes, is the best of Belgian cuisine. It is a cuisine that traditionally prizes regional and seasonal ingredients and there are dishes in this comprehensive collection using all the ingredients synonymous with the country: endives, mussels, herrings, white asparagus, Brussels sprouts, mustard, beer and chocolate. There are national dishes such as waterzooi, moules frites, hutsepot, stoemp and of course waffles. For the adventurous cook there is much to explore in this varied and perhaps unfamiliar cuisine. As the Belgians say, since everybody has to eat three times a day, why not make a feast of every meal? AUTHOR: Ruth Van Waerebeek is an adventurous traveller, international chef and cookbook author from Belgium. She was born and raised in the medieval town of Ghent where she learned to cook at the side of her mother, grandmother and her great-grandmother. She was a chef in two leading restaurants in Ghent before she set off travelling round the world. In the 1990s she worked in full time teaching at a school of culinary arts in New York. Since 2000 she has been the brand ambassador and the house chef of Chile's most important winery Concha y Toro. She travels regularly to the company's major events in Europe, Russia, USA, Latin America and Asia. She now runs the Mapuyampay Hostal Gastronómico and Cooking School in the heart of Chile's wine country. Her cooking classes have been profiled in Gourmet Magazine as one of the 50 best cooking vacations in the world.