Happy Thanksgiving !

Today i want to give thanks to the people who stopped by and read this and to the people of 8-legged Entertainment who kindly created, or captured if you will, Taco the cooking Octopus. And some great cooking this Octopus does.
The animations are not only highly entertaining, the ROFL kind, but the recipes are likewise good. And you get a lot of background information and scientific food facts.
Taco the Octopus has cooked up some Thanksgiving treats: Deep fried Turkey and Pumpkin Flan. Try the Cookies too they are the best!

Last year we tried to cook Deep Fried Turkey for our Thanksgiving dinner we had with a Franco-American family. My friend PJ made the corn dressing according to her Southern family recipe. Delicious and rich. And there was loads of other stuff with pumpkin. I don't remember exactly because I ate so much and felt so terrible, that I discarded the memory of it.
But for the Deep Fried Turkey à la Taco the Octopus i have photos and video to prove and remind. The original recipe talks about a hole turkey, but we don't have a big enough frying pan and miss other utensils like a cooking thermometer to control the temperature of the oil. I had to go to the pharmacist to get a seringe with a needle to inject the cut-up turkey with the marinade. The lady gave me a curious look after i told her what i need it for. She probably thought i was crazy but was intrigued by our cooking endeavor. That was the day before when we prepared the bird. On the day self Philippe enjoyed getting every thing ready for the frying. And had developed a methodic plan of action. This deep frying is better done well prepared. The turkey was okay, some pieces a bit dry maybe. We need to perfection our skill and get the cooking times right.
Philippe is ready to try it again this year.
(We'll do it this weekend for it's a normal workday here, so no time to prepare and no time to digest afterwards)



Happy Thanksgiving to all !

Sinterklaas, St Nicolas, Saintnic, Santa

You probably know already vaguely, but are not aware of it all the time that Santa is just an American made, though not entirely, impostor.
The real deal is St Nicolas or Sinterklaas, as the Dutch say.
He arrives by boat by half November, shown on national tv as the event of the year. Then you get to eat all these treats, sweets, backed specialties. The high light is the evening of December 5th when the Holy man visits mysteriously your home and brings gifts. Most of the time it's a knock on the door and you find a bag of gifts. Sometimes you get lucky and the man himself pays you a visit.
Please note the generous way to celebrate his own birthday of december 6, giving presents the evening before.
Then in the night he goes back to Spain (which is a sort of Florida for the elderly Europeans). His departure is not covered on national TV.
Although the man is a Saint this is not a religious holiday. That's what's so good about it. It's fast and sweet and rarely reason for family disputes like Christmas...
Since I'm Sinterklaas's biggest fan in France (where they do some sort of celebration in the east and north or North-East, but not as elaborated and perfected as in Holland) I take this occasion to write some foody stuff and share some recipes to promote Sinterklaas and get him out of the shadow of his big incorporated rival.

If you can only do one recipe then this is the one you want to try:
Pepernoten or Péfénock as Emma used to call them, are like spicy mini cookies. Peper in Dutch means pepper. Pepper is not in the spice mix aka Speculas spice. But there is cinnamon, nutmeg (i think that's what gave it the name Peper), coriander, ginger, cardamon and cloves. And i think i have had another brand of this spice mix which contained some pepper.

Here's what you need:
250 gr flour + 3gr backing powder or 250gr self-raising flour
mix with 10 gr of ready made spicemix you can buy in Holland, or your own spicemix: 5 gr cinnamon, 2 gr clove, 2 gr cardamon, 1 gr ginger powder, (optional about 1 gr nutmeg and or coriander)

melt 125 gr butter with
125 gr dark sugar (if you can't find the dark brown sugar you can use the raw unrefined sugar from the organic store)
50 gr of syrup or melasse

add the melted butter-sugar mix to the flour mix and knead it to a ball. It will have a brown color from sugar and spices.

Now the fun part starts for the kids you want to involve in this work. They have to roll little balls at the size of a marble. the challenge is to get the equal sized so they will back evenly, and you won't end up with the big ones raw inside and the small ones burned!
Put them on sheet of backing paper. you might have to work in batches.
Preheat the oven to 150°C and back the Pepernoten for 15-20 minutes. Let them cool so they will have their crunch.
Serve with hot chocolate et voilà! you have a nice treat on any winter's day and/or Sint Nic's season

The pictures here are of what you can buy in Holland, but it's full of E-numbers additives crap!