Guy Voets on the Web

Wine & Cooking

contact

literature	history
film	architecture
music	wine & cooking
dance	nature & ecology

A taste for tasty food...

Here in NW Europe, food is often bland, and beyond laurel and thyme few spices are used. Well, that used to be the case, but with all the foreign restaurants and trends like fusion kitchen, the tastescape has changed a lot. In a way, I'm part of this trend, since I also learned to appreciate mixtures of herbs and spices through traveling. For my taste, it hasn't got to be so much hotly pimented, but rather with the Indian mix of herbs and spices that combine into all kinds of curries. My favourites spices are the 'c's': curcuma, coriander, cumin, clove, and among the herbs: basil, rosmarin, thyme, savory (sarriette). To have a real curry, some hotness has to be added... black pepper, green or red chillies, cayenne.

The small food shops in the streets of Thailand and Laos often sell curries that are way too hot for our European tastebuds. I remember that once, near the Wat Phrae Kaew boat landing in Bangkok, my travel companion and I had to take a sip of our Coke and a mouthful of plain rice between carefully picked snippets of a delicious fish curry. In Laos on the other hand, the curries often resemble something taken straight out of a wet rice field: a combination of unknown herbs and greens with an earthy taste. Got to get used to it!

But I also like the simplicity and honesty of the Italian kitchen. Healthy ingredients and a preparation that doesn't call for kitchen acrobatics. Tomatoes and mushrooms are regular items to go in a sauce with rice, pasta, millet or couscous.

Since these trips, I developed a taste (!) for cooking. Like a Mumbai massala, it starts most of the time with simmering shallots and garlic in a spice mixture. It's essentially 'slow food', pity that our new cooking stove is a bit too fast for my liking... We are essentially carnivores, and a 'steak tartare*' (raw, ground and seasoned beef steak) or a juicy and tender steak are on our menu every week.

As for wine... I suppose I also got that taste from home, although I never touched any form of alcohol before I moved to Ghent. I even had a teetotaler* (in Dutch: 'blue button') reputation from when I was a toddler. My parents had bought an earthenware flask of genever during a seaside vacation. I could hardly walk, but succeeded in getting hold of the full litre bottle. It slipped from my hands, bounced once on the stone floor... and broke when it came down again! My parents always had a small collection of wines in the cellar, and in the good years had a barrel (quart de barrique, 55 litres) delivered from somewhere in France (from Antoine Gouttenègre, négociant de vin), that they bottled themselves with the help of some friends (with everybody in high spirits as you can imagine).
Being barman at the theatre sure helped me in getting a lot of knowledge about beer, alcohol and wine. Nowadays we bring a few (dozen) bottles of wine from our travels through Europe: from the Bremm* estate in Zell in the Mosel valley, from an unknown vintner in Gyöngyöspata (Hungary), or from the Buzet* region in SW France, where our friends Dany and René live...