Euro 2014 - Gastronomia!!!!

de-I is taking advantage of his trip to Europe to indulge in some serious gastronomic action.  This is so shocking I know!

Hotel de Stokerij - Oudenburg, Belgium

When we made our reservation here, I was just looking for an economical place near Brugges.  There was a notation on the website about a restaurant but I didn't pay too much attention to it.  What it turned out to be is a very small operation where the husband/chef does a significant amount of the artisanal food preparation himself.  This means that he cures hams in a variety of fashions.  He smokes fish.  He makes pates.  He bakes his own bread.

The dinner was a fixed price set menu with beer and wine pairings

We had aperitifs and snacks first

The snacks were three small friend items with chicken, crab, and cheese inside.

Jan can really handle deep fried items

Inside the dining room there was an open kitchen

There was an entree course of smoked eel on a couscous salad, an eel soup and a croquette of shripm

The eel was lusciously smooth with only a light smokey flavor.

The soup was very strong so you had to like strong fish flavors to enjoy it.

The croquette was again a marvel of deep frying.

The intermezzo was a sorbet made with cherry beer.

The cherry beer is made with a Gueze from Brussels that has cherries macerated in it for five months.

Very yummy

Jan and Ingrid working away on the main courses

The Main

Probably our least favorite part of any of our eating at de Stokerij

The fish was really not up to snuff.  The white asparagus was very good but it would have been nice to have more than one.  

The sauce was made from the asparagus and wasn't strong enough to hold up to the fish

Plus everything was white!

Dessert

A trio with a mousse made from yogurt, a chocolate mousse, and a fresh sabayon.

The Final Bite

I loved this.  Jan took pieces of banana, covered in sugar cooked to hard stage with some miscellaneous sprinkles on top.

The sourness of the banana with the sugar complement

The Breakfast Buffet

This was without a doubt THE best breakfast buffet that I think I've every had (except maybe this one at a hotel in Manchester, England in 1987).

The hams were all cured by Jan including a prosciutto styled one.

He made pates and rillettes and baked their own breads and made their own preserves

Bistrot De Gilde, Vlamerting, Belgium

We had decided to spend some time wondering around West Flanders in Belgium and got a bed and breakfast room in a place in a small town mostly to ave money.  We asked them for a recommendation for diner and were referred to small place not far from the B&B.  We didn't expect much but were amazed and the quality of the food, the friendliness of the staff, the excellent decor, the quality of the beer and the overall value.

Wife had a old Belgian style beef stew with a side salad

I had rabbit, grandma style, with shredded apples on the top.

Crazy tender and tasty

I lovely Westmalle beer to accompany the meal

A mandatory order of frites

Chocolate mousse for dessert with some interesting crunchy things inside

Restaurant-Rotisserie Le St. Louis, Dinan, Brittany, France

We ended up in Dinan after finding out that our actual destination was way further than we had originally thought.  I will post about Dinan which was a great place in another segment.  We needed to find a place for lunch and I got this out of our Guide Michelin Green Brittany book as the closest to us.  It featured a 'buffet of entrees (appetizers).  I was a bit leery of this but I was dead wrong!  It was great.  Again there were tons of house made products like oil cured herring, pates, oil cured pastrami, rillettes of sardines and on and on.

The Entree Buffet

My entree plate

Melissa had a tart tatin with fois gras

Innovative and yummy

Melissa setting up her money shot

Our mains were like a traditional English Roast meal 

Wife and Barry had beef and I had pork

There was also a dessert buffet

Wife opted for that and had an apple dumpling which was apples in a crepe and a chocolate mousse (surprise!).  Both had some kind of alcohol in them which gave a nice richness to both.

Cafe de-I, Plougrascent, Brittany France

When we eat by ourselves at our rental things aren't too shabby either.

Here we have a buffet of cured meats and cheese for a light dinner.

Euro 2014 - On To Sightseeing - Belgian Trevia Trip

I am way behind in my blogging posts as we are now in Brittany in our three week rental experiment.  We have friends with us for the first four days and are kind of busy with them and running around.

When last we left the intrepid duo of de-I and Wife, they were staggering out of the battlefield that is tourist invaded Brugges.  I had booked a hotel researched through TripAdvisor that turned out not really to be near Brugges but about 25 miles away in a little town called Oudenburg.  After the chaos of Brugges, we welcomed the country side escape.  This turned out to be a phenomenal gastronomic experience that I will put into separate post.

Our Little Spot of Tranquility in Oudenburg

 Entrance

Where there little restaurant was

Beautiful flowers everywhere

 Oostende

Oostende is a seaside resort town.  It was cold and windy when we were there.  An awful lot of it could be a seaside resort anywhere but there were a few things of interest.

There was this interesting statuary on the seaside walk

With our love of frites we think we want to put this in our new backyard landscape

A nice fountain in their major downtown park

And as always a nice Gothic Church

Veurne

We had more time to kill and we liked what we read about his town and its Middle Ages square.  Unfortunately there was the most crazy parking system ever with only parking for locals.  No pay parking anywhere.  We finally found some parking that wasn't too far out but Wife was pissed at the attitude of the town so we didn't spend too much time their.

 The square with the local church in the background

It's totally amazing what you find in the most out of the way places.

This church had this amazing organ

And some fantastic stained glass windows

Euro 2014 - On To Sightseeing - Touring Brugges With 20,000+ Of My Best Friends

Brugges is the really famous sibling to Ghent.  Both have similar histories but the old town in Brugges has been much better kept closer to its original state and is a much larger area.  As a result Brugges is the bigger deal from a tourist perspective.  Brugges is on all the bus tours and is just miles from the sea so is on the cruise ship itineraries as well.  Add into this mix that the day we went, May 1, was a national holiday and the result was the place was mobbed.

I'm afraid I really dislike...no REALLY DISLIKE...dealing with hoards of humanity.  And I don't like places that are almost exclusively focused on tourists.  Ghent was more a real city in my opinion.  You could walk a couple of blocks and you were in the middle of the hustle and bustle of daily living.  I like that a lot more.  So I was off to a very unhappy start to this day.  On top of this it was much warmer than expected and I was hot plus I was doing the full camera Sherpa routine for the second day in a row and my shoulders were pretty tired.  So I'm afraid that I didn't have a very positive attitude toward it.  So I apologize if my photo journalism of this is not up to my usual standards.

One nice thing was a surprise that I arranged for Wife.  We are meeting up with our friends Barry and Melissa who live in Albuquerque and San Miguel Allende, Mexico when we get to France.  But when we were comparing schedules, a couple of months or so ago, Barry and I noticed we were going to both be in Brugges on the same day.  So we cooked up a plot to get together without our spouses knowing it.  My story was that we had to be at this statue on the main plaza at exactly Noon and have our picture taken because it would be good luck for the year. Barry told Melissa that they had not seen this statue the last time they were in Brugges and it rotated.  Our surprise was complete.  Melissa walked up to the statue staring at the top until she was almost completely on top of me before Barry had her look down.  Wife was out taking pictures so I had Barry walk up to her and ask her for picture taking advice with equal surprise effect.  We went off for lunch and shopping afterwards which was great fun.

Brugges en photo (as we say in French...got to start practicing)

Oops, first a last Ghent shot.  

 This is a picture of how they preserve the facades of buildings when doing new construction

Canals

Towers

Other Buildings

Euro 2014 - On To Sightseeing - Ghent at Night

We had read that the tow is all lit up during the evening so we went out to check it out.