I know I must seem neglectful, but life has been a whirlwind here, and for the moment I’m trying to spend less time on the computer, and more time actually being here. At some point I promise I will get around to writing about Venice, but I can’t tackle summing up all the many wonderful experiences we had there right now. That said, I feel I absolutely must write about our trip to the friterie the other night, as I was informed that it is a very traditional Belgian experience.
The other night we were at the apartment of old friends of my friend from when she still lived in Belgium. Before we arrived we had been running late while at the mall, so we stopped by at the Carrefour (very similar to Target) and bought a tarte (the Belgian equivalent of a pie in terms of hosting and visiting). When we arrived and kissed each other (just one on their right cheek) I handed the tart to MM, who looked at me in mock surprise and asked if it was an American gift, to which I exclaimed “of course not!” He smiled and took the tarte into the kitchen. Later we all sat down in the little kitchen and we saw the gorgeous tartes he had just baked himself, and I understood why he made the joke about the tarte we had brought with us, as his homemade ones seemed to be an entirely different species of dessert. One was an apple tarte, with thin slices of apples sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, and the other was a juicy plum tart. Both looked scrumptious.
{The Prune Tarte is on the left, and the Apple one is on the right, with the Carrefour tarte in the back as you can see}
I had a slice of the apple tarte, it was even better than it looked. It was still slightly warm, and underneath the slices on top that still maintained their shape were more apples that were much softer and that were sweet, warm and slightly caramely tasting on top of the delicious crumbly crust. Mmmm.
Later I tried a little bite of the plum one, which was nice and tart with whole halves of plums lightly sweetened. Very tasty.
After much debate about what we were going to do about feeding ourselves in the evening as the stores had already closed, we decided to go to a friterie. We’d been wanting to do this the whole trip, so we were very excited about it. We all piled in our rental van, and drove down the road to a cute little square in the nearby town of Tilff. Inside it was quaint and rather homey, with rows of gleaming copper pots on the walls and a stuffed rabbit on the wall with a little stick over its should and a handkerchief sack on the end.
We ordered Hoegaardens with a slice of lemon in them, as MM told us it was “an experience”. Soon after, our incredibly sweet waitress brought our plates of “boules” with a rabbit sauce and a little salad on the side. The boules were large Belgian meatballs, and were quite tasty. A big stainless steel bowl was brought with the frites, and we all helped ourselves, dipping the crispy potatoes into the rabbit sauce.
It was quite tasty, and a perfect Belgian evening. We finished it off with a walk along the river in the dark, under the weeping willows, laughing and talking in a mixture of the two languages.
