I love the distinctive tastes of gruyere cheese, chicory and ham together and regularly make this in the winter as a main course to warm everyone up from top to toe when the rain is lashing down outside and they come in from the cold, … hearty comfort food 🙂 Gruyere cheese gives this recipe a flavour all of its own. Enjoy!
Belgian endive or chicory is not a vegetable that will be liked by everybody. It being slightly bitter puts it in the category for an acquired taste. The recipe is based on 2 pieces per serving, so if you buy the endive heads and they are large or thick and you will halve them buy less heads. You can also make a bechamel sauce to which you add cheese and nutmeg, pour that over the ham wrapped endive, add more cheese on the top and bake. Bread crumbs can be mixed in the cheese for the topping. In Holland we usually serve this with mashed potatoes.
This recipe is for the traditional dutch apple pie, found on a Belgian website. It can be served both warm or cold, usually with whipped cream (but ice cream tastes great as well 😀 ). You will need a *springform* cake pan, or a lot of patience, or you will not be able to get the pie out! Because Dutch recipes generally use grams instead of cups for dry ingredients, I have included the measurements in grams as well. The dough is shortbread-like and may take a lot of time to get right. It took me ages to get it to form a ball, but it worked out fine in the end. If you’re getting tired of it, add a little milk, but don’t despair for with or without the milk, it *will* from a ball in the end. If you want, you can prepare the apple mixture the previous day and keep it in the fridge, the flavors will blend wonderfully. If you want to prepare the dough in advance, take it out of the fridge in time, because it’s really hard to work with when it’s just been in the fridge for a whole night. The preparation time is a rough estimate and assumes that you peel the apples while the dough is in the fridge. I’m quite slow at preparing so it could be anywhere between 1 and 2 hours for you. Last but not least, *do* make sure you have a bit of dough left over for the third to last step – you deserve a little something for all that hard work! 😀
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