



Belgium Oven Fries with colourful beetroot seedlings on top from own allotment

2018 is the year that I will remember in the future. It’s the year that we had such a bad drought that we had to avoid the heat during the day and to give water every evening when it’s a bit cooler. Thank goodness my husband, a 3D animation maker, started to make 3D animation for business from home since last year so that he’s more flexible with his work to be able to help me give water to potatoes.





Me giving water to thirsty plants on a sunny hot July evening, we didn't have any rain in June and July.





The news said that due to the drought Belgium may have not enough good quality of potatoes for its famous fries. This is very likely. For me personally, I love the variety of Charlotte potatoes most. Luckily it’s quite easy to grow so that we don’t need to worry about late blight. At least, I’ve succeeded in growing it two years in a row. It’s a bad year for our crops, as we indeed should be able to harvest more if I were able to give more water. Our routine job in our little farm is to pump up underground water which gave me the feeling of time traveling back to the middle ages. Nevertheless, we’ve harvested 28 kg of potatoes until yesterday. There are still some more growing or under the ground.

Today I cut my previous harvest into 1 cm thick. To be called Belgian fries it has to be 1 cm thick, because if it’s thinner then it’s called “French Fries”. LOL. My Belgian ex-colleague doesn’t mind that people call fries “French fries”. He said those are bad, only Belgian Fries are the best.

In general, you need to fry Belgian fries twice. Today I steamed them for 5 minutes, and mixed the potatoes with olive oil with rosemary. Then I put them into the oven and baked them for about 25 minutes. If I had more time to prepare, I would let it cool down for 20 mins and bake it again - that’s how I did it before. And personally I think it tasted really good.





Belgium oven fries with beet seedlings on top, and stir fried edamame, leaves beet on the left. The green with little holes is wild rucola.









The topping is the little beetroot seedlings that grow as volunteers in the allotment. It took a lot of time to clean them, but I love beet seedlings so much. I can’t find such lovely yellow colour sprouts from anywhere else. On top of that, they are super food. They don’t sell yellow beet sprouts seeds in the shop, nor from the online store. It’s really a surprise harvest.