FTD: Stoofvlees friet

As I suppose most of you readers won't understand what this title means, I'll just explain it.

FTD stands for Flemish Traditional Dishes

Stoofvlees friet is stew with fries.

Ok, so this is about cooking! Here in Flanders we have some traditional recipes that I'd like to share with you, as they are all quite tasty.

How do you make Flemish Stew?

Well, you need beef. For 4 people I'd take about 1 kilo, as eaters always take seconds while tasting this stew. The beef should come from the shoulder or neck of the cow, and it needs to show some fat. Yes, I know, but when you take beef without fat, the taste will go down the drain.

You also need onions (also about 1 kilo), a few teaspoons of mustard, butter, sugar, salt, pepper and laurel. And a bottle of Flemish beer, like Grimbergen or Leffe brown.

And now the preparation

You begin by cutting the beef into cubes. The onions need peeling and cutting into not so tiny cubes too.
Then you put butter in a pot and when it melts, put in the cubes of beef. Use pepper and salt to season the beef.
When the beef is not red anymore, add the cubes of onion, the mustard, the sugar and the beer.
And then let it stew for a couple of hours on a small fire.

How to serve the dish

You serve the stew with fries. It's a mistake to think fries come from France (French Fries) because they are Belgian in origin. To make fries you use the Bintje variety of potatoes and you peel them and slice them into fries. They need to be fried twice, and if you want them really Flemish, you do it in reuzel which is a special kind of fat (animal fat, comes from the pig).