Belgian fries

It's my frustration when visiting English speaking countries, that they label fries as "French fries" and as a result believe that fries find their origin in France.  (Although we all laughed about the ignorance when the menu in the Capitol changed to "freedom fries" when France condemned the US foreign policy a few years ago). It's as if you put "Portugese spaghetti" on each menu.  

Equally I roll my eyes at the tourist fries shops in Amsterdam that advertise "Vlaamse frites". Really...if they are Flemish, why don't you spell "frites " in the Flemish/Dutch way being "frieten" rather than combining the word Flemish with a French word "frites".  Ugh, come on.  If you want to sell a Belgian product, you might take the effort to check 5 minutes how they are put on the menu locally and you'll see it is "Frieten" in the north or "Frites " in the South. 

Anyway...frieten or French fries are part of our culture.  In a circle of less than 1 km walking distance I count at least 8 "frituren" (fast food frying shops) where we can go get our fries. 2 of them are within 200m of our house.  They serve us fries and deep fried meat (sort of) on any day, so we can never claim to be hungry and without a supply of food. We visit them almost once every week, although I think we should cut back a little bit.  But it is the easiest comfort or fast food.

When I was a child I never visited a fries shop though. My mother was afraid someone would spot us and consider her a lazy mom for not making our own fries.  Indeed, most households have a frying pan at home. I was used to the process of slicing up patotoes, pre-frying them the first time and frying them the second time at home.

French fries is so much in our culture that Kabouter learned to prepare them at school. He's only 3,5 years old!  Since 10 days he was asking us repeatedly to go to the store because we had to buy potatoes and a fries machine.  Our deep frier has been broken since multiple months and we were in doubt whether to replace it.  But Kabouter's eagerness to make home made french fries with us helped the decision: we bought a new deep fryer and we bought "fries potatoes" (the art of good french fries is the selection of a good potato). And on Sunday afternoon Jan and I sat down to make our home made fries.


They tasted good!










Comments

Leslie said…
They look delicious!

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