About Ingrid Kerssebeeck
We cook to live or live to cook…. In my case, it is a very thin line around which I hover all the time and which has become very vague indeed over the last decade.
Cooking means discovering. Discovering new ingredients, other cultures, traditional foods (not always to our taste, but worth discovering anyway), food and table etiquette…..
Having the good fortune of living in Belgium, which has a rich food history and where you can buy ingredients from around the globe, has certainly helped to develop a more-than-average love of food.
It started with a trip to Qatar, where my husband and I discovered the most exquisite Lebanese food, followed by several visits to Istanbul, where we were plunged into Turkish cuisine.
The culinary adventure continued with a two-year chocolatier course and ice-cream maker diploma.
Countless visits to London (only a stone’s throw away from Brussels) always end with an Afternoon Tea and a visit to one of the most famous food heavens ‘’Fortnum and Mason’’, purveyors of the finest foods since 1707.
But the love for Middle-Eastern food cannot be hidden any longer. Even the most Belgian of dinner parties with prawn cocktail and ‘’asperges à la flamande’’ have to finish with a dessert worthy of a tale of a thousand and one nights – Arabic five-spice pineapple with saffron ice cream, or tangerine-caramel muhallabeya, a classic milk pudding from Lebanon.