Sinterklaas Vooravond: 3 dishes for a Dutch holiday dinner

We held our annual De Vooravond Van Sinterklaas party yesterday (a day late, yes) and spiced our holiday fun with three decidedly Dutch dishes - runderlappen, hutspot, and brussels lof.  Although we can't recommend the last one, the first two were quite fun, so here you are!

Runderlappen

Runderlappen is basically meat and onions slow cooked in traditional spices, so start with 3lbs of round steak, pound it, saltand pepper it, then cut it into serving size pieces. Browned these pieces on both sides in about 1/2C of bacon drippings (I reserved these from preparing the bacon for the hutspot), then remove them to a slow cooker (with so much meat this took me several batches, and a little additional butter fat). After the final batch of meat is removed add 3 onions, sliced, and fry them slightly before adding 1C water, 3T vinegar, 1T mustard, 2 bay leaves, 1t whole cloves, and 10 peppercorns. Bring this to a boil, stirring to mix in the drippings from bottom of the pan, then pour over meat in the slow cooker. Add enough water (or broth) to just barely cover the meat and cook for 2-4 hours or until very tender. Turn meat every 1/2 hour or so. Serve hot with onions and some of the juice.

Hutspot

Hutspot is boiled potoatoes, onions, and carrots mashed together and served with meat. It's as easy as that. The recipes that we have seen call for about 6 onions, 6 carrots, and 8 potatoes to be washed, pealed, cut into pieces, and boiled in salted water alongside smoked sausages (Gelderse rookworst, to be exact). The vegetables are then removed and mashed together with 1/2C milk and 4T butter, then served with the sausages and cubed pieces of well done bacon. That's the traditional dish, but I left out the sausage and served it as the side starch to the runderlappen. I did serve it with the bacon, however, since I conveniently needed bacon fat for that dish!

Brussels lof

My computer translates this literally as "brussels praise" but I found a few web pages that make me think this is simply what the dutch call endive.  In any case, endive is popular as a cooked vegetable in the Netherlands and several other European countries.  In fact, the endive we were finally able to locate stateside had been shipped from Holland, and we don't mean Michigan.  I washed our endive, then sauted them in butter over high heat for about 2 minutes per side, after which I reduced the heat and added 3T lemon juice, 1t salt, and 1T sugar to the butter, covered the pan, and let it simmer for about 20 minutes.  I can't say we enjoyed this dish.  It was relatively flavorless, and next year I might try a different endive recipe, or I might search for a completely different vegetable all together.  Who knows.

Happy (Dutch) holiday cooking!