Ingredients
Serves two:
- approximately 240 g peeled,
- waxy potatoes
- 2 tablespoons of milk
- pepper and salt
- 100 g peas (frozen)
- 150 g coarsely grated Comté
- 125 g raspberries
For this dish you need a slightly sweet cheese. Also made in the Netherlands called Maasdammer, but that one is too bitter for our purpose. Comté is much better. This cheese comes from Franche Comté (Jura), where mountain residents have made a virtue of necessity. Their special cows graze on high meadows full of flowers and herbs, providing aromatic milk. Up to these days, due to the EU quality mark, farmers are hardly allowed to use artificial fertilizer. Milk is more difficult to transport than cheese over mountain paths, even for the Comtois, called tête du bois, a man with a ‘wooden head’ (an absolute go-getter). And so they have made this delicious cheese in their high villages since time immemorial. Here and there even today in the old way in fruitières (milk was considered fruit). A well-made Comté (officially Gruyère de Comté) has ‘few, small and moist eyes’.
Pommes de terre au comté is a regional dish. I enhance the special aroma with raspberries. If you can’t get Comté, opt for Swiss Gruyère.
- Place the sliced potatoes next to each other in a round microwave dish. Add salt and pepper and 2 tablespoons of milk. Cover with microwave foil or cover. Cook for 6 minutes (= 1 minute per 40 g) in the microwave on the highest setting.
- Sprinkle the thawed and drained peas in a sieve under the hot tap and cover everything with a layer of grated Comté. Place uncovered back in the microwave for another 1 minute.
- Sprinkle washed and drained raspberries on top. Serve immediately.
Wine: Rosé d’Anjou.
Menu suggestion:
Starter: Cantaloupe with almond shavings. With a melon scoop, make balls from a ripe cantaloupe melon. Divide over two plates. Just before serving, sprinkle with 4 tablespoons of almond shavings browned in a dry frying pan.
Dessert: Nectarine with eggnog. Pour boiling water onto ripe nectarines. Rinse in cold water, peel and cut into wedges. Dash of eggnog on top.
