Potatoes and Yams

Finding New Ways to Eat Winter Veggies

2012-01-28T11:27:00.001+01:00

As I said earlier this week, I felt a moment of inspiration last weekend while menu planning. Where it came from, I have no idea, but something just clicked and Niek and I actually felt excited about our eating plans for the week. Winter veggies--which ones to choose and what on earth do you do to them to make them delicious? Summer vegetables are easy: chop them up, throw them in a bowl with some dressing, and call it a salad. Voila, dinner. Last time I checked, eating raw cabbage at every meal isn't that appetizing (although I have a fabulous read cabbage slaw taco recipe that is truly amazing).

But, we did it. We found a recipe that incorporates the best of Dutch winter vegetables, and no, it's not stampot. We settled on the un-Dutch recipe for minestrone, and oh wow was it good. As always, epicurious.com came in handy with a great rendition of winter minestrone. There were the usual kinds of substitutions since Dutch grocery stores aren't exactly brimming with produce choices, and I'm just too stinkin' tired to lug myself and the baby halfway across Amsterdam in search of every, last ingredient. Those days have been put on hold until...I don't know when I'll feel like doing that ever again...maybe when the little munchkin no longer needs to nurse and I could in theory blissfully leave her with Niek for days without worrying about her nutrition. In the meantime, cubed bacon went in for the pancetta, the escarole was nixed altogether, and kale stood in as second-best for chard. Why do the Dutch hate chard? I would assume they do, because it is very difficult to track down. Niek doesn't even know the Dutch word for it (snijbiet, in case you're wondering). It was sad not to use it, but the kale proved to be an adequate substitute.

Although the Dutch supermarkets fail to have a large variety of produce, they do have a surprising number of cabbage varieties. I counted five last time we were there. There was no savoy cabbage this time, so I picked up this little number, a head of spitskool.

I love this picture, because it looks like the head of cabbage is leaning into the shot as if to say, "Hello, I'm a spitskool."

And there you have it. It was probably one of the best winter soups I have ever made, and it was even better the second day. I just felt so full of goodness (re: fiber), so now I can make it through the rest of the winter without constantly despairing over the lack of greens in my diet or daydreaming about a flight back to California.

Gourmet = Fun Winter Dining

2012-01-23T12:01:00.001+01:00

That's it. I reached the point of winter this weekend when going to the supermarket irritates me. Cold weather people--basically anyone who reads this blog outside of California, and right now I'm jealous of my friends on the West Coast--you must know what I'm talking about. The fruit choices have dwindled down to apples, bananas, and oranges. I get some mangoes and berries thrown in for good measure here, but they're ridiculously expensive and sometimes don't even really taste like anything. And vegetables...you know I just really love good root vegetables, but I'm pretty sick of looking at parsnips and beets. After weeks of feeling uninspired in the kitchen, I think I finally broke through with some good recipes for the week. Hint, I'll be using lots of cabbage and kale.

However, that isn't what I really wanted to talk about today. What I really wanted to share was my amazing experience with Gourmet (not pronounced gor-may, no it's gur-met, as in, "I met up with some people last night and had a really good time with good food and conversation and cute kitties and smiling babies." Like that. That's how you pronounce it.) Wikipedia's entry on it only gives me the activity, "gourmetten," so technically I guess we were gourmett-ing. I think some people here also call it a raclette. Any way you slice it, you enter into the fondue/Korean gogigui /Japanese teppanyaki territory. You sit down at the table laden with raw ingredients and go to town cooking on the stone cook-top or in the little pans underneath. This is the second time I've done it, and I just love it. It is, to be honest, slightly more difficult with a squirming baby, but it's still manageable.

The ingredients don't have to be too terribly exciting, and let's be straight here, in January in the Netherlands there aren't too many exciting ingredients to find at your local supermarket. But that is why Gourmet is so awesome. It's the whole experience of cooking all your own little dishes while you sit around and talk that makes for such a nice evening. My favorites to make were omelets and rösti in the pans. Our host told us that his family always did this on New Year's Eve when he was growing up to fill up a lot of time for the long evening leading up to midnight. Niek's family did this on Second Christmas Day with his grandparents. If you want to try this, and I say do, I recommend the following:
1) Plan this with people you actually like talking to. The food does take some time to cook, so there is a big chunk of time you have to fill with something other than eating.
2) Have a good ventilation system in your home. While the meat and veggies on the cook-top smell amazing, they let off a lot of steam and grease.
3) Following #2, don't wear anything that needs to be dry-cleaned. No matter what, you will leave smelling a bit like the fryer at a fast food restaurant. If you know this ahead of time and just embrace it, it becomes a non-issue.

Very confused kitty. "What? People come in mini-size?" Note the diaper bag in the car seat to keep the cat from thinking it was a new bed for him.

Nothing like a nice evening of tabletop grilling to lift me out of my funk. And the sun is shining today, and there are no gale force winds at the moment. What nice ways to break up the winter blues.

Fish and little time to cook...

2012-01-15T20:42:00.000+01:00

Ah, welcome mid-winter. With your short days, cloudy skies, you make it that much more difficult to rebound from the gaiety of the Holidays. Do you know what solves the feelings of malaise? Hot and filling casseroles that bubble up delicious aromas while cooking in my oven. Last week it was time for a little bit of fish pie. If it hadn't been for Tessa Kiros' beautiful description of this dish that she had inherited from a Finnish family friend, I'm not sure I would ever have given it a go. After all, I grew up in the Midwest where pie is synonymous with dessert and does not denote any sort of meal laden with fish and mashed potatoes.

I'll spare you the pictures. They didn't turn out quite as I had hoped, and I don't want to turn anyone off attempting fish pie in the future. But it was delicious as the mashed potatoes mixed with the sauce, veggies, and pieces of fish. I did make it with pollack instead of cod, and I cut out the shrimp.

Ever since I saw a special late one night on PBS about aquaculture (yeah, PBS is where it's at when you need a grad school study break), I haven't been able to bring myself to buy most shrimp found in the supermarket. I'm also the kind of person who carries a list of sustainable fish around in her wallet. It makes shopping for seafood kind of depressing and quite exhausting. I've been trying to strike a balance between buying food raised/caught/grown in a more sustainable way and not feeling horribly guilty if some of the things we eat are part of the...what is that they call it?...the industrial-agricultural system. It's been kind of exhausting lately. Probably because I don't sleep all that well with a four-month-old, and I would like my food to take less time to prepare. I think I am starting to fully understand why pre-packaged foods are so popular.

Still, as Johanna continues to grow (and hopefully sleep more at night) I hope buying and preparing foods will once again become really enjoyable. I loved eating the fish pie, I just didn't enjoy juggling and crying baby and a pot of boiling potatoes.

Cheese and butter

2012-01-03T17:43:00.003+01:00

I just had a sandwich with cheese and butter. In a sea of blog posts and newspaper articles about eating a healthy diet in the new year, I felt so compelled to put it out there that I just ate two kinds of fats with a healthy dose of carbohydrates. Do other people do this? It's not something I ever did growing up, but I know that lots of Dutch people love the combination. The mother of the family I stayed with during my first summer abroad in Germany packed them in my school bag for my mid-morning snack, and I've seen it here often enough. Oddly, I hate the taste of butter and cheese in America. Maybe it's the kind of butter, or the fact that I've never had truly good Gouda cheese in the States, or maybe it's the kind of bread I can get here. Whatever the reason, it's really only something I like to eat here, especially on days like today when, despite a reasonable caloric intake, I feel like I'm starving. I blame this on three things: my metabolism has to readjust after the truly gluttonous holiday season, I'm breastfeeding a hungry hippo (or maybe just a baby), and I've finally started running again. I'm sure dietitians the world over are shaking their heads in disapproval over my fat, fat, carbo combination. To that I will say that I am finally not hungry.

Christmas Cookies

2011-12-26T22:49:00.003+01:00

Honestly, the title of the post should really be Christmas cookie, as in, I only successfully made one type of cookie this year. The ingredients for Niek's favorite holiday biscotti are still in the cupboard, and I've set a goal of getting them finished before Valentine's Day. If I'm lucky, I just might make that deadline.

Although it wasn't a full-out baking marathon (those days may not happen in this house until Johanna is a bit older), I did get to introduce my sister-in-law to the pure joy of making Christmas cookies. I'm not sure what she knew she was getting herself in for when she accepted my invitation to come over and bake. I made her pour through my back issues of Bon Appetit and Martha Stewart Living while I simultaneously perused epicurious.com's list of "must bake" cookies. In the end, we settled on the yet-to-be-made biscotti, a chocolate thumbprint cookie, and some Corn Flakes wreaths.

My sister-in-law was really fascinated by the picture of the wreaths, which is why we chose them. Just a heads up in case you are planning on buying food coloring in the Netherlands--it's not easy. The stock room manager at my local supermarket told me they don't sell it anymore because artificial coloring isn't healthy. Seriously, that is what he told me as he stood in the grocery aisle full of candy. I suppose it was as good of a reason as any he could come up with on the spot. On the walk back home, feeling a little defeated about having not green food coloring, we dropped into the Indian market just on the off chance they might carry the scourge known as a combination of water, propylene glycol, Blue #1 and Yellow #5. I'm not quite sure what the ingredients were, but he sold us a powdered form for €1. Nothing much to lose there. Unfortunately, it did not color the Corn Flakes well. At least we got to have some fun with "American" marshmallows, even if the marshmallow mixture did not hold everything together well. I gave up in the end and just made a big, Corn Flakes colored wreath. Our efforts ended up in the trash later that evening, but it was festive while it lasted.

Our other attempt at Holiday baking seemed to come together at little better than the other one. Surely, it's almost impossible to go wrong with chocolate on chocolate. My sister-in-law apparently has never really baked before, but she did a great job. I am also, admittedly, a little difficult to work with in the kitchen, and I was proud of myself for not letting my over-bearing and controlling tendencies get the best of me. I made the ganache while she rolled out the dough. Lovely, easy cookies that everyone seemed to love.

Once the cookies were finished, Niek and his brother finished decorating our tree. Without my brother-in-law and sister-in-law we wouldn't have any cookies, and I'm pretty sure our tree would still be bare. Nothing like Christmas and baking to bring a family together.

I just got Baked!

2011-12-19T22:19:00.001+01:00

My parents are flying in at the end of the week, but they sent a box of gifts ahead in the mail. The problem with a reading family is that most people ask for books as presents, and those tend to set suitcases over their weight restrictions rather quickly. None of the books were wrapped yet, and I saw that one of the cookbooks I requested was in the box: Baked New Frontiers in Baking. OMG (am I allowed to write that? Maybe I should also write that I luv it and think it's gr8). So excited to try out some new recipes--after this coming Thursday's Christmas cookie extravaganza, of course.
Until I'm ready for a kitchen post, here is a picture of le bebe after our walk today. I've been afraid to walk with her in the wrap, but our strolls have been cut to a minimum due to a certain miss cranky pants not loving extended periods in the stroller. Luckily, my friend sent her a slightly too large pair of fleece pants. Perfect as an outer layer during our chilly jaunts outdoors.

Bring on the cold, North Sea. My baby's ready for it.

Thanksgiving abroad

2011-11-29T10:31:00.001+01:00

Unlike in America, I did not get to celebrate Thanksgiving last Thursday. In some ways I wish the American cultural imperialism that Europeans are so fond of disdaining would also apply to Thanksgiving. Who wouldn't want to celebrate such a glorious holiday? Maybe it's because they don't like to watch (real) football here. Turkey and family with a side of Packers/Lions is a nice way to spend a cold, Thursday afternoon. Our big gathering was Saturday instead, and it turned out pretty well. Preparation only involved one trip to the American store this year. Buying canned pumpkin cut down the time it took to make a pie by at least half, thank goodness. Have you ever tried baking two pies with a ten week old? Try explaining to a baby that no, mom can't pick you up right now or she'll overcook the eggs for the custard filling. It did not go over well. But we both survived and got some pretty good pies out of it, too.

Despite assurances from the poelier that there would be a turkey ready on Thursday for pick-up, my father-in-law was sadly informed that some other person had bought his reserved turkey earlier in the day. Confusing to all involved, unless there is some other Dutch guy with the same name wishing to have Thanksgiving at the exact same time. Instead of twelve pounds of turkey, we ended up with a 15 1/2 lb. turkey (the only one the poulterer could arrange on such short notice). I'm not opposed to a bigger bird, really I'm not, it's just that they don't fit in the oven. The one we got fit, but just barely. And I mean that--the breast roasted about half an inch from the top of the oven's heating element. I'm shocked the white meat didn't turn into a dried out, jerky-like disaster. I supposed I have tin foil, a little bit of luck, and plenty of butter to thank that it was a success.

And thanks to the mysterious stranger, who bought our turkey, we had plenty of leftovers for the next day (and the next, and a carcass for soup too!). Niek wanted to know the proper protocol for making a sandwich for lunch. I'm not one to smush all the side dishes between two pieces of bread. Just give me a little meat with some good mayo and I'll call it a day. Lets all praise the deliciousness of Dutch mayo. So good! Do you see Niek diving into the mayo jar? Yeah, just as it should be.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I can't believe it's almost December. Did someone say cookie recipes?

Why I sometimes miss Target...

2011-11-18T16:36:00.001+01:00

Step 1: Bundle up baby. In the process, cause baby to start screaming. Unbundle baby and calm her down. Re-bundle baby and put her in the stroller. Hear baby start crying. Respond wryly, "Sorry, baby. It's time to stop living like shut-ins and go get these errands done."

Step 2: Walk to tram stop. Pick up stroller with baby in it and walk up a flight of stairs to the platform. Ride in tram for fifteen minutes.

Step 3: Walk to the "green" supermarket that sells the dishwashing liquid I like.

Step 4: Walk to my favorite coffee place. Realize I have to walk five minutes out of my way, because I can't get to the coffee place that is literally across the street from where I'm standing due to construction on the tram tracks.

Step 5: Drink coffee and eat almond paste-filled cookie. Decide the five minute detour was well worth it.

Step 6: Walk ten minutes to another grocery store to get carrots for dinner recipe. Sing the praises of Dutch design as my small stroller fits between parked cars on the incredibly narrow sidewalks. Curse the Dutch for having such uneven and narrow sidewalks

Step 7: Walk five more minutes to the drugstore to buy toothpaste and shower gel.

Step 8: Five more minutes of walking (ugh I'm so tired) to the HEMA (kind of like Target but sooo much smaller, and they only sell their own brand of goods) for a baby brush and hand soap. Wait in line while baby starts screaming. Look apologetic while feeling annoyed that the lines are so long.

Step 9: Walk to tram stop and ride in it for ten minutes.

Step 10: Hoist stroller with baby and various bags of life's necessities down the flight of stairs. Wonder how people with mobility issues ever get anywhere.

Step 11: Arrive home. Unbundle pissed off baby. Crash on couch. Fantasize about hiring live-in help. Realize that is not an option. Feel triumphant about getting out of the house and completing all errands.

Easy Chocolate

2011-11-10T21:24:00.002+01:00

I fear that too often this blog becomes just a long litany of the things I find wrong with the Netherlands. It's true that I do tend to write when I'm upset about something. Take yesterday, when I came home crying after three teenagers laughed at me. I was walking behind them on my way home from the store when one of the girls tossed her empty energy drink can into the bushes. (What is it with those energy drinks?) I'd like to think that most people would say something when confronted with such a blatant act of littering, and I did. Maybe my Dutch sounded terrible, or maybe they were just assholes. Either way, they looked at me laughed in my face and just kept walking. I did tell them in English that they were assholes as I walked past them, and I'm not sure they understood me. I'm not sure why I let three teenagers get under my skin, but I cried about it off and on for a good hour.

It was nothing that a bout of baking couldn't fix, which is the reason I found myself going to the store in the first place. My brother-in-law and his girlfriend were coming to dinner, and it was high time for me to get back into the kitchen and dust off those baking skills of mine. I picked a nice and easy chocolate cake for our mid-week meal, one that didn't even involve melting chocolate. The recipe didn't even need a mixer, just two bowls and a box of really good cocoa powder. In the world of chocolate, I know the Belgians get top billing, but when you think of cocoa, you really have to go to the Dutch--all because of that famous "Dutch process" some inventive nineteenth century Dutchman came up with. I took Niek at his word a few years ago when he told me the Dutch were the largest exporters of cocoa in the world. Apparently, the Dutch really are that important when it comes to moving cocoa all over the world (with 25 percent of the world market), although I hope they thank their growers in West Africa. (If you're bored, you can check out this study done on the demand for Nigerian cocoa in the Dutch market. So many Dutch companies tied up in the economic developments of that country.) This is all to say that it's easy to find good cocoa here, easier even than in the States. Also, I love the packaging. Check out the sweet looking nurse on the front of the Droste box:

Full disclosure: I ended up using the last of the fancy cocoa from Fassbender & Rausch, which is not Dutch process cocoa. It felt so great to make a cake again. It was an easy three layer cake, and I think prepping the cake tins took longer than mixing the batter.

My assistant was less than helpful.

The baking time should have been twenty-five minutes, but it ended up taking three times that long thanks to my tiny oven. It really is a pain to bake only one layer at a time. I should be grateful that we have an oven, since landlord's aren't required to provide one. I think it turned out well in the end.

Gobble, gobble

2011-11-04T09:18:00.000+01:00

Two years ago I didn't make any plans to celebrate Thanksgiving. I didn't think it would bother me, and I didn't think it was possible to find a turkey here. I was completely wrong on both counts.

Last year thinking that I had prepared enough in advance, I ordered a 10 lb. turkey from a butcher at the Albert Cuyp Market three weeks before the big day. The day I went to pick it up, I had my choice between two birds: a 7 lb. turkey or a 17 lb. turkey. What oven in the Netherlands is big enough to fit a 17 lb. turkey, I would like to know. So there I was, two days before our meal, stuck with the scrawny one. That butcher will never get my business again. The meal was a success, but there were no leftovers for sandwiches, which everyone knows is the best part.

This year, my father-in-law and I started making provisional plans in August. Yes, in August. He buys his chickens from a fabulous butcher, who specializes in poultry and wild game. The word in Dutch for such a butcher is a poelier. According to my dictionary, it's called a poulterer in English, but I'll admit that I've never used that word before. Before moving here, I never had the need to go to a butcher to buy a turkey, although I sometimes bought chicken from my "chicken lady" at the farmer's market. I guess I should have called her my poulterer. Anyway, my father-in-law's poelier assured him that she could get us a good bird, guaranteed to be the right size. Here I am, then, three weeks away from our big feast, making my shopping list and remaining calm as the "to do" list for the day keeps growing. Yea for Thanksgiving plans!

Transportation irritation

2011-10-31T16:36:00.002+01:00

Not too long ago I realized that I have been driving a car for more than half of my life. As a girl growing up in the boonies of the rural Midwest, getting a driver's license was a pivotal moment. I can imagine teenagers living in densely populated urban centers also feel a great sense of accomplishment when they pass the driving test--a milestone moment in American culture to be sure--but it's so much more than a rite of passage when you live in a sea of cornfields. It means that you finally have the freedom to get out of those cornfields. I don't live in rural America anymore (or Los Angeles for that matter), and my need for a car has been drastically reduced. In fact, I'm not legally allowed to drive a car here. The Dutch government has deemed that my American driver's license is not transferable, and I'd have to go through a rather expensive process to get a Dutch license, so I just don't drive our car. This has never been an issue for me, because I absolutely love my bicycle. Correction, it never was an issue for me until I had a baby and could no longer hop on my bicycle to run errands or basically go anywhere.

Funny thing about babies, you can't leave them at home even just for a quick trip to the store. Also, newborn babies can't ride their own bicycles. This leaves me with three options for getting around: walk and carry her, walk and push her in a stroller, take the tram. I utilize all three of these options, although walking takes a long time. Public transportation in Amsterdam is pretty good, and I can get just about anywhere, but it still takes longer than riding a bicycle and something about the hustle and bustle of it all exhausts me. Last week I needed to go to the store to get cabbage for a recipe. It was a lovely fall day, and I enjoyed the walk to the grocer, but the whole process took about an hour. I could have accomplished the same task on my bike in about fifteen minutes. I am happy I got out of the house and got to enjoy all of this, even if it felt like it took forever to run a simple errand:

Super cute baby, just hanging out in the stroller.

The park I have to walk through to get to the store.


Enjoying some nice color on the trees.

I couldn't help but think about how much longer everything takes, not just because of the baby, but also because I have no car and I now essentially have no bike. It makes me feel a little cut off from the world. Going somewhere requires so much more time and effort now that my transportation choices have been reduced. Granted, it's still pretty easy to get around, so I am not really isolated. I can't begin to imagine how I would feel if I were living near my parents in rural Indiana without a car. I don't even know how I would get to the store. Here I'm just annoyed that I can't easily bike to my favorite coffee place to get some work done (not that I'm getting a lot of work done with a baby). Now that Johanna is getting a little bigger we take her along in the car for our big weekend grocery shopping trips. For the first month, Niek did the weekly shopping by himself, leaving me at home with the baby. Talk about feeling left out. Until Johanna is old enough to sit in a bike seat, I'll be taking it slow. Perhaps it's good that I have to walk everywhere since I can't leave a little baby at home alone to go for my runs. Once she has good enough head control, watch out. We'll be whizzing by on our sweet, two-wheeled ride. Maybe something like this fancy, blue number I saw on my walk.

Happy Halloween, everyone! Enjoy the costumes and candy! No costumes in the Netherlands but here is a picture of me and Johanna hanging out in our cloud pjs, which are kind of like costumes, right?

Comfort Food

2011-10-13T18:17:00.000+02:00

Now that the weather has turned the corner and has decidedly committed to a fall forecast, we've shifted our menu to one better suited for sweaters and early evenings. Something about those first crisp days just makes me want to get my soup pot out and warm up the oven. In general, fall foods are just a bit more comforting--probably because they employ the use of a lot more butter and heavier meats. Unfortunately, we've had other reasons to need a little comfort food around here lately. Our wonderful dog was rushed to the vet a week and a half ago, and after undergoing a battery of tests we learned that his kidneys were not operating well. Despite the grim news and an overnight stay at the vet, he returned home much happier and more vital. We were told that he could live many years with his condition, but it was not to be. He died very suddenly on Monday. I didn't know it was possible to feel so heartbroken, and Niek and I have had a very difficult week. We're sad that he's gone, and we're especially sad that our daughter will never get to know him.

Newborns, I have learned, leave very little time to wallow in grief; diapers still need to be changed and hungry babies wait for no man. For all the seemingly mundane tasks of early motherhood I am grateful. Even with a little one capitalizing on all my waking hours, I felt compelled to take the time to make at least a little food to make us feel better. That is why I forced my tired self into the kitchen yesterday to put on a huge pot of chili. Even more importantly for me, I found the time to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies. While a good friend of mine sat on the couch holding my baby, I stood in the kitchen baking cookies with my imported supply of baking supplies. It all felt so wonderfully calm and normal to make such an easy recipe even if I also felt rundown and sleep-deprived.

Making recipes from my childhood did make me wonder what the Dutch consider comfort food. The day we took Dantes to the vet, my father-in-law came over and made stewed rabbit with egg noodles. I would put that in the category of comfort food (definitely amazing food) but I wouldn't call the recipe typically Dutch. I asked Niek about this last night, and he couldn't come up with a single dish. I thought it might be something like stampot, the dish of mashed potatoes with kale and smoked sausage. Maybe a nice apple pie? Whatever the Dutch comfort foods might be, I'm not sure I will ever turn to them in a time of crisis no matter how long I live here. When I have an emotional emergency, I'm pretty sure I'll always turn to the foods of my youth. I'm surprised I didn't make a casserole. If they sold condensed cream of mushroom soup here, I probably would have. If there were to be a cornerstone ingredient for American comfort food, I do believe that would be it.

While we miss our sweet pup, our lives continue to be very full and busy. I am grateful for all the good things in my life, and I'm grateful for my kitchen when I need a little cheering up.

Suriname in Amsterdam

2011-09-29T17:23:00.001+02:00

This is the very last thing I ate before I went into labor and had a baby:

I'm afraid the picture does not do this meal justice. In fact, the picture makes it seem a little unappetizing. Believe me, however, when I say that this is probably one of the most delicious take-away dishes I've ever had in my life. It's called Roti Kip, and it's a Surinamese specialty. "What the hell is Surinamese food?" you might be asking yourself. To be honest, that's what I wondered the first time a friend of mine served up a delicious helping of chicken, potatoes, green beans, and warm potato pancakes. I wish I could answer in detail what Surinamese cuisine is like, but my knowledge is mostly limited to what you see in the picture above. However, I always appreciate seeing some good flavors of the Caribbean foisted onto the traditionally bland food of the Low Countries.

I love Roti Kip, and during the latter part of my pregnancy we ate it fairly often. That's saying a lot for people who never go out to eat. There's just something so amazingly comforting and filling about this dish--probably the breaded and deep fried goodness of the food. My concept of modern Dutch cuisine has changed so much in the last three years. Mostly I see, at least in the urban centers, that there are vibrant infusions of flavors from other parts of the world. It actually took me quite a while to notice that there is a market for all those different flavors, even in "mainstream" Dutch food. That is something to be celebrated in a way, although it's accompanied for me with a wave of guilt about European colonialism, which is strange because I'm not even Dutch. Why should I feel guilty about Dutch colonialism? Maybe it's because I don't think the Dutch public feels very guilty about it, so I feel like I should apologize on behalf of others. It reminds me of the time I took a post-colonial historiography class, and I was the only Europeanist in the room. When I walked into that seminar every week, I felt like I should profusely apologize for even wanting to study European history. Obviously, I shouldn't have to apologize for studying Europe, but there's only so much talk about "the other" and dominance a girl can take before she wears down a bit. Regardless, I can come to terms with it enough to enjoy ordering a serving of chicken for dinner. And why should I not? It's absolutely delicious.

When I return to a less zombie-like state--someone please tell me that will happen sooner or later--I will actually start to cook again for pleasure instead of purely for survival. I may even try to make my own Roti Kip. I just stumbled on a recipe for it on this blog. Her photography is so beautiful. I feel like I could make anything if the step-by-step instructions were always that gorgeous.

And, obviously, I will leave you with a pic of an adorable baby. She's so cute!

Biscuits with Little Mice

2011-09-18T21:34:00.002+02:00

One of my followers sent me an e-mail yesterday to ask where I've been (Hi, Steve!). I've been meaning to put up a post for the last two weeks, ever since we got back from our vacation in California. Two Friday nights ago in the throes of some horrible jet lag, I even made a list of posts I was going to write for the rest of September. I felt great (despite my sleep-deprived state) and couldn't wait to get started during the weekend. Everything was coming together: we'd just had a wonderful vacation, Niek's family was coming over the next day to help us move furniture and get the baby room together, I was almost done with a good draft of a chapter for my advisor...and then this happened...

Our daughter, Johanna, decided to make her appearance four weeks early and only two days after coming back from our vacation, I might add. She didn't come when we expected, and almost nothing about her birth or the subsequent days thereafter has gone according to our "plan," but we are truly over the moon about our little girl.

We ended up in the hospital for the birth instead of home like we had planned, but the hospital staff made sure that we had the obligatory post-birth food: beschuit met muisjes (translated as rusk with little mice). Rusk is a type of rebaked bread and the muisjes are anise seeds dipped in a candy shell. The muisjes are held on the bread with a bit of butter. They're served because, apparently, anise is good for milk production. I did point out that beer was also traditionally believed to be good for breastmilk, and my midwife responded by saying that I could have one if I wanted. I passed for the time being.

So now we're home and adjusting to life as a family of three (plus the dog, don't forget the dog). We have beschuit met muisjes on hand for all of our visitors. Time to get some of those other blog posts up, although they might have to wait a little longer. Apparently having a newborn baby is kind of exhausting.

Baby Beer

2011-08-12T18:14:00.001+02:00

About two weeks ago Niek and I took a trip to the baby mega-store, known here as Prénatal. I imagine it's probably something like the American behemoth, Babies"R"Us, except on a much smaller scale. We had yet to visit the place, and we only went for one thing: the free box of crap they give you. If you sign up and agree to have annoying e-mails sent to your inbox, probably for the rest of your kid's life, Prénatal will send you a voucher for "The Happy Box." I didn't really think much of the name, until Niek informed me that "box" can also be used as a euphemism for female genitalia in Dutch. Got to love the marketing genius who came up with the free giveaway. So, we made our way to to the superstore cracking jokes about my happy box along the way.

We didn't buy anything, and we spent very little time looking around. I just wanted my free stuff. Lots of standard things in the package: coupons for things I didn't need, advertisements for things I didn't want, a few newborn diapers, a pacifier, blah, blah, blah. But then, at the bottom, I spotted something pretty amazing. Among the ruins of ads for shampoo and formula were two miniature cans of this:

That's right. I got two cans of alcohol-free beer in my free box of baby stuff. And not just any beer, witbier. It almost tastes like actual beer, but it doesn't quite cut it. I'm not going to complain, though. I never would have thought that I would be getting beer, even the non-alcohol kind, in a box intended for pregnant ladies. Do you think they would put something like this in a giveaway for pregnant women in America? I'm going to say no, but it's a great idea. What a great market for this product. It really made my trip to the superstore worth it.

Hamburger Haven

2011-08-09T16:20:00.000+02:00

For the past few months, the barrista at our café downstairs has been asking me every time I come in how I am feeling and if I am having any strong pregnancy cravings. I understand why she asks me how I'm doing; I complain constantly about my sloth-like activity levels these days. It's the question about the cravings that has me a little confused. Isn't that stuff all a myth, the pickles and ice cream stuff? Actually, here the it's not pickles and ice cream, it's herring and whipped cream. Whatever turn of phrase you'd like to use for pregnant women's eating habits, I hadn't noticed any significant changes in my food cravings...until a few weeks ago when I couldn't stop thinking about meat. It's seriously become an almost out of control issue for me. My sensible dinner menus based heavily around grains and vegetables have given way to crazy last-minute trips to the grocery store for a steak, simply because the thought of eating whole-wheat pasta suddenly becomes abhorrent to me. I've made all my best recipes involving black beans or lentils, but even that hasn't helped. There are days I feel like Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby when she tears into her steak prepared bleu while creepy music plays in the background. It's been like that around here, except that my steak isn't raw, we don't play music with screeching violins on our stereo, and as far as I know the fetus doesn't share any DNA with the devil.

All of this to say in my very roundabout way that on Friday evening during our run, I turned to Niek and said I really felt like a hamburger. Actually, maybe he suggested it first, but I definitely thought that a hamburger was a great idea. Problem: Dutch people do not appreciate good burgers or know how to make them. Since there is no Hamburger Habit equivalent anywhere nearby, Niek and I decided to make burgers at home...without a grill...seriously, without a grill.

Armed with my trusty Cook's Illustrated America's Best Recipes (which is looking pretty well-used these days), I tried to do this institution of American cooking justice. CI offers pages and pages of commentary on creating the best grilled burgers and throws in a recipe for cooking burgers in a pan for the "high-rise dwellers" at the end of the section, but you can feel the pity oozing from the page. Yes, poor me and the regulations that don't permit an open flame on my balcony. Also, grills here are expensive!

My favorite part of the evening came when Niek and I were standing in the supermarket. He picked up the pre-made burgers, and I balked at the price. Why should I pay more per kilo for meat cut with filler when I can make a patty myself in about thirty seconds? Salt, pepper, shape patty and you are finished. I think it never occurred to him to make his own. As far as I can tell, it doesn't occur to most Dutch people to make their own burgers. I've been to a few backyard barbecues here, and I've only ever seen the pre-packaged patties.

After seven minutes in my fabulous cast iron pan (3 1/2 minutes per side as per the CI directions), we set to work making our double cheeseburgers. No hamburger buns here, but the ciabatta rolls from the store were a decent substitute. We may have gone a little crazy stacking them:

According to Heston Blumenthal, crazy British chef that he is, hamburgers shouldn't be more than two fingers high. As you can see, we failed that test by a rather large margin. Still, it satisfied my craving for a hamburger. We watched Heston Blumenthals' In Search of Perfection hamburger episode and laughed at his hoity-toity burger. Um, if I were going to use American cheese slices, I wouldn't make them myself with a pound of comté and a bottle of expensive wine. This is the Netherlands, so we opted for the simple solution of Gouda. It was a good burger. I'm afraid we're going to be eating them a little more often in the coming weeks.

I never had this problem in L.A...

2011-07-15T15:38:00.001+02:00

Probably because I never rode my bike anywhere. I attended a lecture a few weeks ago in the center of the city, and when I went to go unlock my bike, I was greeted by this.

At least I can be grateful that I have a cover on my saddle. Actually, I'm a little surprised it took three years for a bird to poop on my bike. I hope it takes at least three more for it to happen again.

Parisian Weekend (a.k.a. pictures of food)

2011-07-12T15:25:00.000+02:00

Niek and I just got back from our mini-vacation in Paris. As we packed up the car, I was filled with this sense of amazement that I actually live close enough to drive to Paris. We usually pop down when some good friends fly over. This time, our friends happened to be working with a group of college students for a study abroad program. That left them quite busy but with just enough time to squeeze in a few socializing days with us. We didn't make it to any of the big art collections this time, but if you're in Paris and you're in the mood for a different kind of museum, I can recommend the Musée des arts et métiers (or as my friend likes to call it, the museum of arts and meters). We're all big nerds, so we enjoyed looking at the air pumps on display and the recreation of Lavoisier's laboratory. The highlight was supposed to be a working model of Foucault's pendulum, but someone at the museum was too lazy to set up all the metal cylinders along the perimeter. Still, who doesn't like to see the earth rotating?

I have a tendency of only taking pictures of food while on vacation. I think that happens because I'm usually so busy enjoying myself, I only pull out my camera while sitting and resting. Sitting only seems to happen at restaurants or bars. Hence the lack of pictures of anything other than us stuffing our faces. I think though, that you can really appreciate some of the amazing food we found in Paris.

Niek and I were both in the mood for some Asian cuisine, and Paris did not disappoint. Our first night we went to Happy Noodle, a tiny establishment packed with customers dining on gigantic bowls of soup. The noodles are made by hand and were probably the best I've ever had. When we arrived the guy was rolling dough out by the window and cutting it into noodles. I didn't think to take a picture until we were finished eating, and by that time he was finished.

The last time I was in Paris all I wanted was an almond croissant, but I unfortunately never got one. On our first morning, we made it priorité nombre un to get a croissant and a cup of coffee. Oh, sweet heaven, that was some good almond paste wrapped up in buttery goodness.

On Friday we got to tag along on one of the study abroad program's walking tours of the city. I wasn't at all sure what to expect, especially with a group of 41 students. 41! They all seemed like such sweet people, though, and made our walk around the Bastille and Gare de Lyon even more fun. Now that I live in Amsterdam and have no teaching duties, I miss interacting with twenty-year olds. Halfway through the tour, we stopped off for lunch. After consuming a savory North African pancake, I had no room left for the sweet pastries my friend bought with her lunch. Don't they look so beautiful in the display case?

What would a trip to Paris be without a bit of French cuisine? I'll just let the photos speak for themselves. Amazing, cozy restaurant with the friendliest wait staff and great food. We got there around 7:45 on Friday night and just beat the dinner rush. Lucky we arrived when we did, or we would not have gotten a table.

Niek ordered one of the house specialties as his first course: Foie Gras de Canard

Amazing bottle of wine. A little sad that I could only have one glass of it.

I did not know that my steak would come drenched in this creamy sauce. It was pretty amazing.

My camera remained firmly in my bag all day on Saturday (the day we went to the museum). That was also the day we hit the children's clothing stores in the afternoon, and I think I would have felt a little weird taking pictures of onesies and teeny tiny sweaters. After an exhausting afternoon of oohing and ahhing over baby couture, we had our final dinner of the trip at a fabulous Thai restaurant. No pics (too tired and ravenous), but I tell you it hit the spot. I could go for some more of the squid salad that I ordered.

Sunday was our last morning. Niek and I had one more almond croissant after we packed up our car. We grabbed a few sandwiches for lunch at the bakery across the street from the hotel and hit the Montparnasse Cemetery as our final activity for the vacation. I had no idea how many famous people are buried there. Père-Lachaise gets all the attention, but this one is equally as cool. Highly recommend.

There were too many graves we wanted to visit and not enough time, so we had to make a priority list.

My friend is a sucker for Baudelaire's poetry. I'll try not to mock her for this.

My favorite grave from the inventor of a safe gas lamp. See, he's reading in bed by the light of his own invention.

Au revoir, Paris and our amazing friends! Although too short, it was an amazing vacation. I can't believe it's over already.

Taco Salads

2011-07-06T15:42:00.001+02:00

The summer weather can be hit or miss here; some days we have sun and warm temps and other days, well…all I can say is that it’s the Netherlands. I knew I wasn’t signing on for weeks of heat and humidity in the summer when I moved here, but every once in a while I have a craving for a sticky day. I read this post, and it just brought back memories of taking my dog out to the breeder's property a few evenings a week in the summer to train him to hunt. I loved those evenings in St. Louis when the heat of the day (although not the humidity) suddenly seemed to ease up. Once I got home from training, I would pour myself a big glass of lemonade and be thankful my apartment had air-conditioning.

Oh, lemonade, just one of the things I can’t get here. Also, no one believes in ice cubes. For the most part, I don’t whine about the foods I can’t get here. Wait, do I? Maybe I whine here on the blog more than I do in real life. During my first year in Amsterdam, I would get deeply upset about the unavailability of certain products—the hunt for cake flour was a particularly difficult moment. As all ex-pats must learn, and as I've said before, you either learn to roll with the unavailability of certain goods, or you decide to fight against the “system.” If you choose the latter, you will live in a constant state of misery and never truly learn to appreciate all the great things about living in a foreign country. I might add that learning to love Dutch food—I’m not so sure that I would go so far as to say I love it—does not stop me from bringing back a suitcase full of the comforts of home every time I go to the U.S. I already have a list for our trip to California in August, and you had better believe it includes such necessities as King Arthur flour, vanilla extract, and chocolate chips.

But what about all the foods I can’t transport in my suitcase? What about all those freshly made meals that don’t seem to be available, because the Dutch don’t appreciate/know about them? Anyone who has been around me in the last few years knows how obsessed I am with taco salads. I blame Los Angeles for this. All those Mexican restaurants spread out across the city can’t help but invite you in with their colorful tablecloths and fresh salsa bars. If you then give me an amazing combination of crisp salad, creamy guacamole, beans, and steak all warmly held together in a fried tortilla bowl, how can I not help but fall in love? I had never had anything like it before moving to SoCal, and I do miss it here on occasion. A few weeks ago when the warm weather hit, I started getting really intense cravings for taco salads, and I have done my very best to create my own rendition here. What I have ended up making is like the imprint of an imprint of a taco salad. It’s absolutely not the same, but it will suffice for the time being. We use store-bought taco shells instead of making our own taco bowls, and I am ashamed to admit that I put shredded gouda on the salad. To be honest, I accept my version of it because the avocados have been decent lately, and any sort of salad and bean combo tastes better when smothered in guacamole. We've eaten taco salads for dinner at least once a week for the past few weeks and sometimes we eat them twice a week. Man, do we know how to live it up, or what?

The rest of my summer cravings will have to wait for August. In particular, I’m looking at you pitcher of lemonade and heirloom tomato salad with a side of grilled steak. (Before someone points it out: I know I could make lemonade myself, but it would be expensive and would not flood me with childhood memories of mixing the concentrate with water in my mom’s special pitcher. And yes, I’m sure some fancy market here sells heirloom tomatoes, but I guarantee no one here knows how to grill steak like an American. Well, maybe someone does, but I have yet to be invited to that house for a backyard barbeque.)

Hollandse Nieuwe

2011-06-21T12:36:00.002+02:00

It’s the middle of June, and that can only mean one thing (actually that could mean anything, but for a blog about food in the Netherlands, it means something pretty special)…it’s time for Hollandse Nieuwe. Mmm, Hollandse Nieuwe.

This delicacy of the Atlantic is known as herring to the uninitiated, and more specifically, Hollandse Nieuwe refers to the first catch of the season. The resemblance to the herring of my childhood is negligible, not that I have a really clear picture of it in my mind anymore. I just remember an unsightly gray mass always present at family gatherings next to the pickles and olives, a pile of pickled fish from a jar I consciously avoided on my way to the chips and seven-layer taco dip. Dutch herring goes through some sort of salt curing process and arrives to the consumer nicely filleted and in a fairly fresh state. The season only lasts about six weeks, but they freeze a lot of the stock to sell throughout the rest of the year. I missed the season last year, because I was back in the States for eight weeks. No way was I going to miss it again this summer. While most people in the line ordered it as a snack, complete with the requisite chopped onions, I got mine nicely packaged up for dinner that night. Look at this adorable bag:

If you take a look at the first picture from this newspaper article, you can see the “traditional” way Dutch people eat herring—all in one go—but I have never seen it served that way here in Amsterdam. The fishmonger usually cuts it up nicely for you so you can enjoy each little piece while sitting on a bench watching the bicycles go by. That’s what the tourists usually do, anyway. While some people may not think that pieces of herring with onions sounds good, it is actually pretty amazing. The bite of the onions offers a nice contrast to the fatty fish. Man, just writing this is making me want to go order one.

Apparently it is a good year for the little fish. The ones I bought were huge! I bought two of the little suckers for dinner, but we ended up only eating one and saving the other one for our appetizer (yeah, like we usually have appetizers before dinner) the next night. It’s one of those fresh foods I wish I could somehow bottle up and send to people so they could know just how good it is. Since that’s not possible, you should all come visit me in the next few weeks before the season ends.

Summertime quiche

2011-06-14T15:01:00.001+02:00

Is there something about summer that makes people want to be productive in the kitchen? I have been on some sort of weird cooking/baking bender as of late, and I have plenty of pictures to prove it. Too bad I haven't been posting those pictures. After letting these sit in my camera for a month, I finally decided today would be the day I would finally upload them.

Is it a procrastination technique in progress? You betcha. I haaaaaate the chapter I am editing and want to avoid looking at the mess on the page. I think I dislike editing in general, but I've returned to a chapter I sort of gave up on about nine months ago, and what I wrote then is not very pretty or even coherent. The voice of reason inside my head tells me that avoiding my chapter is not going to make it go away, and it will probably make my anxiety worse. That is so true, and I hate my inner voice of reason for that, which is why I'll suppress it for about twenty more minutes.

Back to more interesting things, like quiche. I am totally in love with this recipe from Piece of Cake, and I just throw in whatever vegetables happen to look good at the market. Lately, it's been things like carrots and leeks, but I'll see where the summer takes me. Quiche from start to finish: as easy as 1,2,3,4

Ah, delicious dinner, brought to me through the joy of using my rolling pin and my pie plate. I don't really know what I would do without my American pie plates. How do the Dutch cope without them or regular cake tins, for that matter? Actually, I'm pretty sure they bake 99% of their cake/pie/quiche concoctions in springform pans. Finding a cake tin that does not come with removable sides involves some good sleuthing skills (until you find the large cooking store in Amsterdam, at which point you cry out of happiness and learn that all searches for baking supplies should forever after start there). So I am sure that if your kitchen does not house the "exotic" pie plate, you could make this quiche, too.

Just out of amusement, I took a picture of our dinner menu for that week. It looks like a love letter to the god of carbohydrates. In case you can't read it, here is the menu:

Sat) Pizza

Sun) Vegetable quiche

Mon) Pasta with pesto

Tues) N[iek] not eating at home

Wed) Zucchini soup with puffed pastry vegetable tarts

Thurs) Pasta with vegetables

Fri) Black bean tacos

Is pasta twice a week overkill? When I lived in L.A. I ate it maybe four times a week. I suppose I can chalk it up to life of a student and all that that entails. I'm still a student, kind of, so I see pasta twice a week as a major improvement.

Food and Pregnancy

2011-05-30T17:05:00.002+02:00

As I have navigated the waters of prenatal care in the Netherlands, I have made my mental comparisons with with food suggestions/restrictions found in the U.S. Of course, my knowledge about the U.S. comes solely from my friends with kids and the sometimes scarily paranoid women from thebump.com's message boards. So, I try to make my comparisons with a grain of salt. During my first visit with my midwife (pregnant women don't see an OBGYN here unless there is a medical issue) and again during a less than entertaining "Enlightenment Evening" program I was required to attend in my first trimester, I learned what it was that the Dutch medical community, not to mention the Dutch government, thought it best for pregnant women to eat. I translated some of the highlights from the government website (kind of like the USDA) for the blog:

General guidelines according to the website:

· Eat according to the “Disk of Five.” *It's like the food pyramid, and I love how important bread is. I was told at my meeting that pregnant women should aim for six pieces of bread a day.

· Drink 2 to 3 glasses of milk and 1-2 pieces of cheese per day. Instead of milk you can have buttermilk, a yogurt drink, chocolate milk, yogurt or vla (kind of like pudding).

· Get enough iron, for example from whole grain bread and red meat. Eat foods rich in vitamin C during meals to help with iron absorption.

· A vegetarian diet is fine. Make sure you get enough B-vitamins and iron.

· Artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, are not harmful during pregnancy. *Women on thebump.com freak out about this all the time.

· Too much vitamin A can be harmful to a fetus. Therefore, don’t eat more than 3000 mcg of vitamin A per day. This pertains to animal products and supplements. Because there is so much vitamin A in liver, it’s best not to eat it during pregnancy. *My Dutch pregnancy book notes that the vitamin A found in things like butter or margarine doesn’t pose a risk.

Here are the things best avoided:

· Sandwich toppings: don’t eat more than one sandwich with liver products, like paté, per day

· Coffie: the maximum number of cups of coffee per day should be 4 because of the caffeine. Tea and cola also contain caffeine, but from these products you shouldn’t drink more than eight glasses (assuming you don’t also drink coffee). *I should note that a glass of soda here is about 8 oz., which is way less than what you would get in a restaurant in the States.

· Fish: Fish is very healthy. But don’t eat:

o Vacuum-sealed fish found in the refrigerated section like smoked salmon, eel, mussels (these can be eaten if cooked first)

o Raw fish or shellfish, like oysters *Although the website states this, I was told by the midwife that raw fish is perfectly fine if I know that it’s fresh.

o Swordfish, Bluefin tuna, shark, or king mackerel.

o Eel from Dutch rivers *What does that say about Dutch rivers?

o Fatty fish no more than twice a week, because of the dioxins *During my "Elightenment Evening" we were told that fatty fish, like herring, is good to eat.

· Meat: no raw meats (like steak tartar, carpaccio) and liver

· Licorice: Don’t eat too much licorice or drink too much licorice tea. *Gross. I promise not to eat too much licorice.

There were other things on the list that I expected to see, which I didn't include here (just the usual suspects, like "get enough folic acid," and "don't drink alcohol or consume drugs"). All in all, however, the list feels less restrictive to me than what I've observed in the U.S., but as I said before, I'm looking at the American dietary suggestions from afar. I do think that the most striking differences between here and the U.S. were the suggestions for bread and dairy products (so many!) coupled with the much more lax attitude about caffeine consumption. In fact, it feels to me like it's a more lax attitude about consuming potentially harmful things (like *gasp* sushi) than what I've gathered about attitudes in the U.S. I don't really know how restricted pregnant women feel in America, but I do know that I was once chastised by a pregnant friend during a chat session for suggesting she get a cup of coffee when she said she really wanted one. Seriously, I got a mini-lecture about caffeine and low birth weight. There are plenty of suggestions for diet here, but most of them verge more on moderation instead of complete exclusion. Again, that could be my interpretation of it, as that corresponds more with my philosophy about healthy eating during pregnancy. If I were in the U.S., I'd probably eat the same way I do here, regardless of my health provider’s suggestions.

I do wonder if the seemingly more permissive attitude about diet during pregnancy has to do with the fact that healthy, pregnant women are monitored here less in general. During the first half of my pregnancy, I have seen my midwife twice, never had an internal exam, been weighed once, and have already had the last of my two routine ultrasounds. Other than that, I've pretty much been left to just go live my life. Obviously, I can call my midwife at any time if I have concerns or a problem, but I was told that there really is no need to see me if everything feels fine. As the weeks go by I'll see my midwife more, but she won't weigh me (I haven't come across a single weight gain recommendation beyond the standard, "don't eat as if you are eating for two"), and I won't have another ultrasound unless there appears to be a problem. I happen to like this hand-off approach but could see plenty of women not enjoying it, and there have been a handful of times I have wished that it was routine to see my midwife more often, if only just to listen to the heartbeat. (Sidenote: I was told by the midwife at my last appointment that I could always call and make an appointment to do just that if it would ease my mind, but I've never felt that I truly needed to do it. Trust me, I would call if I wanted to or felt I needed to.)

One of my friends jokingly asks me if I get in my six pieces of bread a day, and I'm afraid to let the Dutch authorities know that that usually doesn't happen. I guess as long as I stay away from the raw meat and keep it under four cups of coffee, they won't send anyone in for me, but that would be true no matter where I lived. In the end, they are only suggestions.

Finally, some white asparagus

2011-05-12T13:17:00.000+02:00

The first time I ever tasted white asparagus—or even knew of its existence, for that matter—I was sixteen and just a few hours into my summer “study abroad” in Germany. It was June, and I had arrived that fine summer day just in time for the midday meal. My host mother, as good of a Hausfrau as I have ever met, always made sure there was a warm lunch on the table for me and her two teenage daughters when we would come home from school. On that particular day I was jetlagged and confused. My German, I readily admit, was not very good at that point, and every conversation going on around me felt confusing and unfamiliar. I didn’t really understand what was going on as I sat in the kitchen watching Inga, one of the daughters, speed off on her bicycle only to come back about ten minutes later with a bag of spears that looked pretty much like this.

A little magic happened on the stove, after which we sat down to a truly delicious meal. I needed to get over my initial feeling of, “What the hell? Aren’t asparagus supposed to be green and much smaller than this?” My hesitation lasted about five seconds, because there was nothing about these white stalks to remind me of the handful of times in my life I had eaten mushy asparagus from a can. We had it a lot for the first few weeks, and then suddenly, it was all gone. No more asapragus in the fields, no more white asparagus for me during my stay. I bought it a few times at Whole Foods in Los Angeles, but it was always expensive and a bit of a let down. Nothing really compared to my memories of German Spargel. I should thank my lucky stars that I live here now.

I think most Dutch people would be horrified to know that I very clearly linked asparagus with German cuisine for years. It was only two years ago, during my first spring in the Netherlands, that I learned how important asparagus is to Dutch identity, especially in the southern provinces where the bulk of the fields are located. You can find biking and walking routes through the fields and a list of asparagus related celebrations here, if you're so inclined. Don't think that I haven't looked at it already and planned an afternoon excursion. Even if I couldn't make it to the fields, I wouldn't suffer. The supermarkets, vegetable stands, and restaurants in Amsterdam all boast big signs for "Asperges."

There are a million ways to prepare asparagus, but since this week was my first foray into cooking with the real deal, Limburgse asperges, I felt I owed it to myself and Dutch cuisine to make it the classic way. Oh, Dutch cuisine...I would say that lots of traditional Dutch dishes are not complicated (not a bad thing) and often involve boiling things to varying degrees of doneness.

The traditional asparagus meal includes boiled asparagus spears, boiled potatoes, a hard-boiled egg, and a few rolls of thinly sliced ham all with a nice layer of melted butter poured on top. That's why I had three pots boiling on the stove and one tiny saucepan melting butter. The asparagus has to be peeled before cooking, as the outer layers are tough. The peeler in the picture above is a special asparagus peeler, and if you believe the description on the back of the packaging, you will learn that no household is complete without one. Seriously, I had no idea my kitchen had been lacking in such an important tool. I altered the recipe slightly to include the potato skins (because I like it that way), and we had a fewer pieces of ham on the plate. Really, how many ham slices can one person eat?...Actually, don't answer that. I probably could eat quite a few pieces if I weren't also consuming massive amounts of butter and starch.

Here I am, tentatively pouring butter all over our plates. Apparently believing everything is better with butter is not simply reserved for baked goods:

I asked Niek how I did for my first attempt. He was pretty pleased with my mad skills (i.e. the ability to boil things), although I think I need to peel a few more layers off next time to make the bottom of the stalks a little less tough. I could buy one of those fancy pots made only for cooking asparagus, but that seems like a ridiculous investment. Here's a close-up of dinner and also a picture of Niek taking in the amazing smell while the dog looks on from his chair.

I couldn't eat like this every night, but it's fun to feel a little Dutch every once in a while. Besides, the asparagus season is so short, I need to take advantage of it while I can. Before I know it, it will be gone again for another year.

Mystery bag

2011-05-09T10:47:00.000+02:00

I am so excited about what is in this bag, I can barely contain myself.

Tomorrow for dinner I am going to prepare asparagus that was picked fresh from the field. Niek's dad brought back four pounds for us when he went to visit his brother yesterday in Limburg. Four pounds! I would make it tonight, but we just had asparagus yesterday at Niek's parents' house. I'm trying to space out the deliciousness over the next few days. I've been looking forward to this day since the last asparagus season. Hooray!

And in something completely unrelated...My mom asked me last night if the tulips were blooming yet. She asked because their winter never seemed to end this year, and I'm pretty sure most of her bulbs are just now brave enough to peek their heads out of the ground. Sad to say, the tulip fields bloomed here while I was in California and London. Instead, this is what greeted me when I took out the dog this morning.

It's already time for the poppies here, a flower I personally associate with California...well, California and the illicit opium trade of Afghanistan. I just love that they seem to sprout up wherever, even in the cracks of the sidewalk. Hope this gives my mom hope that she, too, will soon have some flowers blooming in the yard.

Another Queen's Day

2011-05-02T14:24:00.000+02:00

Saturday marked the third Queen's Day (Koninginnedag) I've celebrated in the Netherlands. While we didn't escape the city and head to the beach like we did last year, we avoided most of crazy fun going on in the center. We skipped the drunken parties on Queen's Day Eve and avoided the throngs of Holland's orange-clad youth living it up in Museumplein. Instead, Niek and I got up and enjoyed coffee on our balcony like the totally civilized adult that we are--or at least pretend to be when the occasion calls for it. Honestly, I didn't want to waste a gorgeous Saturday morning, and besides it's finally strawberry season. I bought my first pound of them at the neighborhood market this past week. They were mostly small, and they were incredibly delicious. I'm pretty sure they were grown in a hothouse, as most produce here is grown, so I guess it's a stretch to call it strawberry "season." They were so much more delicious than the strawberries I've been buying from Spain (the California of Europe, as Niek likes to call it). Paired with croissants, Intelligentsia coffee and a vase of spring's first peonies, you really can't go wrong.

I like to think that the dog agreed with my assessment of the morning, although he is pissed that our new balcony table takes up most of his precious lounging space. He looks cute enough in this picture, but I think he really wants to give me the finger and push that damn table out of the way.

So I don't think that I have mentioned before that in addition to the crazy amounts of drinking that happen for Queen's Day, the other big activity for the day is setting up huge garage sales. At first, I was excited about this aspect of the holiday, until I found out that the Dutch are much less selective about what makes it to their rummage sale piles than Americans. I'm pretty sure most people just collect all the crap that has accumulated in their closet over the past year, set it on a blanket on the sidewalk and hope that someone will give them a Euro or two. At the end of the day, they pack up all of their stuff in a box, and put it back in their closet until the next Queen's Day rolls around.

If you don't have sidewalk space of your own to claim, which you need to do at least the night before by using tape and chalk to mark your territory, you can head to one of the major selling areas. Niek and I ended up in Vondelpark, the center of activities for children. Here, you can buy children's clothing, really old car seats, books, beat up strollers, etc., etc.

There were also lots of kids performing musical numbers and tons of homemade carnival game stands. All of that was very cute, but it was just so crowded. I think we spent maybe half and hour walking around before our friends' baby felt totally overwhelmed and insisted on taking a break. Good call.

I did not sample any of the homemade delicacies lining any of the stalls. Apparently, the thing to do is set up your own food stand. This could be as simple as pancakes or as labor-intensive as loempias (Indonesian egg rolls). Some guy even had his own cotton candy machine. Niek told me that I could set up a stand with cupcakes and cookies next year. That sounds like hell to me, so I think I'll pass. I did love this boy's enthusiasm for his stacks of pancakes:

After braving the crowds of children and parents in Vondelpark, it was time for the real joy of the day: sitting out on a bar's terrace with a witbier. Oh, wait, no witbier for me this year. I comforted myself instead with a kroket sandwich (pulverized meat product that is breaded and fried). Looking at the picture makes me wonder if a beer might have been the healthier option.

All in all, a good holiday. It is really time to get back in the kitchen and start blogging about cooking and food again. It is, after all, spring. Maybe I'll even convince Niek that we need to go to the asparagus fields. Maybe.

California pining

2011-04-19T03:13:00.000+02:00

Whew! I am back from my conference in London and starting to feel a little more relaxed. Well, I felt relaxed this morning, and then the panic about finishing chapter rewrites before the end of the month really set in. All the members of my panel deemed the session a success, and it was fun to meet so many scholars and hear some great papers. There were tons and tons of Nederlanders at the event, and I think I may have spoken more Dutch in London than English.
I would write about food in London, but considering the fact that I basically lived off of Pret a Manger sandwiches and Costa coffee for three days, there's very little for me to say on the matter this time around. Instead, I will do a fluff post made up almost entirely of pictures of my time in SoCal. Sadly, I didn't take that many pictures in California, I think because we were just busy having a good time with our friends...and oh yeah, getting ready for the conference. Here are just a few things that made going back to the West Coast so great and just so different from my life in Amsterdam:

Beautiful views on a bright, sunny day at the Getty. Regan still has a reader card for the Getty Research Institute, which means we got to park there for free! Admission to the Getty is free, but there is a $15 parking charge, and it's pretty damn hard to get up there without a car. That is why it pays every once in a while to be a graduate student.

Primo's Doughnuts. Regan and James are regulars there. Mrs. Primo even came out to give a goody bag of doughnuts to Regan's sister, who was leaving for Kansas after a visit out to L.A. I love a good doughnut.

Do not tell me that you wouldn't all do the same thing. I look forward to getting a pedi before each and every visit. Niek said he finally felt like he was on vacation after his pedi session. The guy who did mine made a few comments about my runner's calluses, but he assured me that he had seen worse. His words didn't seem to match with his facial expression, and I think we was relieved when I asked for the "extra" treatment. God forbid my toes have calluses on them.

Ice cream isn't a food I really associate with L.A.; it's more of a frozen yogurt town these days. However, if you're going to have ice cream, it will be fancy and made in small batches by cool hipsters somewhere near downtown. I had some mocha Bailey's concoction and a scoop of a fancier version of cookies 'n cream. The woman behind me in line asking which ice creams were vegan made it clear I was no longer in Europe. Like the Dutch would ever consider a non-dairy based ice cream.

Honestly, there is really nothing more to say about this. Huevos Rancheros is an amazing dish! Anything that combines breakfast with guacamole is a-okay in my book. We went here twice for breakfast. I miss you already, corn tortillas and avocados!

Last food picture, I swear. Regan and James wanted to take us to a place in the Art District called, Wurstküche. I love that the name of the place is in German but on the menu the sizes for the fries are written in Dutch, you know, because they're "Belgian" fries. They actually weren't really Belgian style fries, but they were good with the handmade Bratwurst and the five kinds of mustard.
I laughed a little when I noticed the children's birthday party winding down in the private events room next to our table. The cool parents were leaving with their little ones just as the younger crowd was showing up for happy hour. I guarantee I never had a birthday party at a downtown hot spot when I was growing up. I ate a lot of Usinger's Sasuage, though. Does that count for something?

We did plenty of other things in between all the eating: Niek and I got to run up Runyon Canyon a few times, I went to a knitting store and spent too much on fancy types of yarn, we had plenty of good coffee, the conference presentation went fairly well, and so on and so forth. A big highlight was the hike to a waterfall in the San Gabriel Mountains.

We hiked along the path of a 1920s camping resort. The above sign was my favorite. Regan is determined to rent the cottage pictured below for a weekend getaway.

James found a salamander, and then we proceeded to take about a million photos of the little guy before we let him slowly (ever so slowly, it was cold that day) take off for a more secluded spot.

I'll leave you with this slightly cheesy picture of me and Niek at the waterfall. And before you start thinking, "Whoah, Diana, maybe you did have a few too many helpings of taco salads and french fries," I promise I have come by that little belly honestly. It's only going to get bigger this summer, and hopefully in the fall I'll have a little person to show for all this gestating I'm doing. L.A. was so much fun, and I miss all my friends so much already. However, it's a good feeling to be home in Amsterdam. I've got tons to get done in the next six months, and it's hard to write in L.A. on vacation.

The plural of conference is insanity

2011-04-13T15:10:00.001+02:00

I have a piece of advice for graduate students:
Do not, under any circumstances think that presenting at two conferences in the span of one week is a good idea...ever. This is especially true if you have to cross nine time zones to go to your first conference and then re-cross those time zones to go to your second. If you find that you absolutely must present at multiple conferences, even though I have told you not to, at least don't be a procrastinator like me and make sure you finish both of your papers well in advance of the deadlines.
I was in L.A. last week giving a paper on a panel with Regan and our friend Naomi. L.A. was awesome, and I can't wait to post lots of pictures of delicious food and one really fun hike to a waterfall. The conference went pretty well, but it came at the end of our trip. By the time we got back to Amsterdam on Monday morning, I was wiped out. I have spent the last few days either sleeping off the exhaustion of jet-lag or freaking out about a paper for another conference that is so not near to being done. I'm not sure I can put two coherent sentences together at this point, let alone an entire paper for a very important conference. I'm terrified that I will embarrass myself and forever brand myself as "that woman who gave a shitty paper about intellectual networks in Asia." Isn't that everyone's fear?
I have to get back to my paper now, even though I would prefer to be doing almost anything other than what needs to get done. Stress makes me want to avoid that which I need to do most.
That was my advice to you for the day. You are welcome.

Back with a Bang

2011-02-16T21:38:00.000+01:00

It's been a few months, but I'm back . . . with a link to the best thing I've ever found on the internet. This is not an exaggeration, people. One sunny afternoon, I was following my typical schedule - one hour of afternoon blog reading to avoid dissertation work - and I stumbled upon Public Collectors, a website that allows people to share digitized collections online or post an inventory of a collection which can be visited in person.

Of course, I noticed a digital collection titled "Food Songs" right away! Click here to experience the magic. Someone named Matt Bua has put together a huge list of songs relating to food. (Which makes it an appropriate topic for this blog, right?!) My personal favorites include 'Too Much Pork for Just One Fork' and 'That's What Makes My Baby Fat.'

Make yourself happy today - listen to some music about eating!

Why is winter so long?

2011-02-10T15:43:00.001+01:00

My mom called me this morning to tell me that it was -11 F with a windchill of -20. We don't see temperatures like that here, but winter does seem to be dragging along this year. Oh, mid-winter. It's that time of the year when you feel like spring is never going to arrive and you're just tired of the cold. While my parents freeze away in the snowy, barren landscape of the Midwest, I at least get temps in the 40s and, as an added bonus, slightly longer days. I can't cook or think about food all the time, so here are the things I have been doing to while away the winter days:

1) Working--reading documents and writing fascinating things about them. I just chose this image randomly, but it's one I have to read for my current chapter.

2) Knitting--Finally finished these wrist warmers that I promised a friend more than a year ago I would make for her. No one has ever accused me of being punctual.

3) "Gardening"--I re-potted a dying mint plant a few weeks ago. I think the root system had outgrown the pot. It gives me hope that I'll see more green things soon.

4) Running--I officially have a wool obsession. I've worn this top for almost every run since I got it in December. Niek laughs, because I get a little sad when it's too warm to wear. Love, love, love wool running gear. I don't look quite so pensive when I wear it, though. I look much more like a dork than the model does.

5)Reading--Okay, yes, this is all cooking related. Ottolenghi is one of my friend's favorite restaurants in London, and I think we were all disappointed that they were booked full during the week Niek and I were in London in November. I got both of the cookbooks for Christmas this year, and I have a new cooking magazine subscription. Oh, the inspiration! Just looking at this picture is making me hungry.

I can't wait to see what Regan posts about her winter in L.A. I'm pretty sure it's not cold and dreary there.

Friday Morning Reading...Mark Bittman

2011-02-04T10:47:00.001+01:00

This isn't a real post, more like a drive-by posting...
While looking over the NYT website's top articles, I saw Mark Bittman's latest opinion piece. As some of the comments say, the list, while not particularly original, gives you something to think about. While I find the overall tone nicely optimistic, it takes on that paternalistic flavor, which always seems to rankle my nerves, when it calls for educating the public on how to eat. To be fair, I don't have any ideas about how to change food culture, so I suppose I shouldn't be too critical. His comment on "food deserts" did remind me of the piece I just read by another blogger about the myth of the food desert in Detroit. Perhaps America's urban inhabitants aren't as addicted to cheesy poofs and Red Bull as the press would like us to think. Also worth reading if you feel like perusing the internet.
While the American media continues to give us all warnings about the obesity epidemic in the U.S. that will probably kill us all in some way or another, issues surrounding processed food and overweight youth get very little press here in The Netherlands. Good thing? Bad thing? At the very least something I'm going to need to think about more.

Winter Rejuvenation

2011-02-01T12:45:00.000+01:00

Regan and I were talking last night, and we both decided that it is high time that we get this blog up and running again. Of course, it won’t be quite the same, now that Regan is back in Los Angeles and I continue to feel less and less like a visitor in Amsterdam. We’re both doing our best to write our dissertations without losing our sanity, and if I could speak for both of us here, starting the blog back up will provide both of us with some very nice “break” moments (aka procrastination) when it feels like the cycle of researching/writing/editing feels like a little more then either of us can bear.

The last few months have been a little rough as I struggled to finish a chapter that should not have taken as long to write as it did. It felt like a terrible weight hanging over my head, and for some reason, I didn’t make any forward progress on it for months and months. It made me pretty unhappy, and it certainly didn’t please my advisor. Feeling stuck can be a pretty common feeling among grad students, as I have only recently really acknowledged. Even as I recognize I’m not the only one this has happened to, I’m not sure what the solution to the problem is.

But then somewhere around November, some switch got flipped and I started to actually want to do my work. I knew it was really better when I started putting in more miles on my runs and I felt like reading cooking blogs again. Maybe it was the start of Bokbier season or the fact that pumpkins were available at the market. I don’t know, and I certainly can’t explain why during the shorter, cold days of winter I feel like working again. I can’t explain it, but I’m happy about it.

So, while I continue to go crazy writing three more chapters and two conference papers, Regan and I will once again amuse ourselves with our blog.

Dam tot Damloop 2010

2010-09-21T11:11:00.002+02:00

Once a year, Niek and I take part in one of Amsterdam's biggest running races, the Dam tot Damloop. It's a 10 mile race that takes you from Central Station in Amsterdam (The Dam) through Amsterdam-Noord to Zaandam (the "other" Dam) on the other side of the water. Here's a little map I made for you in gmaps pedometer shows you the race.

Going to Amsterdam-Noord is like entering into a completely different world, one that doesn't have a lot to do with the goings on in the city. Zaandam, as far as I know, is famous for its ties to the shipping industry, a visit by Czar Peter the Great in the seventeenth century, and delicious Verkade cookies. I was trying to make a comparable analogy for the relationship between Amsterdam and Amsterdam-Noord to big cities in America, but the best I could come up with was the New Jersey/Manhattan or San Fernando Valley/Los Angeles relationship. I kept thinking I should shy away from those, however, because they are loaded (super-loaded) with negative connotations for the areas that aren't considered as urban, and I mean Amsterdam-Noord no disrespect, nor do I mean any disrespect to New Jersey or the S.F. Valley. In fact, I absolutely love this race and all the people who come out to support it. Only about the first half-mile is run in Amsterdam. After that you enter a tunnel that takes you under the water of het Ij and spits you back out in Amsterdam-Noord. The course of the race feels like a ten-mile long street party as you pass through neighborhoods ready to take on the day with beer tents, speakers blaring upbeat 90's music (really, Jump Around by House of Pain made my run just that much better), and friendly updates on the Amsterdam vs. Rotterdam soccer game. I especially loved the woman calling out encouragement to all the runners by saying, "Water hier en in Zaandam een bier." Water here and in Zaandam (the finish) a beer, because the promise of a good beer would make anyone run faster. I believe that tactic worked just as well for me during a half-marathon in Green Bay a few years ago.
I especially love the fruit stop somewhere around the half-way mark. The race has your normal water and sports drink stops with the truly disgusting Dutch sports drink, AA, which tastes kind of like an orange lollipop and coats your mouth like candy. Why so many people clamor to grab their cups of it, I have no idea. I have avoided it ever since my first (and last) sip. At least the race isn't that long, and I wasn't in it to win it so I just stuck with the water. But back to that fruit stand...It's about four cafeteria tables long and it was full of banana slices, orange slices and fresh melon slices. Whoever decided this needed to be a staple of the race is a genius. Without that little break, my last five miles would have been much less enjoyable. I have started to look forward to getting to that stand, and I'm grateful to the jolly Amsterdammer in the apron just chopping away at all that fruit. Seriously, he looked really happy to be chopping up fruit.
All in all, I absolutely loved the Dam tot Damloop this year even if my legs felt like lead and a slightly annoying guy kept passing me and slowing down, passing me and slowing down. Great running music on the course and lots of slightly inebriated spectators made for an enjoyable afternoon. Niek had a great race and improved on his time from last year by almost fifteen minutes. He's so awesome. The only complaint I have, why no water at the finish? I do wish they would hand that out instead of a bottle of AA Drink, but I don't think it's in the Dutch genes to reach for water. They think Americans drink too much of it. I'll bet plenty of runners even ran to the nearest coffeehouse after the race to quench their thirst. Oh, wait, that's what Niek and I did, and yes, my latté was quite delicious (after I had had my bottle of water).

The End of Summer

2010-09-11T22:08:00.000+02:00

After a week that found me buying tights and unpacking my boots not to mention scrambling to find the season's first pumpkin for pumpkin soup (hooray), we got a Saturday with blue skies and a warm breeze. I think the plant world knows that this might be summer's last hurrah before we settle down for some hearty stews chock full of root vegetables. The grocer's stand seemed to bursting with peaches, melons, tomatoes and currants. I had a hard time containing myself, and I would have bought those quinces if I hadn't remembered that my canning supplies didn't make the trans-Atlantic boat ride last fall. I'm still mourning the loss of my mom's canner, but the sadness was quickly replaced by, let's face it, a disproportionate for the situation feeling of joy when I saw the crate full of ARTICHOKES. I didn't even know artichokes had a fall season, which explains my surprise. We scooped them up along with some great Hass avocadoes that were on super sale and hurried home so we could get on with the rest of our day.

I love Amsterdam in the waning days of summer, because everyone celebrates a warm weekend day like it will be the last one for at least six months. Strangely, that seems to be the action Amsterdammers take whenever there is a warm weekend, but maybe it felt more pronounced to me today, because I know the short days of fall are right around the corner. We took the dog to the park, just like every other dog owner, and threw tennis balls until he flopped into an exhausted heap under a tree. We window shopped, browsed the bookstore and finally made it to the knitting store. All in all a wonderful Saturday in the city. I still can't believe I was craving pumpkin soup on Tuesday and today all I wanted was a salad and steamed vegetables. Judging by the number of people eating ice cream cones or drinking a white wine, we weren't the only ones in a summer mood.

So here was my tribute to the end of summer in Amsterdam: steamed artichokes, broiled salmon with avocado and lime with a simple salad. Thank you, Dutch grocers, for making this meal possible. I'm a little disturbed how the picture highlights my obsession with the color green and my love of Finnish design.

Crossing over to the carb side

2010-09-06T12:22:00.001+02:00

I just want to post a little note about a particular eating habit I picked up rather seamlessly last week. The first time I was in the center of the city running some errands, and I was starving. I could have bought a candy bar or a little bag of chips, but instead I made a beeline for the nearest bakery and bought a croissant for €0,70. The second time was on Saturday morning while Niek and I were doing our grocery shopping. We had just finished going for a run, and there wasn't much in the way of food in the house, hence the grocery shopping trip. Right after we purchased our three loaves of bread from the baker (that's not a typo, the two people in house consume three whole loaves of bread per week) which also consisted of an embarrassing incident involving the woman behind me in line making a comment about me kissing the loaf of still warm bread in my hand and my stuttering reply that I was merely smelling the bread and not kissing it in some sort of strange ritual which is what she had assumed, I practically ripped open the bag to eat a piece of bread for breakfast. Apparently I've passed over into the Dutch universe where it is the norm to always stave off hunger by eating bread and just bread. If you couple this eating habit with my newly found ability to ride a bike in the rain while I hold an open umbrella, you almost can't tell the difference between me and the Nederlanders around me. If only I could grow about eight more inches...then you really might start to think I was Dutch.

That is all. Back to yet another overdue chapter, a looming deadline, and a conference panel application, etc., etc.

I think I write a lot about bread on this blog.

Cooking and Gender

2010-08-25T21:48:00.001+02:00

Last week I had an experience that almost turned me into a vegetarian: I bought chicken from a butcher specializing in sustainable/organic meats...and it was the most expensive chicken I have ever purchased. While the nice lady behind the counter told me the price and started packaging the bird in fancy paper touting all sorts of organic stamps and labels, I just stood there in a weird shocked silence, unable to take it all in, and then with my body on auto-pilot I paid. The whole way home I just kept telling myself that it wasn't possible I just paid that much for a chicken and if this was the cost of buying "responsible" meat, we were going to have to 1) find second jobs, 2) stop caring about how livestock is treated, or 3) give up meat. None of those really feel like good options to me, and I haven't yet worked out what we're going to do about it, but in the meantime we won't be roasting any more chickens.

I found myself at the butcher in the first place, because we were having friends over for dinner (diehard meat eaters who wouldn't touch a vegetable with a ten-foot pole, or fish or cheese), and Niek wanted to work on his chicken roasting skills. In the last few years, he's become something of a chicken roasting afficianado, and he'll most likely be working on perfecting his technique for the next few decades.

And this brings me to the actual point of the post, which is supposed to be about the gendering of cooking and my experiences in the Netherlands. Growing up in the Heartland, I didn't see a lot of men using their skills in the kitchen. I don't think I can say that any of my childhood friends' fathers cooked, and I don't remember my dad ever making us dinner (now that my dad is retired, he's taken on a lot more of the dinner making duties, so kudos to you, Dad). Grilling on the barbeque doesn't count, since I would say it's seen as a pretty masculine activity. There are plenty of discussions in our modern world about how home cooking is still perceived as women's work, and I really wanted to site this article, but my proxy server to the university's research library wasn't granting me access, although I found an amusing anecdote about gender and cooking here and a rather angry assessment of Michael Pollan's take on the matter here. Interestingly enough, all of the partners of my friends know their way around a kitchen, and some of them even do the majority of the cooking in the relationship. Regan should tell you about her husband's forays into bread, cheese, and beer making. I'll refrain from using my guy friends as a representative slice of American culture since I dabble a little more in that crazy intellectual/academic world than most people. But whoah, am I digressing a little bit?

This is really about gender and cooking in my home away from home. Most of the home cooking I have experienced in the Netherlands has either been in my own household or in that of my in-laws where my mother-in-law wouldn't dream of preparing a meal and my father-in-law has been in charge of family dinners since my husband can remember. It was early in our relationship that I learned that Niek's dad was the cook of their house, and I remember being a little shocked hear it. It shouldn't really have come as a surprise to me considering that Niek cooked dinner for us on our second date and cooks about half of the time now. Maybe if both of us didn't work it would be different, but since we both find ourselves busy with work and we both actually enjoy cooking, we are able to maintain a fairly even split. I love that I find myself in a family that supports everyone's interests and skills and doesn't really seem to divide household responsibilities among any sort of gendered guidelines. Are there swaths of Dutch culture that see women as being responsible for cooking simply because they're women? Absolutely. Is it a hard an fast rule everyone ascribes to? No, and I am quite happy for that.

Niek's chicken and roast potatoes were a rousing success the other night, even if he didn't think the skin was crispy enough. Cooks are usually their own worst critics, which I know from personal experience. It just gives him another reason to try again the next time we have a few friends to dinner, although we may have to wait at least a few weeks. I'm going to have to brace myself for the cost of buying another organic bird.

The things we carried (in our suitcases)

2010-08-17T15:12:00.001+02:00

As I stood over my suitcase last week trying to figure out how we were going to pack everything without going over the weight limit, I started questioning my dependence on American goods. As you can see, I brought back the every important essentials of life like cake flour and chocolate chips. It really took more willpower than I thought it would not to buy the seven other varieties of King Arthur Flour at the local grocery store. I'm pretty sure most people who visit the U.S. do not think to themselves, "I should really bring this rye flour back with me. I might need it if I suddenly get the urge to make myself some bread. Maybe I should go get some of that corned beef I saw on sale, too. Then I could feel like I was at a deli anytime I want!"

It's all about what makes you feel at home...to a certain degree anyway. I just keep wondering what I would find in other ex-pats' suitcases. I have to believe anyone living abroad feels compelled to bring back little pieces of home when they return from a visit. You should have seen the various products I pouted and fussed about leaving on the shelves of Trader Joe's in Chicago. I also left a bunch of linens and family pieces that had belonged to my grandmother at my parents' house, much to the disappointment of my mother, who is working to downsize. I regularly thwart her attempts as I continually ask her to hang on to stuff I know I'm going to need at some unassigned time in the future. To my parents with a house larger than my apartment: what a storage facility I've made out of my childhood bedroom. Sorry.

We did pretty well coming right in at the weight limit for our luggage. We could have made it without borrowing a second suitcase from my parents if it hadn't been for these:

With a much greater selection and much better prices in America, our luggage coming back from the States will always have at least a few books. I think I should be thanking Delta for restricting the weight limits this year even more. I can't imagine what else I would have thought to bring back if I had had double the weight limit.

Vacation officially over

2010-08-12T13:35:00.000+02:00

I took an unintentional break from blogging during the rest of my time in L.A. and then the three weeks I spent at my parents' house in Indiana. There was just a lot going on, and I was too tired to open my computer most days, let alone write a blog post. That's alright since I saw most of the people who read my blog. To those of you who do read and I did not see during my almost eight weeks in America (which is a shame and it would be nice to meet in real life sometime) you can catch up with my picture journal below. Because, I just know you are dying to know what I did. My life is, after all, intensely interesting.

Here we go...
I studied a bunch with my friend, Naomi, and we drank a lot of coffee together, just like true graduate students should

Regan arrived home from Nigeria (yea!), and finally after many years of cajoling she convinced me to go to Disneyland. Ask Regan about Disneyland sometime. She will tell you all about her happiest place on earth. It was actually way cooler than I thought it would be and it was lovely to have one last day with Regan and Naomi. Thank you, Regan, for convincing me to go.

After leaving L.A., I was reunited with Niek in northern Indiana and spent three weeks relaxing and helping my parents finish some home improvement projects (no photos of those, though). I was also in a wedding on the banks of the Ohio River. My friend and her family made all the food for the reception, and it was delicious. The bride and I had a nice laugh about the local culture down in southern Indiana. She pointed out that the reception hall was located conveniently next to the Royal Order of Rednecks Lodge complete with a rebel flag hanging proudly in the mayor's yard...I wish I were kidding about that, but I'm not. At least Niek got to experience another side of America.

We managed to squeeze in a trip to Chicago for a few days where we marveled at Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, walked around the city, visited the Art Institute, ran along the lakefront, and I introduced Niek to the joy of a deep dish pizza.

And then it was back home just in time to celebrate my town's festival. Niek and I ran the 5K (Niek's first, and he was amazing) and ate an apple dumpling (the only real reason to be at the festival). We declined the polka dancing and missed the yodeling contest (my town was founded by Swiss immigrants), but overall had a good time in small town America. And since you know how much I love to eat, rest assured we took advantage of summer's bounty (sweet corn, blackberries, blueberries, tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden, cantaloupe, etc, etc, delicious).

And just for fun, here is how I poured milk onto my granola every morning. I never tire of watching the Delftware cow vomit up milk.

That is, in a nutshell, what I did over the last seven weeks. There were plenty of other things I did not document with my camera, and I would say it was a successful trip for my work and as a vacation. I was sad to leave, but I'm happy to be home. Thanks to the Gladware I insisted on buying and bringing back with us, we even got to enjoy peaches fresh from the tree and tasty, Michigan blueberries one more time before the plane touched down. Way better than the "breakfast" the flight attendant tried to give us.

Hope you all have had a nice summer. It's back to work and back to blogging.

O dabo.

2010-07-19T16:10:00.000+02:00

Goodbye, Nigeria! Goodbye, early mornings and roosters crowing, bucket baths and banana-peanut butter breakfasts. Goodbye to the sound of the generator, a constant dull roar that is the soundtrack to my Nigerian memories. Goodbye, danfos and okadas and 'slippers' that I left behind. Goodbye, cold Cokes, Shapes, Cheese Balls and Gin-gins. Goodbye, efo, eja and eba! Goodbye to my Nigerian friends, who never had qualms about telling me that I looked more tired or fatter than before . . . and who were wonderful just the same. Goodbye, sweat rolling down my elbows and from the back of my knees. Goodbye, loud music on the street corners and time spent in 'greeting.' Goodbye to runs by the pond, honking cars, dusty documents, meals eaten on my favorite yellow plate, mornings in the market and evenings filled with baking and bootlegged dvds. Goodbye, goats.

I hope to see you all again.

California birthdays and beer cake...

2010-07-06T01:18:00.005+02:00

I'm back in L.A. now, but I don't want to forget to post something about the great birthday celebration for my friend up in Davis now almost two weeks ago. I can't believe that my time up there has already come and gone. I don't get to see my friends very often given the fact that an ocean and almost an entire continent lie between us. When we get together, there really should be at least one celebration of some sort to mark the occasion. Luckily it was my friend's birthday, and we could all celebrate the fact that she is older than I am and always will be. I love that a universal component to celebrations is good food. We made a collaborative effort to create a fitting dinner for the day. That meant my friend was on drinks duty, her husband manned the grill, and I volunteered (perhaps, begged would be a better word) to make a cake.

Here is a picture of my friend making a raspberry-rose gin rickey. I had no idea what would go into that drink, because I don't think I had ever heard of it before. It sounds like something my grandparents would know how to make. The cocktail coupled with the apron she's wearing had us making jokes about 1950s housewives. In fact, while she was making it, she told me that's her style of cooking: putting herself in charge of the cocktail hour while her husband preps the grill. I wondered if we could have placed ourselves any more strongly into strictly defined gender roles. Maybe we're all taking this Mad Men craze a bit too seriously these days. Honestly, it was all in good fun, and who can resist wearing a cute apron? I know I couldn't.

I had to wear something to protect my skirt while I dealt with the intersection between beer and baked good.

Honestly, how many shots of butter can this blog take? I promise, though, this one was completely necessary. It's the first time I have melted butter for a recipe in beer! My friend loves chocolate and beer equally, and when I found a cake recipe that incorporated both, there was no way I was not going to try it. I would show you a picture of the finished product, but we were too busy having a good time, and I completely forgot. I think that was an indicator of a great party. You can see how much I and two of my best friends enjoyed the cocktails and also how much my friend's nephew relished the taste of stout and chocolate.

It was a wonderful summer bar-b-que, and there couldn't have been anything more enjoyable (and perhaps also nothing more American) than a summer evening out on the patio with the grill going, side dishes packed with produce from the garden, and a picnic table full of friends and family. I've kind of missed the easy camaraderie that only seems to happen with close friends. It felt nice to back in California with my friends for a while, but strangely enough, I'm now starting to miss the Netherlands just a bit. If only I could find a way to transplant my friends along with a big backyard and a massive grill to Amsterdam. Then I would be all set.

Coconuts

2010-07-02T01:00:00.000+02:00

I'm back already! To discuss something very important: the deliciousness of coconuts.

Actually, Diana's post on eating locally made me think about the availability of food here in Nigeria. Many of the ingredients we buy in the market are local because, well, they have to be. The system for distributing goods in Nigeria is shaky at best, so farmers sell their produce (vegetables, fruits, chicken, beef, etc.) close to home. Locally-grown food is incredibly cheap: a huge bunch of greens for vegetable stew only costs 20 naira (about 13 cents). A large bag of okra costs 50 naira (30 cents). However, there is also a surprising amount of food imported into Ibadan. Most of the vegetables come from the Middle Belt or northern Nigeria. Much of the fish is frozen and flown in from abroad. Whole stalls are dedicated to selling only canned and pre-packaged foreign goods. Even ingredients grown in Nigeria are often processed somewhere outside of the the region.

There is little variety in the options of imported foods, but every week brings new and interesting local produce to the market. Right now, for example, mature coconuts are in season and being hawked on every street corner. (See how I brought this discussion back to coconuts?! Phew.) I love fresh coconut meat, pried out of the shell and sold in large pieces to eat as a snack with roasted corn. In fact, if I don't reign it in a bit, I might turn into an ear of roasted corn myself. With a side of coconut.

Sarah, my housemate, and I decided to try opening a coconut ourselves. It provided ten solid minutes of entertainment, between throwing the shell as hard as we could at the floor and then trying to pry out the pieces with butter knives. I am happy to report that the only lasting injury was a small cut to my ankle.

{Yes, my legs and arms are completely different colors. Kind of awesome, huh?}

Carried away by our coconut fever, Sarah and I have even started baking a mean coconut cake. Of course, we use canned coconut milk from the supermarket and have thus far been too lazy to grate fresh coconut for the glaze. But it is a Nigerian coconut cake in spirit. I promise.

(recipe adapted from 'Vanilla Bean-Coconut Cupcakes' in the April 2009 Bon Appetit)

Combine:
2 cups flour
2 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter
1 1/3 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup coconut milk

Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes.

In a saucepan, heat leftover coconut milk (from 13-14 ounce can) with a spoonful of sugar, allowing liquid to reduce slightly. Mix in 1 cup flaked/shredded coconut and pour glaze over warm cake.

{James checking out our coconut cake via Skype. Mmmmmm.}

I have just one more week to eat locally in Nigeria - wish me luck!

Eat Locally...Really Locally

2010-06-29T07:30:00.003+02:00

From Amsterdam to L.A. to Davis, CA in less than a week. I've been up here in northernish California since last Monday visiting some good friends. I have forgotten how incredibly hot it can get up here in Davis, and while the heat of the mid-afternoon sun leaves me heading for the nearest air-conditioned spot, it's apparently very good for the produce around here. Notice our crazy adventures in my friend's dad's garden. Her parents had been on vacation for a few weeks, and we volunteered to go over and do a little gardening only to be attacked by the largest zucchinis in the world. They were everywhere and they were gigantic. You can see in the picture below that I was nearly swallowed whole while picking them. Thank goodness we had some zucchini bread recipes. I also made one of my favorite soups all with ingredients from the garden. It's during moments like those that I am a little sad that all I have is a balcony with a herb pots, but after an hour trimming the blossoms off of chard plants in 95 degree heat, I wasn't so sad about not having my own garden.

There's a reason why the local food movement has taken a firm hold in California. When you can grow almost any summer fruit or vegetable imaginable within a 60 mile radius of your house, it's pretty easy to eat locally. I'm not knocking it. I do love to walk through farmer's markets like the one I went to on Saturday in Davis. One sweep down the aisle left me feeling hungry and ready to dive into a crate full of tomatoes. We talked to the blueberry farmers from Fresno and even the local woman selling worms for all your backyard composting needs.

Outdoor markets in California, for all their beauty and variety, always have an air of unattainability and superiority to me. Going to a farmers' market is a little bit like how I browse through designer boutiques; I might get a few small items here and there, but I'm not going to buy a new wardrobe in one afternoon. It must be the artisnal cheeses and the twenty varieties of baby beets for sale that give off the slightly elitist vibe, although I readily admit that I love the market just the same. After all, I was the one standing there plotting ways I could hide 8 oz. jars of lavender honey in my carry-on luggage. California markets are just a fun diversion that present you with a bunch of inspiration for cooking and living. If I hadn't seen all those stalls selling crate after crate of gorgeous figs, I probably wouldn't have felt this insatiable need to make something right this second with figs.

Lucky for me my friend's brother had a fig tree bursting with fruit. I can eat a lot of figs on my own, but even after living without them since my move to Amsterdam, I couldn't finish a few pounds before they went bad. A few minutes of searching online coupled with a need to cool down led me to a fig ice cream recipe and a really nice food blog. Locally grown tastes really good covered in sugar and heavy cream.

2010-06-26T02:05:00.000+02:00

O, dear blog readers, the end is drawing near.

I leave Nigeria for the United States in less than two weeks

. . . and I still have so much to tell you about my life here!

Let’s start with this: my housemates and I just returned from a trip to Calabar in eastern Nigeria. It was beautiful. Wonderful. Awesome. I am now wondering why I was smart enough to get into graduate school but not smart enough to choose the nice part of Nigeria to study. JK, western Nigeria. Kind of.

I have to admit that it took a trip to the east to help me realize that 'interesting' is not the only positive adjective to describe Nigeria; it can also be beautiful, peaceful and relaxing. Traveling home on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, it occurred to me how much the insane population density of western Nigeria effects how people live and move and relate to each other - in ways that ratchet up the intensity of day-to-day interactions. And yet I like the challenge of living in Ibadan; it is endlessly fascinating to reflect on how both the remote and more recent past have shaped this society. Also - you never run out of things to complain about. How convenient for those of us who enjoy such a pastime!

Back to Calabar, where I traveled the Delta creeks by boat, swam in a waterfall, visited a drill monkey sanctuary and knocked back a few shots of locally-distilled gin . . . all in the name of research. One of the fun things about visiting a new region was seeing the different foods it offered. We ate delicious suya covered in a groundnut spice, tender chicken pepper soup and whole roasted fish, basted in a sweet pepper sauce. We also found some new fruits that we can’t buy in the west: lychee and an ugly brown nut with velvety skin. When you pry it open, you find that the flesh is a brilliant orange. We couldn’t figure out the name of this fruit, so we call it orange nut fruit. Creative, right?!

In conclusion: Nigeria is beautiful. The fruit is amazing. Lychee tastes like candy. Towns with trees and sidewalks are nice. A lot of people live in this country. They deserve to have a functioning government which can sustain an expanding economy and provide social services. The end.

L.A. Burgers

2010-06-24T06:46:00.001+02:00

Now that the stresses of preparing for a conference paper are behind me, it's time to return to the writing that really matters...blog posts. If my advisor is reading this, just kidding about that last comment. Anyway, my good friends took me out for a bite to celebrate the achievement of my first ever conference paper. We could have gone anywhere for any kind of food imaginable; it was L.A. after all. However, when my friend suggested a hamburger place they have been meaning to try, I was on board and didn't give any other food another thought.

I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that L.A. is definitely a burger town. Sure, it gets a lot of press for its frozen yogurt and diet food fads, but burgers are a deeply ingrained part of food culture. Why? That's a great question, and I have no idea. I always considered it part of the L.A. food paradox. On the one hand you have the health obsessed, the organic food markets, the Pinkberry, and the raw food. On the other, you've got hot dogs, chile rellenos, Korean barbecue, and some of the best hamburgers and fries I've ever had. It's all part of this crazy city with a million and one identities, and really, I cannot tell you how I have missed the occasional good burger.

We went crazy, cool, (slightly) hipster for the evening. I lived on the west side of the city when I lived here, and I was pretty loyal to Hamburger Habit. This time, though, we spiced it up by heading into the heart of Hollywood and eating at Umami Burger, think fairly minimalist decor with a fairly minimalist menu. C'mon, when you've got a good burger, you don't need to have an extensive menu. I would like to say that it is probably one of the best burgers I have ever had in my entire life (and believe me, I have had a lot of hamburgers). If you want to experience a wonderful balance of flavors and textures packed into the tiny package of a bun with ground beef, this would be the place to do it. Yes, I realize that sounds kind of corny to talk about a burger that way, but seriously, it was good. You can enjoy the burger, fries, and beer while you watch the "cool" parent with his trucker hat at the next table feed his daughter specially sauteed mushrooms or while glancing at the barely legal blonde in her too short baby-doll dress in the corner. It was fun, it was L.A., and wow, it was delicious.

So glad to be back in the States for a while, soaking up some sun while I reacquaint myself with some California culture.

Sorry there are no pics. I forgot to bring a camera. I took some pictures with my friend's phone, and I'll post them when I get them.

James eats plantains.

2010-06-15T17:55:00.000+02:00

James visited Nigeria nearly 2.5 months ago and sent me the following blog post two weeks later. And one week ago I took a picture of plantains to include in the post, which I'm finally getting around to putting online today. Oops. Well, better late than never (which is what I’ll be writing as I continue to post about Nigeria for months after I’ve returned to LA)!

~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~

I'm sure that everyone out there who reads this blog has been wondering when I would do a guest post. I know people need a break from perfect sentence structure and grammar. So, here it is.

Dodo! I finally had Dodo! No, not the dodo bird but the Yoruba word for fried plantains. It has been five long years without a proper fried plantain. Sure, you can get them at Cuban restaurants or by busting out your frying skills (with a fire extinguisher) at home. But, they just aren't as good. The market women really know how to fry up a delicious plantain.

{dodo with moin-moin and vegetable}

The banana family is not indigenous to West Africa, but they have been around a good long time. Plantains are plentiful all year long and are a staple in Nigerian cooking. You can pretty much do what ever you want with a plantain: boil, fry, mash, and roast. Another bonus is that you can have it savory or sweet. I'm a little curious what a plantain pie would taste like (wink, wink Regan). One of my favorite snacks is a roasted plantain right off the grill.

{boli}

I usually go for the sweet ones, because the "green" ones make me too thirsty. Of course, that is a good excuse for an ice cold Coke.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~

E kuuse, James! Remember how you ate that entire bowl of pepper soup the first time we visited my host family in Ghana and they told me that you were the better African? Alas, it is probably true. (Thanks for visiting me and for writing a post with good sentence structure. You're awesome.)

Rainy Season Food

2010-06-15T12:33:00.000+02:00

I talked to Regan for a little bit last week, and her internet connection was even good enough to support Skype's video function. It's apparently rainy season in Nigeria right now, and then I thought about how it has felt like rainy season here for months. A few weeks ago, we had a terribly rainy and cold Sunday, and the weather enticed me to stay inside and make some comfort food. When I was a kid and it was raining, nothing seemed to hit the spot better than grilled cheese sandwiches with a bowl of tomato soup. I have luckily landed in a country that loves grilled cheese. They call them tosti's here, and they are made with Dutch cheese and Dutch bread.
It's a horrible admission to make, but I have to confess that when I first came here I was incredibly disappointed by the bread. I think I was expecting to get the same kind I ate when I lived in Germany, especially the little breakfast breads, brötchen. I ate those things every morning and sometimes stole them from the basket for my lunch, too. That's not really how bread is here. Your average bread looks kind of like plain, old sandwich bread. My expectations to have a crispy crust with a soft center were dashed to pieces that first time around. Since that first visit, I have amended my opinion of Dutch bread considerably, and I've come to love it, especially now that I've found a good baker nearby. As good as it is I still have no clue how the Dutch can eat so much of it. Niek's eight and ten slice a day habit makes no sense to me. Even I as a carbaholic cannot fathom that. Still, I like making my tosti's with it, and it the absolute best food for a rainy day lunch.

The weather seemed to break in the afternoon, so I thought it would be a perfect time for a run. When we only had a few miles left to go it started to rain, and then it started to hail. The dog was not amused.

Sorry for such a short post. I'm leaving for a conference tomorrow, and I've got a billion things to do before I go. Can't wait to eat Mexican food in L.A., oh and give a presentation.

Doing Dutch Things and Eating American Stuff

2010-06-09T11:52:00.008+02:00

In the past week, I've done a bunch of things that have made me feel really Dutch, or at least have given the appearance that I am becoming "integrated" (ugh, I shudder at the use of that word to describe immigrants in The Netherlands, but that's a different post, a really different post). Here are a few of the things I have done after which I realized I would do almost none of those things in L.A.

1) Right before catching the train home from my day at an archive, I popped into the drugstore at the train station and bought candy. I stood there at the buffet of candies just like all the other Dutch professionals looking for a nice sugar fix to get them home. I even tried again to like black licorice, going so far as to sample one while I was stuffing my pointy bag with gummi bears. Blech, big mistake. It was a harder, salty kind that at first lulled me into a false sense of security. In fact, I almost liked it and thought that would be my turning point moment. I could write a post about the day I taught myself to like anise. But then as I was standing in line to pay, still chewing on that piece of candy, because it took like five minutes to chew completely, the flavor went from slightly salty licorice to the taste of ammonia. It was like I had bleach flavored candy in my mouth. That was it, I'm done with the black menace for at least another six months. The other candy was heavenly to eat as I sat in a train and watched the Dutch landscape go by.

2) My bicycle got a flat tire a few weeks ago while I was riding it in the rain (super Dutch thing to do), and I finally got around to fixing it this weekend. Never in my life have I fixed a flat tire on a bike. Before coming the Netherlands, I don't think I had been on a bike in years, and I had somehow gotten through my entire childhood without ever getting a flat tire. Niek isn't a fan of fixing his flat tires; he usually takes the bike to the bike shop down the street when there's a problem. However, I was feeling a bit embarrassed that I didn't know how to solve a seemingly simple problem. I went to the bike supply store, which is kind of like going to NAPA Auto Parts except this time it's for your bike, and had the nice gentleman behind the counter help me locate a tube repair kit. It was obvious I had no idea what I was doing, so he told me to bring it in if I couldn't figure it out. Lucky for me Niek is Dutch, meaning he was born with the knowledge of basic bike repair, even if he doesn't use that knowledge very often.

Seriously, I am beaming at my newly found ability to perform a simple task, and also that I did it in a skirt and a white sweater without getting dirty. When I told my in-laws that I patched my tire, they told me I am now qualified to be a Dutch citizen. I somehow don't think tire repair is a portion of the citizenship examination, but it's still a good skill to have.

3) I ate appeltaart...Not really necessary to expand on that since I've made it quite apparent how much I love this food. Eating it on a terrace on a beautiful summer day is what made it even more of a cultural experience. I have been waiting patiently through all the cold and rainy months to talk about terrace culture in The Netherlands. I don't know if terrace culture is really the right word. The outdoor space a café, bar or restaurant has is always referred to as a terras in Dutch, so I'm just anglicizing the word. When it is sunny and warm here, which it is maybe 10% of the year, the Dutch flock to outdoor cafés to enjoy the sunshine and a good witbier, or in my case this last time around, a good coffee. They just sit for hours, talking and watching the world go by. I love how busy and full outdoor spaces become in the summer, and it is by far my favorite summer activity. You've got to soak it up and enjoy it while you can, because before you know it, the days will be shorter and it will be too cold and wet to be outside. Niek was just excited to finally try the cinnamon ice cream. He was pretty jealous that I had been here with Regan but never with him. Yes, the ice cream and appeltaart did warrant such an enthusiastic response. We sat and talked about politics and the economy since those things were on our mind with the big election for parliament coming up, and we basically just enjoyed ourselves.

Those were the three things I've done in the past week to make me feel really Dutch. When all is said and done though, I can't help but still feel pretty American, especially in the kitchen. Yesterday when I wanted something sweet, I still pulled out one of my American cookbooks and whipped up a concoction Niek had never heard of before: blondies (kind of like brownies minus the chocolate). I had never made them before, but a few recipes for them have come up on my favorite baking blogs, so I figured I'd give them a try. These particular ones called for brown butter, which I had also never made before. I made sure to get a shot of my excitement after I had successfully created clarified butter, a lot of butter:

Oh they are so good. Totally worth using up the last of my vanilla extract. They go really well with Dutch coffee.

Farmer Regan

2010-06-04T00:06:00.000+02:00

I’ve just entered into a long-term relationship – with a farm. And I only have six weeks left until I go home. Oops.

First, I have to say that the use of the word ‘farm’ instead of ‘garden’ for any plot of cultivated land is one of my favorite Nigerianisms. That and ‘bum-bum’ and, more generally, the proclivity for swearing at the Nigerian state.

Ok, now to my point: on Saturday, Abigail, Precious, Praise and Prosper helped me clear a (very) small plot for a farm in our side yard. I mostly wanted to start a farm so that I would have an excuse to swing a cutlass. And swing I did! (Not before Praise warned me not to cut off her foot or my own.) Also, I thought that it would make a good blog post. Nigeria. Growing food. Having deep cultural insights (hey everyone: kids anywhere in the world will work for candy!) . . . it all fits the theme.

Now my farm and I have six short weeks to get to know each other. The greens and okra that we planted have already sprouted, so we’re off to a good start. If only a taco salad and a glass of milk came shooting out of the tropical soil, we’d really be in business!

(Sorry about the weird color of the pictures - they were taken with a (much appreciated) loaner camera. My own camera recently took a nosedive from my arms onto the concrete floor of Kenneth Dike Library. Sarah, my housemate, suggested that the camera might have purposely taken the dive after witnessing the decrepit state of the archives. I have to agree.)

The smell of home...

2010-06-03T13:23:00.000+02:00

A while back, maybe a few months ago now, I bought a bag of barley. I bought it for no other reason than the fact that it looked nice in the packaging. When I first picked it up in the store I don't even think I knew what it was. The grains sold at the Moroccan market usually come in plain bags marked only with the name, and I'll admit that my Dutch vocabulary doesn't always extend very far when it comes to agricultural goods. Lucky for me, our house guest at the time is a historian working on the correspondence of a sixteenth-century merchant family, and he has been forced by necessity to learn the words for bulk-trade goods of the early-modern period. Not me, though. I work on overseas trade routes, so I can only tell you the Dutch words for luxury goods like pepper or nutmeg, or obscure medicinal plants. Last time I checked the weren't selling Dragon's Blood at my local grocery store, so learning that word hasn't really helped me out in my daily life.

That package of barley has sat in the back of my cupboard all this time until yesterday. Cooking has felt more like a chore lately than a joy, so I have done very little of it, and it's been pretty uninspired. I think I'm just tired of pasta and rice, so tonight out came the barley. When I opened the bag, I was struck by the smell. It was wonderfully sweet and deep, and it reminded me of something. It kind of smells like the steel cut oatmeal I like, but that wasn't really what it reminded me of. Maybe beer? There's a lot of barley in beer, but that wasn't the smell. What was it? Then it came to me...it smells just like a barn. That's right, the food I made for myself last night reminds me of hay and manure, but totally in a good way. In fact, the smell reminds me of my childhood. My hometown is tiny and located at the corner of pig farms and soybean fields, so suffice it to say, I know what the inside of a barn smells like. I think I've mentioned that fact before, but I felt the need to mention it again, since it seems to have had such a profound impact on my sense of self.

The sensory experience got me thinking about what I can define as my home. Should I have really asked myself that last night. Maybe it would have been easier to just enjoy my dinner, but then what would I write about on this blog? The Midwest hasn't been my home for some time, although I've got a huge collection of childhood memories that will always tie me to it. L.A. never felt very permanent, such is the transient nature of graduate school, although I always look forward to the visits that take me back to friends and good food. Does that make Amsterdam my home now? I mean home not just in the sense that it is the city where I live. I also don't mean it in the sense that Niek and I have made a home out of our house. I'm talking about feeling comfortable and at home in the culture. Is Amsterdam my home because the experiences I have here and the relationships I build give me a sense of place and belonging? Furthermore, if you settle in a place as an adult and don't have all of those memories from your childhood to give you cues and references to the culture in which you are living, can you really feel like you belong?

I occasionally need to remind myself that I'm not just visiting Amsterdam anymore; I actually live here. I speak the language, have a bank account and Dutch health insurance. I read the Dutch newspapers and ride my bike to run my errands. Dutch culture can be confusing to me (one of the reasons Regan and I started the blog was to explore some of our encounters with our new surroundings), but the Netherlands doesn't feel like a completely foreign place anymore. Unfortunately it hasn't completely lost its edge of foreignness, either. It does make me wonder if I will ever feel like I belong, or if I should even strive to feel that way. Is a feeling of belonging required to create a sense of home? It's not the worst thing in the world to feel like an observor if you also love the place where you live. I do love it, even if my oldest memories don't bring me back here.

I'm pretty sure these kinds of questions and ideas are pretty common for expats, and they're nothing new. I like the adventure of living in a foreign country, frustrating situations included. I also love my husband very much, and I gladly stayed here to be with him. There are times, like last night, that I wish just for a second that I had never had the desire to leave the place where I was raised. It would be so easy to have my family and friends close by. I could know the place I live in a way you only can once you've lived there forever. I did wish that for a second, because I liked the smell of barley so much and the wonderful associations it created. That feeling passed, because I am who I am, and I never wanted to stay in a small town in the Midwest, even when I was living there. I like being here in Europe with my husband and my dog. I like the canals and the cheese the beautiful Dutch sky. Maybe the next time I'm back in the States I'll smell something that reminds me of Amsterdam, and I will comment without thinking, "oh that smell like home." I don't know what that smell would be, but I'll let you know if it happens.

What else do you do on Second Pentecost Day?

2010-05-25T10:52:00.003+02:00

I am back now and feeling a little less stressed. I've gotten to a better place with my chapter and presentation and I sent Sea Legs Girl my story about running, whew. Now that I have downshifted into regular stress mode instead of the very unattractive freakout gear, it's time to get back to some writing that doesn't involve footnotes or citations of any kind. Just thinking about writing without those restrictions makes me feel all dangerous, as if I could say anything on here without the requirement to back up my claims. Good thing I pretty much only write about food and what happens in my own kitchen.

Because it was finally warm and sunny here this weekend, we ventured outside our own four walls and felt very social. Saturday and Sunday were packed with a birthday celebration for a friend and an excursion to a park with the in-laws, all wonderful stuff that I can post about later. The big question on my mind and I am sure yours as well: "What does one do the day after Pentecost?" That's right, it was time on Monday for Second Pentecost Day. Most places are closed giving you the opportunity to relax and do nothing. We could have also headed to IKEA, which is open on this holiday of holidays, for their blowout breakfast special. We could have wandered the massive showroom in search of affordable Swedish design that doesn't look like it came from IKEA. As we are not in the market for an Ektorp or a Florö, and I detest crowds, that was nixed as an option. Instead, I foolishly decided we should spend our morning productively at a garden center. My mint looked like it was dying a slow death, and the basil needed a bigger pot.

Do you know where the Dutch people go who don't end up at IKEA? They go to the garden center...the horrible, gigantic, crowded garden center. I just wanted a bag of soil and a few terra cotta pots, and it ended up taking us almost two hours to get that accomplished. There was a traffic jam of carts full of geraniums and cherry tomatoes stretching for what seemed an eternity through the maze. It was probably like any major garden center on a holiday weekend, but I have never in my life visited such a place. If I had taken pictures of my experience you would only see pictures of me really irritated by a lack of customer service and the very long lines. Better you should see the following pictures:

I think your third option for getting out of the house and "doing something" on Second Pentecost Day is sitting on a sunny terrace with a Belgian witbier while you watch the boats go by. Once you've done that, you can really enjoy re-potting your herbs. Watch out, tomato basil salad! I'm getting ready for you.

Still kickin'

2010-05-19T00:25:00.000+02:00

James just informed me that I should post at least a few sentences on this blog, assuring readers that the malaria did not kill me. And neither has Nigeria. Yet.

However, as I write this I realize that I have probably spoken to every single blog reader in the past three hours. So you all know that I am cured of malaria (after one month of avoiding the doctor and then - finally - two shots in the bum-bum by a distinctly unsympathetic nurse). Now the only excuse I have for not posting on the blog is sheer, unadulterated laziness. But I would like to point out, in my defense, that a day of research in Nigeria requires a long recovery period and involves drinking of Coke and watching of bootlegged movies, not writing of thoughtful blog posts. (Also, I am quite lazy. But look James - I've written more than two sentences!)

So. Here is my solemn vow: to try with all my might to avoid malaria for the next two months -- to resist the temptation of okadas, even though I love the feeling of the wind blowing through my hair as we weave around taxis and fly across potholes -- to continue my quest for those elusive things we call "documents" or "historical sources" so that I might one day write a dissertation (fingers crossed, people! seriously) -- and to eat many delicious and non-delicious Nigerian foods and report back to you, our dear readers.

And, finally, some photographic proof that I remain among the living:

(Learning how to plant cassava on the Iheanacho's farm, which is right next to our house. I claim to be making plans for my own farm. Abigail finds this fabulously funny since she's on to me and propensity for sitting around. But I have big plans; I just need to buy a hoe and some seeds!)

Stress...just stress

2010-05-03T13:44:00.000+02:00

A much more competent and organized person than I would be able to handle a few writing deadlines while maintaining a tiny blog. How I wish I were one of those people. I promise that Potatoes and Yams will again fill your blog reader with all sorts of wonderful tidbits about food and life abroad in the near future, as soon as I can stop stressing so much and Regan is fully recovered from her malaria scare. For right now, though, all my writing energy is going into a horribly overdue chapter and a paper I am presenting at a conference in June that a bunch of respected Dutch historians will also be attending--nothing like heaping a little pressure on top of that stress--oh and also a writing project Sea Legs Girl is working on (my chapter is coming, I promise!). So until I get a grip on myself, you can go check out her blog. :)
I will leave you with a few lovely pictures of Koninginnedag, Queen's Day. Every April 30, the streets become awash in a sea of orange-clad, drunk, Dutch people celebrating the glory of the monarchy.
I took these pictures last year during my first Queen's Day experience. I could only handle the large crowd for a few hours before escaping to the countryside for a little bike ride. The lambs in the field were much more entertaining than the masses strolling around Amsterdam. This past Friday, Niek and I skipped it altogether and escaped to a deserted beach with the dog. It was awesome.

A Nigerian Easter pie

2010-04-21T22:19:00.000+02:00

I realize that I'm a few weeks behind here, but I can't miss the opportunity to tell you about the delicious pie that wasn't . . .

James, my housemates and I invited Abigail and her family over for a good old-fashioned Easter celebration. Egg-dyeing, candy-hunting and general tomfoolery.

I was excited to bake a 'real American' dessert for the occasion - pie. Since pie is an unknown entity in Nigeria, James had to bring me pie plates from home (along with Cinnamon Life cereal, Cheez-its, peanut M&Ms, lavender and a vegetable peeler). I proudly showed them to Abigail and assured her that my pie would knock her socks off. She would be converted to the Way of Dessert. But then, instead of baking a know-it's-going-to-be-good apple pie like a sensible person might, I decided to get tropical: I would bake a mango pie. A beautiful, tasty culturally-symbiotic pie!

Unfortunately, my pie was kind of yucky. It looked like a pumpkin pie, but tasted like a weird eggy mango custard. Good thing we had Starbursts to eat after the egg hunt! While the other Easter festivities were a roaring success, mango pie was not . . . so, lesson learned? Eat pies. Eat mangos. Separately.

(James claims to have liked the pie.

But he's very committed to Team Pie in the eternal pie vs. cake debate.)

Scones and Work

2010-04-21T13:39:00.003+02:00

Do you ever feel like you are just going to die if you don't get something as soon as possible that is sugary, breadlike and goes well with an afternoon coffee? No? Well, good for you, although I don't understand you at all. I get those urges a lot, and Niek's suggestion to go eat a piece of fruit to stifle that craving is insulting. Firstly, gross, fruit and lattés don't go together at all. Secondly, I have tried that trick before and no matter what nutritionists say, an apple does not make my desire for cake go away. If anything it leaves me irritated, because I feel full from that stupid piece of fruit but completely unfulfilled.

I'm trying to get myself into a bit of a re-writing frenzy (when am I not doing this?) so I can finish a chapter and send it to my advisor. This means spending a lot of time at home willing myself to be productive and taking lots of "breaks" with housework and yes, occasionally baking. There's nothing particularly Dutch about the scones I made for myself during one of these said breaks. Regan could even make these in Nigeria if she could her hands on some chilled butter. Fortunately the Dutch are plagued/blessed with a surplus of dairy cattle, so that's not a problem for me.

In fact, the price of milk and butter is shockingly low here, probably because they've been conditioned to consume dairy in large quantities. It's the only place I've ever been where it is standard practice to serve milk and buttermilk as drink options during a conference lunch. I've been to a few history conferences here, and it's always the same lunch: lunch meat sandwiches and cheese sandwiches (but never meat and cheese together) and your choice of milk or buttermilk. You should have seen the look the caterer gave me when I practically had to beg for a glass of water instead.

So when I found myself needing a snack to go with my coffee, I went for quick and easy. A few turns of the food processor and fifteen minutes in the oven later, I had dense scone topped with some sugar and cinnamon to complement the coffee and work. So much more satisfying than an apple.

How to tell it's April in Amsterdam

2010-04-15T22:03:00.000+02:00

1. The daffodils are almost finished blooming and the tulips are almost ready.

2. Amsterdammers are sitting on terraces and drinking witbier.

3. We slept with the window open last night.

4. The dog has been led deep into the wilds of the park in search of the sources of the million smells his nose is taking in.

5. I ran outside in shorts, a t-shirt, no hat, and my ears and hands didn't get the least bit cold.

6. The sun now sets at 8:30 p.m.

7. There are lambs interspersed throughout the herds of sheep.

8. I have this relentless urge to eat salad.

9. People just keep smiling as the whiz past on their bicycles sans coats, gloves or scarves.

The real reason that I know it is truly April in the Netherlands can be summed up into one foodstuf. Guess what I had for dinner tonight.

10. This right here is spring on a plate...

That's right. I had white asparagus for dinner. Asparagus season is upon us, my friends. I think I've almost wrangled Niek into a trip to the fields in the south of Limburg just so I can experience it in all its glory. I hope to tell you about it once I convince him to go.

The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Netherlands

2010-04-13T16:32:00.000+02:00

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” -Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food (and in other stuff written by the author)

I was making my dinner last night, pasta with tomato sauce and anchovies (nothing but the best for a Monday), and it just suddenly popped into my head that Niek and I eat quite differently than we used to. That's due to quite a few factors, actually, and is tied up in the practical concerns of keeping our weekly shopping routine within our budgetary constraints, my desire to eat a more well-rounded diet, my unexplained loathing for taking vitamins, all while we continue to truly enjoy what we eat. I love to eat; I see it not only as a necessity but also a daily pleasure. I also hate hearing that there are bad foods and good foods. Food is just food, isn't it? Shouldn't it exist outside some sort of moral sphere? Food never makes choices about what it's going to be or how its going to be consumed. Those are choices for an individual to make. You can talk about good and bad systems for growing or slaughtering or processing and packaging foodstuffs if you are talking about those things in terms of their impact on the environment or causing suffering. You can talk about good or bad diets, although I also take issue with moralizing a diet. If you watch The Biggest Loser, which I have been known to do on ~~a weekly basis~~ occasion, you can see how easy it is for the trainers and the show to demonize inanimate objects (food) and watch as the contestants are redeemed from their unhealthy (bad) ways and become reborn as happy, slender, healthy (good) individuals. The show icks me out a bit, and yet I continue to watch it. Hmm.

If you think I'm starting to sound like I've read too much Michael Pollan, then you would probably be right. I've only read his Omnivore's Dilemma and in that book I found an individual grappling with the choices he makes daily about what he is going to eat. I loved that he wanted to understand the systems at play in the U.S. that bring him so many food choices, and I loved that he wanted to find a balance between feeling good about his food choices without making every trip to the grocery store a moment of crisis in his life. If you haven't read the book, I would suggest it as a a nice, easy weekend read. I've heard great things about In Defense of Food, too. His revelations aren't groundbreaking by any means, but he presents them in an easy and entertaining way.

Pollan's book was just the last in a series of progressions in my life that have truly forced me to think about my food. In my early twenties, I saw Supersize Me just like the rest of my cohort. I read Fast Food Nation, which to this day has put me off chicken nuggets. (If you want to know about the lives of packing plant employees you can read Fast Food Nation, or you can also ask my mom about the summer she spent teaching English to Mexican immigrants working at a local meat packing plant in Nebraska. They did not have easy lives and most definitely did not have easy jobs.) I have perused countless articles in magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker and the Dutch De Groene Amsterdammer. I'll just mention in passing a pretty disturbing program on PBS about aquaculture that ended my love affair with farm-raised salmon and shrimp. Reading Pollan's book was no big jump for me, and it reinforced the ideas behind the way I eat more than it changed it.

Do I sound like an overly-sensitive, overly-educated, tree hugging, organic cotton wearing academic/intellectual to you yet? I think that I do. For the record, I don't own any organic cotton clothing...yet. I would say, however, that growing up in the Midwest with parents deeply committed to conservation efforts (shout out to Ducks Unlimited and Quails Forever) and eating well had just as much to do with the way I look at food as the books and articles I've read as an adult. My dad often went hunting and fishing when I was a kid, and I cannot tell you number of times he reminded me that we should only ever bring home as much as we could eat. Seriously, I'm pretty sure he said that every single time I sat with him the boat. My dad deeply dislikes trophy hunting, and I think he gets a little sad when he thinks about it. Do not ask me how my mom found the time to cook a nice supper every night or how she was able to can like crazy at the end of the summer when all the produce from the garden started coming in. She doesn't can anymore (although she freezes a lot of summer fruits), but when she gave me her canning equipment a few years ago it was like Christmas in August. Sometimes I feel like some sort of strange amalgam between Midwestern practicality and liberal higher education with a sprinkling California Cuisine philosophy for good measure.

So what does all of this have to do with food and the way I eat in the Netherlands? Well, quite a lot. Los Angeles made it easy to eat and cook the way I wanted to without much effort, much easier than in the Midwest. Do you realize there is more than one strawberry season in SoCal? I would notice it every few months when the price of strawberries would drop in the stores. "Ah, must have been time for another harvest in the Central Valley," I would think. I could splurge on some locally grown stuff at the farmer's market when I felt like it, buy conventionally grown produce at the Persian Market for the whole week for about $15, and get my hormone free milk and Greek yogurt at Trader Joe's. It was fabulous, and I loved the routine I had created for myself in L.A. I hated that I had to drive to get to all of those places, but I loved that I could go months without needing to set foot in a regular grocery store (except for baking necessities like highly refined sugar and cake flour). Now almost two years after my move to Amsterdam, I am still struggling with my shopping routine. The struggle is probably why you have to read about it so often on this blog. So, sorry about that.

The older I get and the more I read, the more shopping for food becomes a conscious act of making choices: choices for nutritious food, choices about sustainability, choices in support of humane livestock operations. Some things are really easy for me; I just don't buy chicken or eggs unless I know the chickens did not live their lives in cages. (I have been to large-scale chicken operations, and I hate them. You try not feeling disgust at a factory farm. Go ahead, just try it.) The gray areas begin and the choices becomes more difficult when I consider grains and produce. With the newest catch word in "responsible" food choice, "local," swimming around in my brain, I start to wonder about the food in my basket. Can I buy that kiwi? It had to be flown from New Zealand to get here, so I don't think it's particularly fresh or environmentally friendly, but it would taste so delicious in a fruit salad. Should I buy this bag of bulgur even though it had to come from Turkey to be here? What about the figs from Morocco and the blood oranges from Spain? I can't quite give up imported produce and subsist on the fruits and veggies grown locally in the Netherlands in the winter. That would involve months of nothing but root vegetables and stored apples, and that sounds not at all appealing to me.

The way people eat is also just so different here. Correction, the way I want to eat and the lengths I need to go to eat that way lead me to conclude that people eat very differently here. I didn't notice it at first, but it's become more and more apparent to me in the last year. Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, "Duh, Diana. It's a foreign country, of course it's different." Obviously I know it's going to be different, so maybe what I should say is that it seems like food is unvaried. I can't really say with any authority at all how varied a typical Los Angeleno's diet is, but I do know that the options felt so limitless when I lived there, and I feel kind of fenced in here.

I suppose my efforts for better eating, and to some extent more responsible eating, has focused on cooking as much with whole foods as possible (whole grains, dried beans, good nuts, butter, olive oil, blah, blah, blah), giving myself lots of choices, and not overdoing it on the processed foods. I love sweets, and I eat something sugary everyday, but I wouldn't define that as overdoing it. Eating should be enjoyable and I enjoy my sugar. Creating too many rules and restrictions around food could make anyone, but definitely me, cranky and unhappy. I "heart" Michael Pollan's book so much, because he wants you to enjoy the food you eat, and part of that process is through variety. This, unfortunately, is why Amsterdam can continue to feel like a foreign place to me. I want variety with my food choices, and I haven't been successful at finding that here. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I keep finding the same food wherever I go. I find lots of Gouda cheese (yum), lots of bread, lots of meat, and a few of the same fruits and vegetables. When I want whole grains or beans, I go to the Moroccan market and shop with the other immigrants. If I want fish that doesn't show up on a list of unsustainable species, I have to work really hard to do so. And when I want whole wheat flour, well you already know, I throw a temper tantrum and realize I'm not going to get it.

So last night as a I finished eating my spaghetti I thought about Michael Pollan and his eating philosophy. I thought that sometimes it can be really frustrating here to find the ingredients I want in order to enjoy my dinner. I also thought how much easier it is for him as a resident of Berkeley, CA to eat the way he wants to. I thought that I might have taken my time in L.A. too much for granted, although I don't regret leaving it. Living in Amsterdam, in any foreign place, comes with its challenges, and as an ex-pat food is one of my greatest challenges and joys. I can eat the way I want here, but I have to be willing to work a little harder at it.

Hey, Regan. I loved your posts about the market. Looks like you don't have a problem finding lots of locally grown food. :)

A public service announcement.

2010-04-10T12:21:00.000+02:00

Don't warm up food in the oven while it is wrapped in newspaper.

[Good thing we just received a key to the porch door so that we have a second escape route in case of fire!]

Grocery shopping, Ibadan style - Part II

2010-04-09T01:07:00.000+02:00

And now to finish the shopping trip. I hope we've all had time to sit in the shade and have a snack - maybe a FanYogo or a cold Coke - and we feel ready to get back out there and bargain some more. Meat doesn't buy itself, people.

But it does come delivered, carried on a piece of cardboard by an obliging young man [always a man: women don't sell meat, they sell vegetables - but not carrots, men sell carrots . . . ah, the gendering of the marketplace . . . another post, another time]. Abigail has to bargain harder for a good price on meat than for other food items. I usually wander away so as not to taint the proceedings with my oyinbo presence. As you've probably realized, I would likely starve to death without Abigail. My diet of Cheese Balls, Coke and oatmeal would result in malnutrition and eventual brain stoppage. And then who would write a dissertation on the development of a book market and the social implications of literacy in twentieth-century southwestern Nigeria? Oh. Someone else.

I can, however, get a great price on bananas and cans of tinned milk with my mad bargaining skills.

And I like to throw my hat into the ring when it comes to fish bargaining. The fish in the picture above is waiting for a price to be agreed upon so that it can go to a good home. To be made into stew. Yum!

I love grocery shopping in Nigeria because the markets are full of tastes and smells that I've never experienced - buckets and baskets piled high with beautiful mounds of food that I've never seen. But I also enjoy taking part in what is a daily ritual for so many Nigerians, especially the women who do almost all of the shopping and cooking. I certainly don't blend in, but when I'm waiting for the fish to be chopped up or the egusi seeds to be ground, I feel like I have earned the right to be here.

[A disclaimer: grocery stores, the kind with shelves and price tags and freezers, do exist in Nigeria. I just don't go very often because they're expensive and carry the same foods as the market. Also, the local Food Co. doesn't make for very interesting pictures. But people do shop in these kind of stores. Just so you know. (But also, mostly people shop at markets like the one described above. Where else can you buy your cassava powder and stock fish?)]

Easter, and just for fun, 2nd Easter

2010-04-08T13:53:00.003+02:00

Yes, I realize that Easter was already five days ago, and I should have posted this much sooner. It's just that Monday was Second Easter Day here, and I've been trying to catch up with a bunch of work ever since then. Oh, yes, the Dutch have second holiday days all the time: Second Christmas Day, Second Pentecost Day, Second Ascension Day. I think when I first visited during the winter Holidays, I wrongly assumed there was a Second New Year's Day. It's a big ploy to wrestle a day off work from all those religiously categorized, yet now fully secularized, official holidays. Now that I think about it some more, I'm going to do some research to find out the processes that took place in order to make all of these government sanctioned days off from work. Almost all the public holidays here have a connection with Christianity. The Dutch State has a very unique history with its relationship to religions and one that I'm not going to get into right now. Honestly, do you really want to read about that because how much time do you really have? If you're bored, just look up pillarization some time. Actually, here is the Wikipedia entry. Not the best explanation of it, but I guess it will do. I had to know about it for my comprehensive exams although, early-modernist that I am, I would be hard pressed to talk about it with any authority.

Right, well back to Easter and the fabulous food...which I did not make. We spent the weekend at my in-laws' house where the kitchen, to which I have only recently been granted access in the form of a lowly sous-chef every now and then, is the domain of my father-in-law . It was only last month I was allowed to slice a mango for a salad when he was in a time crunch. (By the way, I totally rocked that mango. Thank you, Jamie Oliver, for teaching me how to do it all fancy like. If you're curious to know, he did it just like this) It's always fun spending a few days in Utrecht with Niek's family. We walk around the center of the city, enjoy the charming coziness of its smaller streets and two canals, and we also eat much too much good food.

I can't really tell you what a "traditional" Easter meal is in the Netherlands. It's sure to involve a lot of meat and starches. Going by that logic, our brunch was pretty Dutch. It had delicious coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice (for some reason Dutch people just love o.j.), lots of bread products, cheese and meat. We had salmon for the bagels, too. Although ours had to travel from Alaska to be with us, salmon appears on a lot of brunch menus here.

The sun even came out for a a few hours, before it decided to hail. We didn't color any eggs this year, but I did see them in the store, and the Dutch children I saw went on their Easter egg hunts probably with as much enthusiasm as their American counterparts. I haven't thought too much about Easter eggs, but now I'm curious if most of Europe adheres to this tradition. Anyone know?

Hope you all enjoyed your weekends and ate well.

Grocery shopping, Ibadan style

2010-04-05T14:19:00.000+02:00

On the way to the market.

James is on a plane somewhere between Lagos and Atlanta right now and I'm back in my living room in Ibadan. Boo hoo! Luckily, we've had electricity all night and morning, which eases the pain a little . . .

See? I'm easily satisfied. It also helps that we've begun the countdown to my return to Los Angeles. I'm going to try to soak in all of the Nigerianess that I can over the next three months. Then it is back to West LA, where I won't be able to see cute little goats everyday but I will have an uninterrupted power supply. You know, trade-offs.

So, join me on a very Nigerian experience: shopping for groceries at Bodija Market.

A view down the main market road.

We usually start at the plaintain seller's stall, where we buy the plantains and yams and then leave them until there until the end of the shopping trip.

Buying groceries in the market takes a long time. Weaving in and out of the stalls, buying each item from an individual seller, negotiating every price, entertaining people with my attempts at Yoruba, eating snacks . . . no quick trips to the store around here.

Doing the grocery shopping is an all-day event!

Buying the vegetables and canned goods.

I'm obviously not in any of these pictures because I'm behind the camera, embarrassing Abigail with my constant requests to "ya a photo." (And if I do make an appearance in any market picture, I will be the woman with the bright red face and crazed look in my eye. Watch out.) Since I've been shopping at Bodija for about six months now, the sellers have seen me around and are gracious enough to allow me to take photographs of them at work. I've had to promise not to make lots of money selling the pictures to 'my people in America.' Instead, I say that I will show people the pictures so that they want to come and visit Nigeria.

So, people of America, this is grocery shopping in Nigeria - come see for yourselves!

A lovely oil seller.

(To be continued.)

Primo's Pics...for you, Regan

2010-03-30T09:20:00.001+02:00

Hey, Regan. I could go for some Primo's donuts right about now, too. Does James want to fly back to L.A. and then head over to Amsterdam? No? I guess I'll have to go back to L.A. for a visit, then. I'm ready for a buttermilk donut.
Here are some pictures I took at Primo's last October.

Seriously, a donut sounds kind of good right now.

A treat

2010-03-30T00:10:00.000+02:00

The last few weeks have been full of fun and travel. But instead of talking about my adventures, I want to tell you all that I got to eat a Primo's donut for breakfast.

A picture with James - to record the historic moment. A real donut in Nigeria.

Primo's, if you've never been, is the best donut shop in Los Angeles. Mr. and Mrs. Primo have been running the place since 1956. The coffee is no good, but the donuts are light, fresh and cakey. So James and I spend most Saturday mornings sitting in front of Primo's with coffee from home (for James) and a carton of milk (for me), eating our cinnamon/chocolate/buttermilk donuts. Sometimes Mr. Primo comes outside and tells us about back when the neighborhood was covered in celery fields and the opening scene of "The Grapes of Wrath" was filmed on the dirt road that is now National Blvd.

Thanks for bringing me a taste of home, James!

(PS. Since I should be writing about Nigeria: there are donuts here, too. They are a lot heavier and a lot less sweet than the American variety. Also, they are called 'puff puff,' which is extremely fun to say.)

Cake!

2010-03-28T19:11:00.003+02:00

Yea, it is spring! We've had some really nice days here this week, and it seems that everyone is happier now that the flowers are blooming and a winter coat is not required for biking around town. My husband's birthday happened to coincide with this week's lovely weather giving us the chance to get outside to do some celebrating. He did ask me for one thing this year: to bake him a birthday cake. In the years that we have known each other I have never made him a cake, a fact he has brought up on many an occasion. I think it was just rubbing salt into the wound that I have made birthday cakes for other people, just not for him. That's what happens when you do the long-distance thing for a while. What was I supposed to do, mail him a cake from 6000 miles away?

So have I griped about not being able to find cake flour here? Pretty sure I have. It's probably in a post about not being able to find other such niceties of the civilized world like vanilla extract and tape measures with centimeters and inches printed on them. Fear not, this will not be one of those posts. Imagine for a second what I looked like when I walked into the supermarket on Friday convinced that I would not find what I was looking for, convinced that control over Dutch baking supplies remained firmly in the hands of the powerful cake mix companies, only to discover in the moment I stood in the small baking corner, the world had been turned upside down. Unfortunately, I did not have a camera with me to record this historic event, but I re-enacted it the next morning for you.

I look a little more comatose than surprised in the picture, but it was kind of early so I should get points for effort. Can you read the package? It says "cake flour!" So what if it's not real cake flour like I could get at home. In an effort to make it light and airy, they mixed regular flour with a bit of rice flour, but still it's a step up, and I'll take it.

With my cake flour firmly in hand, I could being the task of making a lemon cake. Lemon flavor is what Niek wanted, and I'm only too happy to oblige considering how obsessed I am with making lemon desserts. I had a lemon tree in my backyard in L.A., which is where this love affair began. Anytime I needed a quick dessert, I would just walk out back and pick a few. It was so easy and of course so delicious. It's not quite as easy here, but it's not as if buying a few at the Moroccan market is a really trying affair. And now that spring has made an appearance, I suddenly feel like fresh and light flavors again.

The Dutch don't really do cakes well. Various cookies? Yes, delicious. Apple pie-type things? Also quite awesome. Cake? Meh. Cakes just aren't the same here (as if I should expect them to be the towering layers of an American cake). It usually involves a few really thin spongey layers really thick layers of some sort of mousse. Don't get me wrong, they can be delicious. They're just not cakes to me.
Here's an example from our wedding last year. The pink layers are a raspberry mousse. There probably something very American about me that craves something much grander than this for a celebration, something that indicates just by looking at it that it is decadent and loaded with tons of eggs and butter.

Maybe cakes are a little more restrained here, because they are almost never considered a dessert. It's what you are supposed to serve in the afternoon with coffee. Even at our wedding, we had to explain that we would be following the American tradition of serving the cake last instead of directly after the ceremony the way the Dutch do it. It still throws me for a loop that celebrations start with something sweet before moving on to a savory meal.

The many layers of cake, frosting and lemon curd created an effect that was anything but subdued, and it proudly took its place of honor at the end of the meal while we wished my husband a happy birthday. I have no idea what we'll do with a cake that was meant to serve twelve, but I'm sure we'll enjoy our coffee time a little more for the next few days.
The recipe was wonderful and fairly easy. If you feel like a lemon cake, you can find it here.

Babyshower, Part II

2010-03-23T14:46:00.003+01:00

About a month ago, I promised to post more pictures of the baby shower I threw for one of my friends. I then realized that in all of the excitement of the day, I had failed to take any pictures of the shower or the food that I had been so anxious about preparing and presenting. Luckily the guest of honor had the presence of mind to snap a few pics of the place before the guests arrived. She's been kind of busy (something about preparing for the imminent birth of her first child) and just got around to sending me the pictures this past weekend. If I were a pregnant lady quickly approaching my due date, I'm not sure I would ever have remembered to send a scatter-brained friend some pictures of cupcakes, but she is a much more organized person than I am, so you are all very lucky.

Despite my fear of organizing large events for lots of people I do not know, I was so excited to throw this shower. My friend is so lovely and just deserved an afternoon of people celebrating her. Baby showers are a completely foreign concept here, and I have spent quite a bit of time over the past few months trying to figure out why these kinds of celebrations aren't commonplace. I'm talking about parties that are traditionally meant to bring communities of people together with the goal of supporting and aiding individuals in a new phase in their lives. I'm thinking of bridal showers, baby showers and house warming parties. (To be fair, I have been to a house warming party here, and some people did bring gifts, but it wasn't expected, and the gifts were all very small things. Mostly, people just stood around and drank a bunch of beer.) You can bet there is no such thing as a registry here, either. A handful of stores have bridal registries, but a baby registry? Um, no. That is just not done.

Please excuse the plastic wrap over the sandwiches. It's the only photo I have of them.

Here are the cupcakes. I can't believe it took me so long to make so few!

I am not trying to say that Americans only care about getting really good gifts from their friends for their babies or that Dutch people aren't interested in celebrating big life events. Baby showers have always seemed to me like a community building event. People come together to talk, eat and share advice in addition to the gift-giving part. It seems like a great way for a personal and small network to provide support to new parents. Based on all the stuff my friend and her husband have bought over the last few months, I'm going to go ahead and say that having a baby is expensive. Isn't a baby shower meant to take some of the financial burden off of first-time parents?

My husband thinks that a shower seems like a very American form of support: individuals banding together to help out an individual in need. I think he may have a point. Whenever we have discussed this, I've asked him why the Dutch might be less inclined to support individuals in this way. He just looks at me and tells me that the Dutch do support individuals; they give a large portion of their income to taxes which in turn comes back to the community in forms of social services. So while your friends will probably not buy that really expensive Bugaboo stroller for you*, their taxes (coupled with your mandatory health insurance) ensure that you will have no out of pocket expenses for prenatal care or delivery and that you'll receive a hefty reimbursement for childcare costs once you go back to work after your twelve weeks of paid maternity leave. So, in a nutshell, that is why the Dutch do not have baby showers.

Despite the guests and the hostess having absolutely no idea what to expect from the day, the shower ended up a great success. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food and had a good time playing the baby shower games I suggested. It was just a bunch of ladies getting together for some food and baby talk. Maybe showers will catch on here, after all. Who doesn't like a nice afternoon tea with the ladies?

*I realize that a Bugaboo isn't something that most American women would get at their baby showers, because it's freaking expensive stroller. It's really just to emphasize the point that the big-ticket items (stroller, car seat, I don't know what other expensive things babies need but I'm guessing there are a few things) wouldn't automatically go on some sort of baby gift list here. By the way, Bugaboo is a Dutch company, and the streets of Amsterdam are crawling with them.

Oops.

2010-03-16T22:02:00.000+01:00

Yoruba is a tonal language, which means that pretty much everything I say is unintelligible to anyone other than myself. Normally, this doesn’t matter – the people I’m trying to communicate with just smile, tell me I’m trying and wonder what the heck my gobbley-gook meant.

Today, for example, I informed the archive ladies that I will be going to Lagos to pick up my husband on Friday. This sentence sounded perfectly clear and understandable in my own head. The ladies, however, smiled kindly, asked (in English) what I was trying to say and then corrected my sentence . . . repeating back to me the exact words I had just said. Except with actual Yoruba tones instead of my (apparently) free-form version.

Good luck trying to understand me, people of Ibadan!

At other times my cavalier treatment of Yoruba tones has more serious consequences - like when people ask if I eat Nigerian food. I typically list the various Nigerian meals I’ve enjoyed and then end with something along the lines of “But I like pounded yam [iyan] the best.” Well, it turns out that I’ve been pronouncing ‘iyan’ with a high tone at the end, instead of the low tone it’s supposed to have – and therefore telling people that “I like famine the best.” That’s right. All over Ibadan, I’ve left a trail of people wondering why I like Nigerian food just fine, but I enjoy famine the most. (Also, when I tell people that I have a husband, I might also be telling them that I have a car, a farm or a penis. I’m never quite sure.)

Yams, not famine.

Oops!

Shopping and the Dutch Bike

2010-03-16T20:22:00.002+01:00

Just wanted to share how I get the shopping done when Niek isn't around. We do the non-Dutch thing of buying groceries once a week. Unfortunately we were just too busy helping a friend move on Saturday to make it to the store. This morning, because there was basically nothing left in the house and I had been reduced to eating almond butter and raisins with a spoon, I hopped on my bike and did some shopping. The weather was beautiful today and biking along in the sunshine put me in a great mood. After living in Los Angeles for so long where people will get in their cars to drive literally a few blocks, it feels kind of liberating to be in such a bike-friendly place.
Below is my bike. It has no gears, a pedal brake and a little bell to warn the tourists who walk into the bike lane. I love it so much. Sorry I had to take the pictures inside the garage. I wanted to show off the pretty day in the background, but it was too complicated to balance the weight of the grocery bags on the bike without the support of a sturdy column. Hope the weather is becoming just as lovely where you are.

The bread flour quest

2010-03-15T18:51:00.002+01:00

Sorry to bring this up again, but the Dutch must be the Europeans, who are least inclined to bake. Here I am in the thick of Western Europe. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a corner bakery filled with bread and cookies, but somehow, please do not ask me how it is possible, I can't find basic baking supplies in Holland's largest city. All I wanted was some bread flour, that was all I was asking for; to be more precise, that was all my cookbooks were asking for.

My cooking routine has been in a bit of rut lately, so I've been happy to take suggestions for our dinner menu from a fellow historian grad student who has been staying with us for a few weeks. I think if it had been left up to me, we would have been stuck eating omelets or granola every night last week. When he enthusiastically mentioned making our own pizzas for dinner one night, I was game. The only concern I had was making the crust. I had never made pizza crust before. In fact, I had never made any kind of yeast bread, ever. Kind of weird for someone who has spent more than half her life baking. I did buy a jar of yeast once, but it sat in my refrigerator for a few years before I moved and decided to throw it out. After looking through a few of my cook books I thought, "Hey, how hard can this be?" Hmmmm....well, it's actually not that hard, but somehow I managed to fail on the first attempt. I will blame the Netherlands, once again, for my major baking failure.

First trip to the stores in my neighborhood resulted in no bread flour. Fine, I would just get some whole wheat flour and make a delicious crust like I once enjoyed here in Columbia, Missouri. Problem, "whole wheat" flour here looks like someone took bleached flour and mixed it back with the wheat bran (kind of like graham flour). That's not what I wanted. Then I spotted a bag with a German name on it that looked like whole wheat flour. I asked Niek what he thought Gerstenmehl meant. He had no idea, so I thought I would just take a chance and buy it. Guess what, it does not mean whole wheat flour.

Apparently it means barley flour (I have got to improve my German vocabulary) and has the consistency of semolina. And this is what it looks like after it's been used as a substitute for bread flour.
That's also exactly what it looks like after it has been left to rise for two hours. I covered it with a wet linen towel, went for a nice long run out in the semi-warm spring weather and came home to find a yeasty, heavy brick of dough.
I would have tried to make a crust out of it, but it crumbled in my hands. Into the trash can it went where it made our house smell like the after-effects of a frat party.
The next day I did my regular tour de find-a-seemingly-common-American-ingredient through the supermarkets, natural food stores, and the British-American store. Nothing, not one place had either a normal whole wheat flour or bread flour. So, I resigned myself to using the all-purpose flour on hand thinking it would be awful and all the cookbook writers would come after me for daring to use bleached, bland flour in their glorious recipes.

Nope. Nothing wrong with it. It rose like a dream, and I fulfilled my fantasy of tossing pizza dough into the air. Pictures were taken of that, but they're too embarrassing to share. Our houseguest and Niek took a more sane approach to rolling out their dough and adding their toppings.

...mmm hmm, it was delicious. I'll definitely be attempting the crust again, with or without the bread flour. Too bad my neurosis to find the perfect ingredients and my frustrations with a foreign country stressed me out for absolutely no reason. I'm still going to look for some bread flour, though.

Banana bread, Nigerian style

2010-03-10T21:20:00.001+01:00

My backyard banana tree. Mmmmmm.

Here in Nigeria, I don't cook. I don't clean. I don't wash my own clothes. Basically, I get to be a lazy bum. But to make up for my laziness, there is one thing I can do: bake cakes. Honey cake, vanilla cake, lemon cake, banana cake . . . my cake evangelization may even have led to some conversions: I've been asked to bake birthday cakes, which always get a warm reception. And believe me, if Nigerians didn't like the cake, they would tell me - no worrying about delicate feelings around here!

My campaign for cake awareness in Nigeria got off to a slow start, what with my liberal use of sugar (which is called 'iwo oyinbo,' or 'white person salt' in Yoruba) and my refusal to do frosting. However, it has really picked up speed recently. I'm trying to use more fruit and local spices -- and when I have enough self-control to get out my camera and snap a photo of the cake before cutting it up and wolfing down a piece, I'll be sure to blog about my experiments . . .

But for now, I'll just share my super simple banana cake recipe. I picked this recipe off the internet because it called for melted butter - no need for a mixer. What can I say? My needs are simple here. [And I can't remember where I found the recipe: but Thanks, random website!]

Combine:
1/3 C melted butter
3/4 C sugar

Add:
4 ripe mashed bananas
1 beaten egg
1 t vanilla (I like to add an extra 1/2 teaspoon.)

Fold in:
1.5 C flour
1 t baking soda
pinch of salt

Pour in loaf pan or square dish and bake at 350 F for 45 - 60 minutes.

This is the only picture I took of the baking/eating process. Oops!

Diana, here is a warm, sunny picture of banana leaves to give you a taste of the tropics.

And although my bananas are probably a lot better than yours, you get to drink lattes.

Lucky duck.

Go Bananas

2010-03-08T10:41:00.004+01:00

Last week's stress-fest of writing, reading, writing, writing, and more writing is complete. My chapter now has a rough draft! At the moment that draft roughly resembles what I think a freshman would create in a composition seminar if the assignment was to experiment with stream of consciousness writing, but hey, at least it's a rough draft. That is why I can't write this week on the intersection of food and Dutch culture. I would love to, really I would, but I didn't experience much outside the walls of our apartment for a while. I guess that's what happens to grad students working against a deadline. In fact, last week I subsisted mostly on cookies during the day and big bowls of pasta for dinner while sitting at my desk. I eat when I'm stressed, and oh my, did I eat a lot of processed food. By the time Saturday morning rolled around, I was ready for some food that didn't come out of a package and took more than ten minutes in a boiling pot of water to create.

Regan and I chatted briefly (too briefly) last week during one of the rare moments when her internet was working. Boo on you, Nigerian internet providers. She told me she had just made a banana cake, probably from bananas growing in her yard or somewhere equally local and fresh, and it made me hungry for a baked good of my own. I bet my bananas were not picked ripe from the tree, and I wonder if her bananas looked like this:

The best banana bread comes from overly-ripe, almost trash-can worthy bananas. I usually don't have too many black bananas sitting around, but when a few go bad, I just stick them in my tiny freezer until the mood strikes me to bake them into something more appetizing.

A nice and simple recipe for a weekend morning. The loaf pan easily fits in our little oven, and the good smell makes the house feel homey and Midwesterny. As much as I love this bread, I can't help but look at the old bananas in my freezer with some longing for fresh fruit that isn't citrus and that doesn't require days of shipping to arrive in my kitchen. I sighed a bit this morning when I woke up to a light dusting of snow on the ground. Hurry up, spring!
At least spring has arrived at the florist. Do we have these flowers in America, and if so, does anyone know what they're called?

Regan, I can't wait to see pics of your banana cake. It sounds so creative and I bet it was delicious!

My Favorite Meal

2010-03-06T10:06:00.000+01:00

For writing on a blog about food, I’ve been remarkably slow in getting down to the nitty-gritty of eating in Nigeria. So here it is: I’m going to tell you about my favorite Nigerian meal. I’ll even include the recipe so that you can all run out to the store, pick up some ground/dried cassava and melon seeds and make your very own eba with egusi!

Break out the pots and pans:

Me: E kuuse.

Tomato-seller: Ooooooo!!! You speak Yoruba. You are really trying, o.

Me: E se. E jo, I’d like to buy 100 of tomatoes.

Tomato-seller: Ahhhh! She said “e se”!!! How long have you been in Nigeria?

Me: Five months.

Tomato-seller: Do you take our food?

Me: Bee ni. Mo feran eba ju lo.

Tomato-seller: Ooo! You have tried, o.

This is a conversation I have every. single. day. Asking whether you eat Nigerian food is the ultimate test of the extent to which you’ve embraced the country. I can criticize the failure of leadership in Nigeria, the lack of basic human services, the rampant corruption and the gang-like mentality of the police (these are all popular topics of conversation), but if I pack away a plate of iyan and ukazi soup, I must really like this country.

Which, of course, I do. So I eat lots of Nigerian food. Here in Ibadan, one must be able to eat amala to prove true devotion to the Yoruba people. No gathering is complete without plates of amala . . . I’ve been told that people will talk for weeks if you dare to get married without the requisite offering of amala to guests. They will go home hungry (nothing else qualifies as “real food”) and grumble about your hospitality.

I first learned about culturally-based conceptions of food (and not just what tastes good to people) when I took my host family out for pizza in Accra. I thought it was the best meal I’d ever eaten, while my family wondered what they should have for their dinner. Apparently, even when eaten at 7pm, pizza is just a snack. So are sandwiches, hamburgers and spaghetti. A meal must include a large serving of starch. In Nigeria, it is called “swallow food” – food that you have to really work to eat, but leaves you feeling full for hours (sometimes days) afterwards.

For my money, eba is the best of the Nigerian swallow foods. It is made of gari – dried and ground cassava – that has been mixed with water and cooked into a paste. You can eat eba with almost anything, but I love the egusi stew. The main flavor in this dish comes from ground melon seeds (“egusi”) . . . I sit here trying to think of an equivalent flavor in the American palate, but nothing comes to mind. I guess you’ll all have to make a trip to Nigeria to experience the deliciousness of egusi – and have I mentioned often enough that you get to eat with your hand?! Down with forks!

Egusi – an approximate recipe

(And by ‘approximate,’ I mean that Abigail gave me all quantities in Naira: 50 Naira tomatoes, 100 Naira eja, 30 Naira crayfish. But she was very specific about cooking times! Oh, and the recipe serves 4 people. Approximately.)

Blend 4 small tomatoes, 1 medium onion, ¼ cup ground crayfish, pepper and Maggi to taste. Bring mixture to a boil on stove until it reduces to a slightly-watery paste, then fry the paste. (No one said this would be easy.)
Transfer paste back into large pot and add 1 cup meat stock. Taste and season with salt and/or more Maggi (Abigail wants me to emphasize the Maggi) here.
Add 1 medium dried fish (eja gbigbe), shredded, to the pot.
If you’d like, add some meat. Allow contents of the pot to boil for 2 minutes.
Add 1 cup ground egusi. (Don’t worry, I’ll bring some home in my suitcase.) Allow pot to boil for 5 minutes.
Add 3-4 cups of a shredded green leafy vegetable. (Abigail typically uses ugu, but you might try collard greens.) Combine everything and then cook for 3 minutes.

This dish should not be too watery. You can serve the egusi with rice or as a side dish. It is really just a fancy way of preparing greens – which are called ‘vegetable’ here . . . which makes me wonder if there is a generic word for, you know, all vegetables. Hmmm.

Enjoy!

Coffee and cake...and then more coffee

2010-03-01T09:18:00.000+01:00

I have to make this quick, because I have been kind of swamped with my writing schedule. I have a chapter due on Friday and am nowhere near where I should be right now, so I am feeling a bit stressed about getting it done.
Let me take a nice, relaxing moment to reminisce about the latté and apple pie I had just a week ago. The pie, known as appeltaart here, is really kind of a cross between a cake and a pie. There's a thin crust on the bottom, but the filling has enough flour in it to keep the apple slices from falling all over the place. There are about a billion places in Amsterdam to get this national treasure, and I knew a Canadian ex-pat in one of my Dutch classes determined to try them all. Her knowledge of appeltaart haunts was astounding and kind of scary. This is the piece I shared with a friend in a cafe on a sleepy street in the center of Amsterdam.

And just for comparison's sake, here is a picture of the appeltaart Regan and I split this past summer when she came for a visit:

That one had a thicker top crust and came with cinnamon ice cream, which was pretty awesome on a hot, August day. I've never attempted to make it myself at home, mostly because the ones I order in the cafés are so good. Maybe I should try a recipe, you know, with all that free time I've got on my hands.

And just a quick note on the beverage, the one I love probably too much. Americans call it a latté, but the Dutch call it a koffie verkeerd. You can also order a latté here, but you have to say [láh tuh] and not [lah tey] or the waitress will instantly know you are American and switch the conversation into English even if every other word you have said has been in grammatically correct and perfectly pronounced Dutch. Just a heads up. I usually say koffie verkeerd, because it means "messed-up" coffee, and I think it's a cute description. A regular coffee is black and the "incorrect" one has a bunch of milk in it.

So now I'm going to go make myself a coffee and get to my work writing. As much fun as writing a blog post can be, I can't send it to my advisor as part of a chapter section.

Good Morning, Sunshine

2010-02-24T09:04:00.001+01:00

I had been writing a post about the seething rage that work in the Nigerian Archives often sends me into - and the Coke that I must then drink to sooth my soul. (Also, Rage Against the Machine blasting on my iPod seems to help.) But yesterday morning, I had a freshly-blended pineapple/banana smoothie and bread with peanut butter for breakfast, followed by a lovely interview with a professor about books.

Ah, Nigeria, it only takes the right meal and a good conversation for you to work your charms . . . I'm so easy.

Sunset from my front yard.

(Note to my future self, lest I become too nostalgic: evening brought a run-in with police brandishing semi-automatic weapons. So, yeah.)

Thank you, George Washington Carver...

2010-02-21T22:09:00.002+01:00

When I was in junior high I was, as I am now, a pretty big nerd. That's why I joined my school's academic bowl team. I think it was called the academic bowl, but it could have just as easily been "marathon for the brain" or "thinking decathalon." Why is it that all of these kinds of competitions want to combine the idea of sports with the more sedentary academic pursuits into the title? The year my school put a team together the topic was African-American history, and that is where I learned about George Washington Carver and his obsession with peanuts. Let's just take this moment to thank him for bringing the idea for peanut butter into the American consciousness. That's all I was thinking this morning as I was putting these into the oven to roast.

He changed the way Americans thought about peanuts, and we can all thank him for those PB&J sandwiches we had as children...unless you're from the Netherlands, in which case you think PB&J is disgusting. It's not as if I can't buy it in the store here. In fact, Dutch people really like peanut butter, but they only seem to like this kind:

I love that the word for peanut butter in Dutch literally translates to peanut cheese, pinda (peanut) + kaas (cheese)= peanut butter. Calvé is made by Unilever, that giant corporation of the Netherlands, and as far as really processed peanut butter goes, it's not so bad, but it just didn't taste, well, peanut-y enough. I'm not against eating processed food, because, well, have you seen some of the sweets I like to bake and eat? I'm also constantly disappointed that Reese's Pieces aren't for sale in the Netherlands, as the combination of chocolate and peanut butter isn't popular here. I guarantee there's probably only about 0.05% actual peanut product in that candy, but I could eat an entire pound bag of them. Notice how I said I could as if I had not actually done it on several occasions. When it comes to peanut butter, though, the peanutier the better. We started buying the 100% natural stuff at the organic food store, but I hated forking over so much money for ground peanuts. (Trader Joe's, I miss you and your sensible prices for things like this.) Enter my Sunday morning where I apparently had nothing better to do, except for work on a dissertation chapter, but this was much more entertaining:

After 15 minutes of roasting and 10 minutes of grinding in the good ol' Cuisinart, my experiment was complete, and there can once again be delicious peanut butter in the house.

Hooray!

Baby Shower: The Preparation

2010-02-19T05:18:00.006+01:00

A few weeks ago about 20 Dutch ladies gathered in my living room for a baby shower. Before the party, I asked myself about a dozen times why on earth I had offered to throw such a party. I think I had been to maybe two baby showers ever in my life up to that point, and one of those was when I was seven, so I don't have a lot of experience with this particular kind of celebration. The words, "Well, I just have to throw you a baby shower," just kind of fell out of my mouth last fall when a friend announced that she was pregnant and due in the spring. I couldn't think of anyone more deserving of being celebrated than this wonderful friend, and I wanted to do something special for her.

The Dutch have about zero experience with baby showers, or showers of any kind, as I discovered last year before my wedding. (As a side note: my mother-in-law and my mom put together a fantastic bridal shower/bouquet making afternoon last summer, and I think the Dutch women really like the novelty of going to an American style gathering.) I don't think anyone, including myself, really knew what to expect on that Saturday afternoon in February. Maybe that's a good thing, because I was pretty unsure about all my duties as hostess. Obviously, one of my biggest responsibilities for the afternoon was putting the food together for an informal tea. I had a few freak out moments during the days leading up to the shower, but I pulled it together enough to make a menu and get some baking done.

It was truly a joy to devote a few days to baking, and thanks to the lovely blog posts at Piece of Cake, I was able to find some delicious cupcakes for my guests. Seriously, I don't know what I would do without cooking blogs. Not only do they feed my obsession to know about other people's lives, but they also give me so much inspiration. Ever since I moved and had to say good-bye to my Bon Appétit subscription (also, the direction that magazine decided to take about two years ago disappointed me and left me feeling lost in the culinary wilderness), I've come to rely on cooking blogs even more. Well, I felt excited standing in my kitchen trying out her recipes for chocolate cupcakes and some truly scrumptious cakes of lemon flavored heaven.

This chocolate cupcake recipe celebrates two ingredients the Dutch are famous for: cocoa powder and coffee. I can't speak highly enough of my little percolator. If you love espresso but can't afford the drool-worthy espresso machine complete with burr grinder attachment sitting in the window of your local cooking store, may I suggest a stovetop percolator instead? It will only ever bring you many cups of joy.

Although it's still a little early for the tastes of spring and it will be several months yet before I see fresh, young vegetables at the market, I couldn't pass up a chance to make the lemon cupcakes. Besides, I was craving a bit of spring, even if was just in my kitchen. As I was whisking up the lemon pastry cream, I was trying really hard not to calculate the amount of calories, fat, and cholesterol contained in just one bowl. Egg yolks + sugar + butter = ~~contribution to heart disease~~ the best lemon dessert I've ever made.

Because after the lemon cream came the buttercream frosting and with it the use of several more packages of butter and sugar. I bought five, FIVE, packages of butter for the shower, and I used up every, single one.

I will tell you that the cupcakes turned out very well, and the ladies seemed to like them. I used a different frosting on the lemon cupcakes, though. Instead of a frosting using heavy cream, I chose one that uses meringue in order to create a lighter, fluffier taste. The lemon pastry cream is already so rich, and I didn't want to overpower the airy cake with a heavy frosting, too. I'll post the pics from the shower this weekend along with a commentary on throwing a baby shower Dutch-style, and then you'll get to see what my finished creations looked like.

Happy Friday!

A different take

2010-02-16T21:48:00.000+01:00

Greetings Potatoes and Yams readers! My sister Regan has asked to write a guest post about my time in Nigeria (“Don’t be too negative”), and since there’s no power and I can’t read any more books about tough, thirtysomething women private eyes who take down big corporations and small towns with secrets to hide through their persistent inquisitiveness and sheet grit, I’ve decided to comply. Please bear with me as my blogging skills are very out-of-practice.

After spending nearly six months in the Netherlands, I boarded a flight to Nigeria to visit Regan for a couple of weeks before heading back to the US. I was excited but also a little apprehensive, given that Nigeria is currently making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Fortunately, Regan assuaged my fears by meeting me at the airport with my absolute favorite thing to eat in West Africa: oranges.

Oranges in Nigeria are vastly superior to their counterparts in the industrialized world for several reasons. First, they are hideously ugly, which probably means they haven’t been bathed in pesticides. Second, they are incredibly tasty and juicy because they haven’t been bred to be seedless. But most importantly, they are eaten in the funnest way known to man. The outer rind is cut away, leaving the fruit ensconced in the soft, white part I am sure there’s a scientific name for. The Very top of the orb is cut away, revealing the fruit below. You then place your mouth over this opening and squuuueeeeeze all of the juices in. Repeat as many times as necessary to drink all of the deliciousness. As an added bonus, you can turn the orange inside out and eat whatever is left.

This magical method of eating oranges is representative of the larger trend in Nigeria (and from what I gather, across West Africa) of drink and foodstuffs that can be consumed through the squeeze method. There’s agbolumo, a fruit that tastes not entirely unlike sour glue, that you suction out the seeds and then spit back out. Filtered water comes in sachets (or “water breasts”) – rip a corner off with your teeth and drink up. And most importantly, there’s the entire line of FanMilk products. Whenever life in Africa has gotten you down, simply look for someone in a blue vest pushing around a big white cooler, hiss to get his attention, and purchase a semi-frozen sachet of ice cream, yogurt, or my personal favorite, chocolate milk. God bless FanChoco.

However, there is a dark side to this obsession of eating without chewing. Much of Nigerian cuisine seems to consist of a stew accompanied by a large side of some sort of starch, pounded and mixed with water until the taste and consistency of silly putty is attained. Break off a piece of putty, dip it in the stew, pop it into your mouth, and swallow whole. While this stuff is somewhat edible and definitely filling, I hardly consider anything you can eat without chewing to be “food.” But props to the Nigerians for figuring out a way to get nutrition without tiring their jaw muscles. They must have to keep those rested for another favorite activity – yelling.

[And by 'yelling,' Ashlyn means to say 'enthusiastically approaching life.' Or maybe not. Thanks for the guest blog, Ash! Now we've hit the big-time here at Potatoes and Yams.]