Taco Salads

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.)

Summertime quiche

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.

The End of Summer

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.