California pining

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.