January 2012
4 posts
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December 2011
2 posts
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Kimchi
Project for tonight: we’re making Korean inspired wraps with ‘roast red pork belly’, kimchi, lettuce, noodles and hoisin sauce. #LuckyPeach
February 2011
4 posts
Coconut and cardemom muffins
I read about these in the cooking section of the newspaper and thought this would be a great way to make my boyfriend understand my love for carrotcake and spicy cakes. This recipe makes lovely moist muffins. These would have been great for Valentine’s Day. All credit goes to Roos Ouwehand in NRC next. Coconut cardamom valentine’s day muffins Ingredients12 cardemom pods300 gr flour225...
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Where are we now...
We had a lovely day in Groningen with a lovely lunch.
See the full gallery on posterous
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mapo tofu
A trip to an asian food market always incurs the insatiable urge to make some Asian food. Reading a wonderful book about a Chinese girl reacquainting herself with Chinese food (Fortune Cookie by Ann Mah) left me with a desire for Mapo Tofu as she describes it as a dish I would LOVE. In the back of the book she adds a recipe, unfortunately she (willingly) omits the soy bean pastes in that recipe,...
January 2011
5 posts
Thoughts on recipes
Yesterday I made Nigel Slater’s Grilled prawns with yogurt and mint. A lovely recipe, but I am not too fond of the way Nigel measures his ingredients. I can work with grams, cups, ounces, you name it. But what to make of “a couple of handfuls” of prawns? Whose hands? I have tiny hands, my boyfriend has big hands… How much is “a good shake”? How much is one...
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Lamb tagine with prunes and almonds
Last sunday we had a lovely meal. We were busy making chocolates, so we needed a dish you could assemble and pop into the oven. We used those tiny little cast iron pans so everyone had a cute individual pan. This also makes it easy to adjust the dish to everyone’s personal liking. One of our friends is pregnant and she did NOT want any mint NEAR her pan, so we did one without mint.
I...
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Potato and carrot mash
I have another traditional Dutch dish for you: potato and carrot mash. This is a wonderfully warming, hearty and filling dish during this cold winter. I spiced things up a bit - as I usually do - since the traditional version required boiling your finely sliced carrots, potatoes and onions together. You then mash them all together and end up with a glue orange-yellow substance which does not look...
December 2010
2 posts
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November 2010
4 posts
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Hot thunder and lightning
This probably sounds like the weirdest dish ever, but it is actually a very traditional, and very tasty, Dutch dish.
The traditional variety is simply called Hot Lightning and probably earned its name because the dish keeps hot for a very long time. It is a simple mixture of boiled and mashed potatoes mixed with sour and sweet apples (or pears). It is crucial that you find the right balance...
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Easy old fashioned meatballs with a twist
Sometimes old fashioned no fuss food is all you need after a long, dull but very busy friday at work. You only need to make the meatballs, then you just have to turn them regularly to make sure they bake evenly. It makes a very easy meal with some slices of bread or rolls and a bit of salad.
I also like them with my Bombay potatoes or with a very Dutch dish which can be translated as hot...
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October 2010
3 posts
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Chapatti with dessicated coconut
I have been craving Indian food recently. I don’t know what it is, as there are many wonderful things to cook, but somehow I keep returning to Indian dishes.
Today I went to an Indian restaurant with a wonderful friend whom I hadn’t seen in a few weeks (way too long for us!). We wanted to sample everything and the abundance of lovely sounding Indian recipes made it extremely hard to...
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Indonesian salad with coconut and Daging Ketjap
As you can see we are enjoying Indonesian food immensely these days. And what’s not to like? It’s easy to make, tasty and packs a lot of flavour in relatively easy to make food. Recently a new Indonesian cookbook came out ‘Boekoe Kita’ (Our Book) the recipes look amazing and we have tried two of them so far with great succes.
Another thing I really like about this food is...
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Tandoori lambchops with bombay potatoes
One of my missions is to get my boyfriend to eat more vegetables. I’ll try everything that might secretly make him eat some. Today I decided not to disguise them. My boyfriend likes spicy food so I thought: Indian food will do the trick! My parents in law gave us some incredible lambchops (another one of his favourites) so they would accompany the veggies.
Tandoori lambchops with Bombay potatoes...
September 2010
2 posts
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Agatha Christie's 120th birthday
These English people with their cakes that taste of sand, never never, will they have tasted such a cake. Delicious, they will say – delicious –’ Her face clouded again. ‘Mr Patrick. He called it Delicious Death. My cake! I will not have my cake called that!’ ‘It was a compliment really,’ said Miss Blacklock. ‘He meant it was worth dying to eat such a cake.’
Agatha Christie has always been one of...
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August 2010
1 post
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July 2010
8 posts
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Food in children's books
The use of food in children’s literature seems to be a hot item. I must say I also find it very interesting and worth writing about. I am particularly fond of old fashioned English books and the descriptions of food eaten at various picnics you find in those. I love the descriptions of crumbly sweet scones with clotted cream and jam, small triangle sandwiches. gingerbread cookies and all...
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Daging Semur
I bring a traditional Indonesian recipe today: Daging Semur. Beef slowly stewed in spiced kecap manis. A lovely dish and very easy to make - after you sliced the meat and chopped the onions, you just put it all in a Dutch oven and let it stew for 2 hours or more. After that you only boil some rice (and in my case some eggs) and your meal is ready!
Daging Semur
Ingredients 750 grams of beef
6...
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A cupcake recipe
As an answer to my cupcake dilemma from last week, I noticed a cupcake recipe in the saturday magazine of our newspaper.
Gwen Thomas, an American woman living in Amsterdam, bakes cupcakes to order for us Dutch people who just don’t seem to grasp the concept of a cupcake (even though we do appreciate a good cupcake.
The article mentions that most Dutch people indeed seem to think that a...
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Tandoori Chicken
Tandoori chicken is one of the best things you can do to chicken. The marinade is
spicy and tasty and it is a very versatile dish. You can shred the chicken and use the meat as a sandwich filling, you can eat it with rice or naan,
or - like we did this weekend - as part of a lovely barbecue with homemade bread, a light potato salad and raita.
Preferably the chicken is of course cooked in a...
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The Cupcake Dilemma
As a Dutch girl I never completely understood the difference between muffins and cupcakes.
When I was a child we would simply call whatever we were baking “little cakes” and happily decorated them with some icing and Smarties (M&Ms without peanuts). The icing was simple: just sugar and water mixed until smooth - I’d never heard of, seen nor had the buttercream variety until...
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True Blood
Friend: Hi, I ordered a bottle of True Blood and got a call that I could come and pick it up.
Bookseller: Here it is. I wonder what it's made of.
Friend: I'm not entirely sure, probably Blood orange.
Bookseller: You know, years ago I had an easier and better idea: dracola.
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Grilling weather
It’s toasting hot outside, the perfect weather for a barbecue. Unfortunately we don’t own a barbecue neither do we have the space for using one, I am sure many people have the same problem. Fear no more: a grill pan will do the trick just fine!
A recent trip to Ikea left us with a very nice recipe book full of ideas to use your grilling pan to the max: “I grill with you - 20...
June 2010
10 posts
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Shrimp salad
It has been too hot for any “real” cooking the past week, which explains the lack of posting. We have been eating easy dishes, reheating leftovers or freezer stock or went for takeout. This was actually our dinner from last Sunday: retro shrimp salad! Easy as anything. The recipe is my mother in law’s and has been in the family for ages.
Retro Shrimp Salad for 4 people...
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She's a peach, she's a doll, she's a pal of mine! →
We’ll be making Lucy’s Tilapia Taco’s next week!
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Home-made pizza
Tonight is pizza night! I have been craving for pizza this entire week. For myself I’ll make a vegetarian one (not that I don’t eat meat, I just like the traditional combination of mozarella, basil and tomato so very much). My Hungry Boyfriend will make himself a pizza with chorizo, red onion and old Gouda cheese - which is also very yummy so I may as well make part of my pizza with...
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Lemony Chicken Burgers
Sometimes you just don’t feel like putting a lot of effort in your food. On those days an easy, healthy dish with only a few (pantry) ingredients is nice to have.
For this chicken burger you only need chicken (minced, if available, otherwise you put it in the foodprocessor or slice it as finely as you can), rice wine, sesame oil, spring onion, soy sauce, lemon juice a bun, some sauces...
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Liege waffles (with pearl sugar)
Belgian waffles are amazing. Especially the variety with the crispy pearl sugar which gives the soft, slightly chewy waffle a nice crunch. I always wanted to recreate them myself, but never found a recipe that sounded easy enough. I think I found it this time!
Note that the batter has to rest for 30 minutes in total!
Liege style waffles (Belgian waffles with pearl sugar)
35 min | 30 min prep...
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Spice blends
My mother in law brought me a seriously spicy piri piri spice blend. Even pointing at it made my eyes water. It tastes delicious, however, when you mix just a pinch of it through your ground beef or sprinkle it over some baked chicken. Spice blends are wonderful to spike up a relatively simple (or easy) dish. This made me remember a conversation I recently had with a colleague, she told me her...
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Easy standby dishes
Finally Summer arrived! I am happy about it, but since I am terrible with heat, I have not been very inspired when it comes to food. Luckily I have some nice standby dishes that will perk up any easy meal, go great as side dishes with a barbecue or just make you feel comfortable.
One of my favourite sandwich fillings is egg salad. It is very easy, healthy and satisfying. This weekend I made...
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Indian night
Tonight there are Indian dishes on the menu. We’ll make samosas filled with spiced potatoes and peas and chicken tandoori. I have high expectations about the samosas. I’ve been wanting to make them ever since I saw some made during Masterchef - they looked so extremely delicious and I absolutely love curried potatoes. I also hope this will be a recipe to get my boyfriend to eat more...
May 2010
14 posts
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Grilled Halloumi
Sunday needs barbecueing and therefore I bring you a recipe! A vegetarian one today, just for the fun of it, and with a slightly unusual ingredient to spice things up: Halloumi.
Halloumi is a small, elastical and crustless white cheese from the Middle East. It hardly melts and is therefore wonderful to prepare on the barbecue.
Grilled Halloumi with a lemon-coriander-almond pesto.
Ingredients...
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Thai Beef Salad (Yum Nua)
I envy my sister in law. She has been to Thailand a few times and took a cooking class once where she learned how to carve pretty vegetable flowers. That is high on my to do list! Luckily she brought me some Thai food greeting cards. They have amazing recipes printed on the back with a pretty picture of the food in question on the front. I use them frequently, and one of them has become one of our...
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Comfort [insert noun here]
Many things count as comforting. For me it ranges from a tasty cup of coffee (and I am very picky) to reading books with titles like “Enquire Within About Everyting 1890” (with the dazzling remark printed on the cover: over one million copies sold). I am not kidding - I spent some lovely evenings leafing through it, stumbling across sensible advice as:
376. Beat a Carpet on the wrong...
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“Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”
– Adelle Davis (1904 - 1974)
That’s difficult to do, though, when my life at least, is programmed around doing it the other way around… I have more time to cook (and more of an appetite :-)) in the evening than in the morning.
My opinion? As long as you listen to your body, enjoy what...