July 2010
8 posts
8 tags
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...
5 tags
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...
5 tags
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...
8 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
5 tags
2 tags
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.
5 tags
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...
