It was our first time and I think it went really well. I have now learned that it's actually possible to have too much sushi. *belch*
Tigger had a good evening, too... he got all the leftover bits of tuna, salmon and shrimp.


Click makes bigger.

These are a Dutch traditional treat for new year's eve and new year's day. But you can buy them from street vendors throughout the winter. And they're fun to make at home, too. I've even seen them being made next to a camp fire while camping.

If it all works like it's supposed to work, they'll turn themselves over in the oil to get evenly brown on all sides.

• 17 g compressed fresh yeast
• 235 ml lukewarm milk
• 280 g all-purpose flour
• 10 g salt
• 1 egg
• 110 g dried currants
• 125 g raisins
• 1 Granny Smith apple - peeled, cored and finely chopped (optional)
• 1 litre of vegetable oil for deep-frying
• 125 g confectioners' sugar for dusting.

DIRECTIONS

1. Break up the compressed yeast, and stir into the warm milk. Let stand for a few minutes to dissolve. Sift the flour and salt into a large bowl. Stir the yeast mixture and egg into the flour and mix into a smooth batter. Stir in the currants, raisins and apple. Cover the bowl, and leave the batter in a warm place to rise until double in size. This will take about 1 hour.
2. Heat the oil in a deep-fryer, or heavy deep pan to 190 degrees C / 375 degrees F. Use 2 metal spoons to shape scoops of dough into balls, and drop them carefully into the hot oil.
3. Fry the balls until golden brown, about 8 minutes. The oliebollen should be soft and not greasy. If the oil is not hot enough, the outside will be tough and the insides greasy. Drain finished oliebollen on paper towels and dust with confectioners' sugar. Serve them piled on a dish with more confectioners' sugar dusted over them. Eat them hot if possible.

...turned out pretty well. *burp* In fact I think I overate just a little...
Here's the recipe.

• 500 grams of cod. I buy small pieces that are cheap because they're full of bones. I'd call them 'cod pieces' but somehow that sounds totally wrong...
• A handful of peeled shrimp (I used deep frozen)
• A bag of what they call 'soup vegetables' here. A mixture of pre-cut celery, carrots, leeks and cauliflower. About 500 grams
• A small zucchini or half of a big one, cut in small cubes or strips
• Two cloves of garlic (I like how we call them 'toes' in Dutch!) (pressed)
• Two laurel leaves (bay leaves)
• Fish or vegetable stock cubes
• Pepper
• Pesto (basil sauce), about half a jar or several table spoons full
• One small tin of tomato puree

Boil the cod in about 2 litres of water until it is white and soft. Drain the cod but keep the water, it's used in the soup.
Spread the fish out on a cutting board and pick the bones out by hand. Now you know why you paid only one euro for a pound of fish.
Throw the bones away but give the skins to your cat, you'll make yourself enormously popular.
Put the fish back into the water. Add all the other ingredients.
Let it boil for at least 15 minutes and season to taste.

Very nice with ciabatta or other kind of bread. and white wine.
*hic*

Autumn is upon us, which means that everyone who has a garden tries to get rid of the yearly overstock in pumpkins. Apparently, they're much too easy to grow.
I was gifted with three. I used half of the first one to make a curry, which I thought was nice, and it also taught me a valuable lesson:
stoneshop  doesn't like pumpkin. Not even in curry.

This left me with 2 1/2 pumpkins and no one to feed them to. I decided to try a different approach, and baked a pumpkin cake. This turned out remarkably well. So here's the recipe I used:

• 250 grams of pumpkin, peeled and grated (300 grams works fine, too)
• 150 grams of sugar (I used cane sugar)
• 150 grams of flour
• 100 grams of chopped walnuts (I used half walnuts, half almonds)
• 50 grams of honey
• 4 eggs
• 1 tea spoon of baking powder (or more, up to a whole packet)
• 1 packet of vanilla sugar
• pinch of salt
• powdered sugar

Mix the eggs and the sugar.
Add all other ingredients and stir well.
Pour the batter into a cake tin (covering it with baking paper might be wise. I didn't and I was sorry)
Bake the cake for an hour in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees C
Make sure the cake is done by sticking a fork in it. It it comes out clean, with no traces of batter, the cake is done. If it's not, give it some more time and check again. (My cake took 20 minutes longer.)
Serve cold, with some powdered sugar on top.
It turned out really nice. It was even nice when still warm.

Koshari or kosheri is a very simple dish which is commonly eaten all over Egypt. You can buy it in specialised shops called Kosharias. It's a simple, tasty and filling dish, and quite inexpensive. If you want to eat it as a meal it's nice to serve it with a salad.

There are many variations but this is how I made it a couple of days ago:

• one small can or jar of cooked lentils (yes, I took a shortcut there)
• similar amounts of rice and pasta (preferably a small kind)
• one or two onions
• three or four tomatoes
• two cloves of garlic
• one red pepper, medium hot
• olive oil
• small can of tomato puree
• salt, pepper, cumin, coriander (all ground)
  

Cook both the pasta and the rice, making sure they'll be ready at about the same time.

Peel and cut the onions and the garlic, heat a few spoons of oil in a frying pan or skillet, and fry them.
Cut the red pepper in small bits and add those. Leave the seeds in if you like it hot.
Wash and dice the tomatoes and add those as well. Simmer for a while, and then add tomato puree and half a mug of water. Season to taste (salt, pepper, ground cumin seeds and ground coriander seeds spring to mind). Let it all simmer to form a sauce.

By now, the pasta and rice are probably done. Drain the pasta and add the rice (or add the pasta to the rice, depending on which is in the larger pot). Add the lentils, mix gently and heat on low heat.

Serve the lentil/rice/pasta mixture with the spicy tomato sauce on top.

It's that time of year again: asparagus season. The White Gold is available all over the Netherlands, and it seems to be a good year!
Now asparagus isn't for everyone. Some people love the stuff, some can't stand it, and some (*shudder*) don't care much either way.
I'm afraid stoneshop belongs to the last group. He doesn't hate asparagus, but he simply fails to see the attraction.
So today, at the market, we bought a pound of asparagus (for me) and a bag of fresh spinach (for him).

In my family, eating asparagus is a tradition, a bit of a ceremony even. We have them with butter, eggs and fresh young potatoes, and not much else. A bit of ground nutmeg and a dash of black pepper.
The tradition calls for two boiled eggs a person; these are peeled, mashed up with a fork, and mixed with a bit of butter. (Actual butter, of course. No substitute will do. Not with asparagus.)

It is a good year. I paid 1 euro 50 for a pound of asparagus and they were lovely. I'd peeled them well, then cooked them in the microwave; the potatoes were unpeeled, and boiled in water with a bouillon cube added to it. The butter melted on the asparagus spears and the crumbled eggs. I had made sure I had a nice white wine waiting in the fridge to go with it.

The picture isn't all that good. But the meal was.

...when I wrote this entry about those silicone egg poachers that I saw on the net, and immediately starting lusting after.
And thanks to gorydetails, I now own them. This posting is to inform you all that I'm very happy with them and that they do egg-zactly what they're supposed to do (although it is possible to make the eggs stick to them, but I knew that before I got them).
Here is the glorious bowl of ramen noodles I had last night. With a poached egg. It was lovely.

This recipe is both surprisingly simple and amazingly good. I personally hadn't thought it possible to bake good Dutch pancakes without any eggs or milk. But it works. And they're good. In fact, some people find them better than normal ones, and on the other hand most people don't notice a difference at all.

Without further ado, here goes:
You'll need

• apple juice
• an equal amount of sparkling mineral water
• flour
• salt
• baking powder
• butter or sunflower oil
• syrup, jam and sugar

That's all.
Mix well and aim for a normal pancake batter, viscosity-wise. (Dutch pancakes are larger and thinner than American ones, so the batter should probably be more liquid than you'd normally make it. Think yoghurt.)
Fry in a frying pan, after melting a small bit of butter or heating up a squirt of sunflower oil in the pan.
Serve with syrup, jam and sugar.

I cannot tell you the precise amounts of each ingredient, since I never bother to measure them myself, so you'll have to wing it in that respect.
But it's not that hard if you've baked pancakes before. And you'll be surprised how well they turn out.

A vegetarian recipe.
The story goes that there was an imam who came home as his wife was preparing this dish, and the wonderful smells coming from the oven made him faint. It didn't quite have that effect on me, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

Needed for two persons:

• One or two eggplants depending on size
• Two tomatoes
• One onion
• Fresh garlic
• Salt, pepper, ground cumin, ground coriander seeds
• Olive oil
• Optionally: some sliced olives and/or some feta cheese

Pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees celcius.
Cut the top off the eggplants and cut them in halves, lengthwise.
Hollow them out with a spoon, leaving the walls about 1 cm thick. Sprinkle or spray with olive oil both in-and outside.

Put eggplant halves in the microwave and cook until they are slightly soft and about halfway done.

Cut and sautee the onion and add finely cut or pressed garlic to taste.
Add the inner part of the eggplants, cut into small pieces.
Add diced tomatoes, salt, pepper, spices. Olive slices, too, if you want. Let it all simmer for a while.

Put eggplant halves in a low oven dish and fill them with the vegetable mixture. Put some diced or crumbled feta cheese on top if you want. For the dish in the picture, I used some fresh cheese because we were fresh out of feta.

Leave it in the oven for 25 minutes, or until the eggplants are all soft and the whole thing looks and smells delicious. This will give you the time to cook some rice, bulgur or couscous to serve it with. Enjoy!

I never realised I wanted silicone egg-poaching pods, but now I know that I do! Wouldn't these be perfect for poaching eggs to put in your instant noodle soup? And then there's the design. They have that whole retro- space age thing going on.
I'll be checking the fancy designish cookery gear shops around town soon...

Good food can be sexy.
Just check out the nice, firm bum on this mushroom.

A wintery recipe. Serves four.

• 500 gram dried green split peas
• vegan broth (cubes)
• laurel leaves
• two carrots
• one leek
• 1/4 celery root
• smoked tofu
• frying oil
• parsley
• salt, pepper

Bring 2 litres of water to a boil, add broth cubes and peas. Cook for 30 minutes, which gives you plenty of time to do the following:
Clean and chop up the vegetables.
Cut the smoked tofu in small cubes.
Simmer tofu cubes in a frying pan with a smallish amount of strong, salty broth and a dash of oil. After the broth has evaporated, fry the cubes in the remaining oil until they are a nice brown. You now have mock bacon cubes.

Add the vegetables to the soup and cook for another 15 minutes. Add salt and/or pepper according to taste.
Just before serving, add the fried tofu cubes and sprinkle withsome parsley.
Serve with dark (rye) bread or pumpernickel.

It tastes even better the next day.

This is a classical witlof salad the way my mother makes it. This recipe is rather common in the Netherlands but I'm not sure if you furriners are as familiar with it, so I'll post it anyway. It's great for people who normally won't eat witlof because of its bitter taste (although the varieties that were grown when I was a kid were much more bitter than those we buy now. Either that or my preferences have changed), because it's got plenty of other stuff to drown out the bitterness, so you hardly taste it at all.

Serves two or three, or serves one on two days.

• 1 large head of witlof or two small ones
• 1 apple. I use Elstar but you may not be able to get those. Use a crunchy apple with a fresh, soursweet, spicy aroma.
• handful of walnuts, chopped
• handful of raisins
• mustard
• lemon juice
• olive oil
• yoghurt
• black pepper
• salt

Not much to tell, really:
Cut the witlof into narrow strips.
Wash the apple, don't peel it, cut it into small pieces.
Make a dressing with the yoghurt, a gush of olive oil, a spoonful of mustard (depending on its strength), a squirt of lemon juice and some pepper and salt.
Put everything, including the walnuts and raisins, into a salad bowl and toss.

For some variety, you can add some peeled tangerine, or some cheese (Edam or Gouda would be fine) cut into cubes.
Add enough cheese and you could have the salad with some bread as a light meal.

An adaptation of a recipe I found elsewhere.
For two:

• One large fennel bulb, or two small ones
• Two tomatoes, diced
• A handful of mushrooms in slices, any kind, fresh or dried and soaked
• Two cloves of garlic if you like it as much as we do
• olive oil
• Parmesan cheese
• breadcrumbs
• pepper and salt

Preheat the oven to 200° C (that's pizza temperature, if you're used to Fahrenheit).
Cut the fennel bulbs in four quarters.
Pre-cook them in salted water for five minutes, or put them in the microwave at 800 watts for five minutes.
Grease an oven dish with some olive oil.
Put the fennel in, then the mushrooms, then tomatoes, then garlic (cut up or pressed).
Add some black pepper and salt, then a handful of breadcrumbs, and finish off with a layer of grated parmesan cheese.
Put the dish in the oven for 20 minutes.

Serve over pasta.

We had this just now and it was very nice.

It's a bit obscure, though. (That should make it more interesting.)
Not all Dutch people know about this, so it might be a regional custom to bake (or actually fry) these small, hollow waffles on New Year's Eve; I don't know which region, though.
I was taught how to do these by my family. My grandmother always made them because she preferred them to oliebollen which are quite massive and can lay on the stomach like the proverbial brick. Both my mother and her sister have their own set of irons, as does my father. And of course, so do I.

The irons can be hard to find, but older houseware shops in the smaller villages may have them. Alternatively, I've been told some of the more upmarket cookery stores now stock them because it's quaint and interesting to have obscure cooking utensils nowadays.
Without further ado, here's a picture of my 'vlindertjes-ijzers' (butterfly-irons) and the Vlindertjes I baked on New Year's Eve.

(Originally posted on MySpace)
Tomorrow is Christmas eve and we're having guests for dinner. My parents (sort of), his parents (sort of), his sister and her husband and two kids. Yes, that makes ten!
So for the first time in my life I've started cooking a day early. We just made the soup and dessert so we won't have to do it all tomorrow.
The menu is as follows:

- lassi (mango yoghurt shake), three kinds of pappadums, three chutneys.
- dahl (lentil soup), naan bread.
- yellow rice.
- a sweet curry with sweet potatoes, carrots, coconut milk, almonds.
- a spicy curry with cauliflower, zucchini, egg plant, onions.
- fried okras as a side dish.
- raita (yoghurt based salad) with tomato, cucumber, radishes and mint.
- kheer (rice pudding). See recipe in earlier blog posting.
- coffee and tea with tiny chocolates.

Sounds classy, no? As you see, it's all Indian. I love Indian food. I hope our guests do, too. We're including a sweet curry for those who don't do spicy, so we should be allright.
Now let's see if I can find another plate tomorrow, because we're one short and I really want to have matched plates, just this once!

And we have a lovely Christmas tree. I'll try to take a picture of it. Tomorrow. If I have the time...

(Originally posted on MySpace)
Clean the sprouts, and microwave on high power for four to five minutes.
Peel one onion and cut into rings.
Cut 1/2 red bell pepper into stripes.
Heat two or three spoonfuls of oil in a wok or wadjan.
Fry onions and add:
-ginger powder
-kurkuma powder
-cumin powder (djintan)
-laos
-one or two cloves of fresh garlic, pressed
Add pepper stripes and sprouts and stir-fry for a while.
Add one small can of coconut milk, a spoonful of sambal (to taste, of course), a dash of ketjap (soy sauce). Stir well.
If it stays too moist, use some corn starch or potato starch to make it thicker. Sprinkle with seroendeng, or if not available, with dried coconut.

Serve with rice, peanut sauce (satay sauce), and satay of choice (in my case, marinated and fried tofu) and/or slices of hard boiled egg.
Selamat makan!

This is a typical Moem recipe. No amounts or measures of any kind. You'll just have to figure out how much of each you'll need.

(Originally posted on MySpace)
Here's the best recipe I ever found for Kheer, a sweet rice dessert from India.


Bring the milk and the rice to a boil.
Boil for a while, like five or ten minutes, stirring all the time. Stir well, and keep scraping the bottom of the pot so it doesn't stick.
Add cardamom, saffron, nuts, raisins, coconut and condensed milk. Allow the mixture to boil until it sets, but remember that it will get thicker as it cools down.
Finally, add a tiny splash of rose water, according to taste. Sweeten with some honey if desired.

Serve hot or cold, garnished with some coconut and a few nuts, or some sugar flowers or similar. Enjoy!

If you make too much (it's quite filling...) you can freeze it for another time.

(Originally posted on MySpace)
Here's the best recipe I ever found for Kheer, a sweet rice dessert from India.


Bring the milk and the rice to a boil.
Boil for a while, like five or ten minutes, stirring all the time. Stir well, and keep scraping the bottom of the pot so it doesn't stick.
Add cardamom, saffron, nuts, raisins, coconut and condensed milk. Allow the mixture to boil until it sets, but remember that it will get thicker as it cools down.
Finally, add a tiny splash of rose water, according to taste. Sweeten with some honey if desired.

Serve hot or cold, garnished with some coconut and a few nuts, or some sugar flowers or similar. Enjoy!

If you make too much (it's quite filling...) you can freeze it for another time.