This is language-related and not really translatable. So it's in Dutch. Sorry!

Er wordt nchtvorst voorspeld.
Ik heb als kind heel lang gedacht dat 'nachtvorst' een ander woord was voor Sinterklaas.

Het verschil tussen een bisschop en een koning is voor een kind niet zo heel eenvoudig te doorgronden. Hun kleding, zoals je die op plaatjes ziet, lijkt nogal op elkaar. Zo heb ik ook eens aan mijn moeder gevraagd wie er hoger was, een keizer of de Paus.

En Sinterklaas opereert natuurlijk vooral 's nachts.

Verder wordt er vaak gesproken over nachtvorst rond de tijd dat de eerste speelgoedfolders met Sint Nicolaas erop in de brievenbus vallen. Dus.

So what am I supposed to be doing, traditionally-speaking? Ice-skating, of course.
In the real world, though, it's been at least twenty years since I've been on the ice. I don't even have my old skates anymore. Not that they were any good... or maybe I wasn't.
However, my friend konstanzerb  invited me to go skating with her tomorrow, and that sounds like fun. So I headed for the charity shop across the street to check out the stack of ice skates I remembered seeing there, about two weeks ago.
Oops! Not much left of that stack by now... after all, it's been freezing for a while. But I did find these:


Très vintage, aren't they? And I'm told that these should work better for me than my old skates. Those where the kind with a white leather boot attached, that never fit well and would give me blisters; also, the blades were short and the shoes high above the ice, which made them unstable. Suitable for ice dancing, if you knew how, but not for gliding along for longer distances.
Besides, I can wear these with my own hiking boots, which are nicely warm, waterproof and very comfortable.

I have no idea if I'll be able to ride these. I'm hoping my Dutchness will take over and tell me how.
If I live to tell the tale, I will be letting you know how it went soon!

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.

I'm curious to find out how much you, unDutch people, know about a specific Dutch tradition: Sinterklaas, or the Feast of Saint Nicholas.

Please don't look it up, as I know is easy to do, I'd like to find out how much you know and where you picked it up, not how well you can look up stuff on the internet  ;-)

And please answer before reading the others' comments, as there might be spoilers.

Don't worry if you can only tell me that you know not a single thing about it, it's all interesting to me.
So humour me, please. Thanks!

...or, in LOLcatspeak: Yes I can has discount!

I like luxury foodstuffs. Luxury prices, not so much. Luckily many of our supermarkets will put discount stickers on food that needs to be sold today or tomorrow. So I like hunting for those stickers when I go shopping for food.
Today was a good hunting day: everything I bought had one of those lovely stickers! Yay!
(Okay, so I did buy some of this stuff *because* it had the sticker.)

They make everything taste 35% better.

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.

Today was Queen's Day. If we have a national holiday, this is it: it's a celebration of our Queen's birthday, only it's not her birthday, because that's in February and we'd have awful weather. So we celebrate it on her mother's birthday instead.

This is going to be another busy weekend. It's the weekend of the annual Batavierenrace, which is a relay race for runners, over 185 km from Nijmegen to Enschede, divided into 25 stages. More than 300 teams (which means more than 7,500 students) participate in this race.


To make it harder for the runners to hurl themselves in the path of oncoming cars, there are about 120 volunteers with motorcycles, who regulate traffic. Since they do this from midnight until the race is over, about six o'clock the next day, they need to be fed and watered at regular intervals. And this is where I come in.

I'm in charge of one of four teams of volunteers (one of them being gummihuhn) who take care of the other motorcycle riders. We start off at about two o'clock half past twelve at night and head for a town near the German border, where we set up camp in a suitable spot in an industrial zone and start baking pancakes and making coffee and tea.
After a while stoneshop arrives with his merry band of traffic regulators, and they each get a pancake and coffee (or tea). They leave, and we keep on baking.
Stoneshop takes them to the crossings and dangerous points in the route they've been assigned to, and eventually we arrive with our stack of pancakes and our thermos flasks, and each of them gets a bite and a drink again.
It more or less goes on like this until the whole thing is over, and then we get a meal and a bed.

It may not sound like it, but it's actually great fun!
So see you after the Bata!

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.

I got a free messenger type bag from my bank today, because I put some money aside and filled in a form  ;-)
It's a nice shoulder bag (not that I don't already own oodles of bags, but hey, it's free and I'm Dutch) albeit rather blue.
It has a transparent part in front, where you can put something you'd like to be visible from the outside.
Of course, that makes it totally suitable as an instant BookCrossing bag. Pimp my bag!
The slogan reads 'Read and Let Read'.

Kind of a rant, I guess.

This is a spin-off from a Chit Chat thread. I don't want to harp on about it there, because it might make the person I replied to uncomfortable, but harping on about something that bugs you is part of what LiveJournal is about, right?
Right. So, what I posted there was this:

> the resident grammar/spelling nazi

Sorry to interrupt, but I wish people would not use this expression.
I understand that its meaning feels differently to different people, but to me and many other Europeans (and, I suspect, many people in other parts of the world too) the word nazi can't be used casually. It basically means GENOCIDE to me. That is quite a different concept from 'someone who's fanatical about certain rules'. And it distracts me from what you're saying, to say the very least.

Can we please try not to use the word nazi in a casual way?

Now I know I'm not alone in this, but at the same time I know there are people out there who don't have the foggiest what I'm on about, or think I'm making a big deal out of nothing.
Except to me it isn't nothing.

The war happened, the Holocaust happened, National-Sozialismus happened. And it was (and is) a big deal. It's a deal that literally cost millions and millions their lives. (We tend to know about the over six million Jews, but we don't always realise there were probably over 26 millions of Russians who died as a direct result of this war).
See, this war I'm talking about wasn't really all that long ago. Lots of people are alive today that remember it. Even my own parents (and I'm blessed to still have parents) remember it. And it happened right here. The results can be seen in many places all over my town and my country.
(For those not in the know, I live within crawling distance from the bridge that was made famous by the book and film 'A Bridge Too Far'.)


Picture: what the center of my city looked like, just after the war, after most of the rubble had been cleared away. This is where I go to the market nowadays.

In any case, it's much too close in many ways (in time, in location, in the collective memory of my people and many others) to make light of it. And the word 'nazi' will never be just another word for me.
So if you want to describe someone who's a stickler for rules, in a humourous way, please think of another word, or make up a new one. Let's please not use this one anymore. There are too many memories (even though they're not mine). It's just too hurtful.

No, I didn't enjoy the 'soup nazi' Seinfeld episode much either.

As Christmas was approaching, we realised no one had invited us for a Christmas meal. Last year, we had family over for dinner; that was nice, but we didn't really feel like doing that again this time. So we decided to spend a few days away from home this time.
I found a nice short trip arrangement on the Stayokay, which is the former youth hostel organisation, website; as we are former youth ourselves, that seemed very appropriate.
I inquired whether or not there was room for us in the inn, and (also very fitting) it was almost full, but they had a room for four which we could have at a small extra fee for the empty beds, which they would not be renting to anyone else. So we had a room for four to ourselves. The downside of that was, of course: bunk beds. But I was sure we'd find some way around that.

We were going to Terschelling, which is one of the islands that form a string to the north of the Netherlands. It's 30 kilometres long. It's possible to take a car on the ferry, but that's fairly expensive, and besides, what for? There's nowhere to drive to.
We decided to take our bicycles instead, and get some exercise.


Of course, we also took our laptops and a small stack of books to release.
And since we knew about a BookCrosser who lives there and sometimes feels a bit left out (because it's much harder for her to attend meetings or hunt for books) we also took a banana box full of unregistered books, so she'd be able to release them all over the island, and possibly net a few new BookCrossers that way.

Aaltsje (that's her name) was waiting for us when we got off the ferry, and her eyes lit up when she say the full box!

It was already dark, but we found the inn quite easily. We had a nice dinner, a short walk around the village and headed for bed. Don't tell the staff, but we put the matresses on the floor. We're not used to sleeping in separate beds.

The next day was Christmas day. We spent it exploring the island by bicycle, which is nice, but a bit windy. We found a very nice old windmill, the one on the picture above, that is now a great place to stop for coffee and tea (although the tea tasted a bit salty!), and later on we stumbled upon the Wreckage Museum, which was full of things found on the beach or while diving. Very interesting and well worth a visit.
I took a few pictures that day, and you can find them here if you're interested, or click on the pic.

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)
...as I went for a short walk in a city park.
There was really just enough snow to give that nice 'powdered sugar' look, and to turn the trees into white lace. Actually the freezing mist did that.
It all looked really pretty, and made me think of Christmas, but in a nice way. We'll be spending Christmas on one of the islands to the north of the Netherlands, I do hope it won't rain!

You can see the pics in my PhotoBucket album by clicking the thumbnail. They're not all that great, but they will give you an impression.

(Originally posted on MySpace)
Here's a bit about Saint Nicholas traditons, the way I know them:

In the period before the festivity, children are encouraged to leave their shoe in front of the open fire (nowadays, central heating works, too. Those Black Peters are smart!) with something for Sinterklaas' horse: a carrot or some hay.
It's best if they sing a song or two, so Zwarte Piet can hear them through the chimney, and tell Sinterklaas that these are good kids who have sung him a nice song. In the morning, there will be a tiny gift or a piece of candy in the shoe.


Bigger gifts are given on the evening of the 5th or 6th of December. The gifts are all supposed to come from Saint Nicholas and are often packed in a big cloth bag.
They are left on the doorstep by a friendly neigbour who rings the bell or knocks on a window, pretending to be Black Peter, and then hurries off before the kids get to see him. Sometimes, he'll throw some candy into the room first, making sure all the children get to see is a gloved hand!
If there are no neighbours, all of this happens while father or mother just had to pop out for a small errand, and when (s)he comes back Black Peter has just left again so they have miraculously missed each other!

The mysterious bag is respectfully brought inside, and usually people will take turns unwrapping a present. There are gifts for the grown-ups, too. Most of the gifts will be accompanied by a poem or rhyme, signed by either Sinterklaas or Black Peter; the poems often make fun of the receipient of the gift, but in a friendly way. They are all read out loud.
Some of the gifts are packed in such a way that they resemble an animal, an object or even a person; your gift may be wrapped in cotton wool and covered in something sticky, like syrup; or the package may be very hard to open, or contain nothing but a note telling you to go and look in the fridge where your present will be hidden. These 'trick packages' are called Surprises, pronounced Surpreezes, and making them is one of the most fun traditions surrounding Sinterklaas.

As soon as children don't believe in Sinterklaas anymore, they become a Hulpsinterklaas, or Sint Nick's Helper: they make or buy presents for the other members of the family. So during november and early december, it's not uncommon that a parent will not be allowed into a kid's room, because 'surprises' are being made inside, and no one should see them before the big event.
It's often a bit sad to find out that Sinterklaas en Zwarte Piet aren't real, but on the other hand, being a Hulpsinterklaas makes you feel really grown-up!

If the group of participants is too large to make a gift for each, names will be drawn, so each person has to get a gift for just one of the others. Sometimes, groups of grownups celebrate Sinterklaas this way with no children present at all. Usually, there's a set (and low) budget: Sinterklaas isn't about getting expensive stuff, it's about creativity, silly rhymes and fun.

To me, celebrating Saint Nicholas Day is one of the nicest traditions we have here, and it's a shame that many people drop it in favour of putting presents under the Christmas tree.

(Originally posted on MySpace)
Soms maak ik voor de lol gekke teksten op bestaande melodietjes. Vaak probeer ik dicht bij een deel van de originele tekst te blijven, dat is grappiger. Hier zijn er twee, je kunt vast wel zien wat de originele tekst was.

---

Yoghurt
Of vla
Wat is
er nà?
IJs of rijs-
tepap
Of ba-
varois.

Voor hopjes of vanille
Ga ik door de knieën
Knijp dat pak maar uit
Griesmeelpap of fruit-
yoghurt.
Oeeeh oehoehoeee,
yoghurt.*

---

Zeven brieven heb ik jou geschreven
Zeven brieven vol van mijn verdriet
Waar zijn al die brieven toch gebleven
Zelfs de klantenservice weet het niet.

Zeven brieven heb ik jou geschreven
Zeven brieven vol van hartezeer
Maar een antwoord heb ik nooit gekregen
Ik vertrouw de TNT niet meer.

---

* Voor wie er niet uitkwam: Love Hurts.

(Originally posted on MySpace)
I met a writer once
His name was Belcampo, most of you won't have heard of him. I don't think much of his work has been translated. He's dead now, lived to a ripe old age too. I met him when I was 18 and he was well over 80. He mainly wrote stories of a genre that's hard to describe. They deal with the impossible or the very unlikely, but written in such a way that it all appears normal. Some of them could be described as what-if stories. If I have to compare him to someone you would know about, I'd say he was the Dutch Roald Dahl.

He was my favourite writer at the time (in fact he still is), and I did a school assignment about his work. I wrote to tell him that, and he kindly sent me a book so I could read it (it wasn't for sale anywhere), I paid him of course, and sent him a copy of the assignment when it was finished. He then sent me a very friendly letter complimenting me on my work. I was over the moon.

Then when I was in his city for something unrelated, I found myself on his doorstep. I was too timid to ring the doorbell. But luckily his wife came home and found me there and I explained why I was loitering on her doorstep. She immediately invited me in, saying 'Herman will be pleased to hear he has a visitor!'
And he was. He had been cutting out pictures of paintings and pasting them in a scrapbook. His eyes lit up when I told him who I was.
We had a lively conversation that lasted all afternoon and most of the evening. He was a very fast and original thinker, always seeing sides of an issue that no one else would even think of. He was witty and funny, too. And he treated me like an equal.

I was invited to stay for dinner, and helped with cooking. I can honestly say I have fried tofu in Belcampo's kitchen. None of you will find this impressing, except for a small selection of Dutch people.
I can't remember the conversation itself but I remember that afternoon as one of the most special in my life so far. It felt like a historical moment, a very long one.