Moem's Journal
It's not Myspace...wait, it's not even LiveJournal.
Recent Entries 
readme.txt
Hi! You've found me. This is kind of an experimental / placeholder journal, since the way LiveJournal has been changing recently worries me.
You can find me there under the username m03m. That's m-zero-three-m.

Since I'm (for now) primarily an LJ user, these entries have been copied from there. Some have even been copied from MySpace first!
That causes some problems with linkage. And if there's something about site changes and other ongoing events that makes you go 'huh?' because it doesn't seem to make any sense, it's probably about LiveJournal, not Scribbld. I apologize for any confusion and other kinds of inconvenience.

Oh, and copying the entries from elsewhere means losing all comments, as well.
9th-Jan-2009 11:28 pm - We went skating!
avatar met molen
And we had fun! And I didn't even fall down! And the weather was gorgeous! The frozen trees looked so pretty! And I want to do it again! And I can't stop using exclamation points!
Want to see pics? Click the one below.

Skating!
 
8th-Jan-2009 03:18 pm - It's freezing and this is the Netherlands...
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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 [info]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!
5th-Jan-2009 01:51 pm - Here's that recipe for oliebollen I promised you
kladderkatje
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.
oliebollen

23rd-Dec-2008 02:20 pm - It's that time of year
foto
My friends, I invite you to follow this link. No nasty surprises, promise. And SFW.

*sings*
Falalalala lala la laaaa. And I've actually decked the halls, sort of.

13th-Dec-2008 09:45 am - This year's Saint Nicholas 'surpreezes'
kladderkatje
...as mentioned in my previous blog about Saint Nicholas day's traditions. (Some of you may remember last year, when I made a Big Tit.)
We're celebrating a week late this year, because some in our group are celebrating with family on the proper date; but never mind that, it's still fun.
Here are the 'surpreezes' (phonetic spelling invented by [info]yokospungeon ) I made this year. There are small gifts hidden inside, and each one has a little poem attached.
surprise!

The polystyrene mouse contains a packet of sparklers, that'll come out when you pull the tail. It's not that weird of a gift because I know the giftee loves them.
The zebra is a plant watering can, wrapped in zebra patterned paper with some extras taped on, and there won't be much left of it when it's unwrapped; that's why it's nice to have a picture!
The cardboard saw is marked  'eyebrow saw', and has a poem to explain that the receipient is getting a handy tool to prune her husbands very bushy eyebrows; inside is a tiny pair of scissors (which was on her wish list). Making fun of people is part of the tradtion; Saint Nick can be humourous or gently teasing, he's never really mean though.
[info]stoneshop  made a surpreeze for which the receipient will need an angle grinder to open. There was welding involved.
*rubs hands in glee* This should be fun!

1st-Dec-2008 08:46 pm - Here's that Saint Nicholas posting I promised you
avatar met molen
Actually, this is a recycled posting from last year. Here you go.

Here's a bit about Saint Nicholas traditons, the way I know them:
Read more about Dutch Saint Nicholas traditions )

So how did all y'all do when I asked you to tell me what you know about these traditions?

Click to find out. )
24th-Nov-2008 01:16 pm - A seasonal question for my foreign friends
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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!

Sinterklaas
 

31st-May-2008 09:56 pm - Ooh aah asparagus
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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 [info]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.

Yum.
1st-May-2008 12:03 am - Queen's Day in Arnhem
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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.
24th-Apr-2008 09:07 pm - I'll be offline for the weekend
motor in wadi
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 [info]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 [info]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!

25th-Feb-2008 09:43 pm - Dutch pea soup, vegan version
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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.

snert

There's some left. If you're hungry..
3rd-Jan-2008 11:41 am - Here's a bit of Dutch tradition for you
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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.

Dutch deep fried waffles, click makes big

As you see, they don't all look like like butterflies. There are wheels and stars and I've seen pictures of card symbols too. But in my family they're referred to as Vlindertjes, no matter which shape they are.

These waffles are made from a normal waffle batter, liquid enough so you can dip the iron into it. The iron should be hot enough to sizzle ever so slightly when you dip it into the batter, so be sure to heat it up in the deep fryer first. Don't dip it in all the way or you'll never get the batter off! The top of the iron should remain free from batter.
If the iron is hot enough the waffle will come loose from it while it's being fried. You may need to help a little with a fork, though. Deep fry it in hot oil until a nice golden brown, turn it over so the hollow side is at the bottom and lift it from the oil. Put it on some absorbent paper to get rid of excess oil. After they've cooled down, the Vlindertjes will be nice and crispy. Sprinkle with a generous amount of confectioner's sugar, and enjoy.

Oh, and it's perfectly normal if the first three waffles stick to the iron. In fact, there traditionally should be a bit of a struggle before you get it right. Or so I tell myself!
6th-Dec-2007 11:41 am - On Saint Nicholas traditions in the Netherlands
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(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.
3rd-Dec-2007 11:51 am - Do you like big tits?
kladderkatje
(Originally posted on MySpace)
Then you'll apreciate the special trick packaging I just made for a Saint Nicholas gift. It looks like a Great Tit. The present hidden in its belly consists of fat balls to be used as bird food during winter. So please look at my lovely tit:





I'll tell you a bit more about Dutch Saint Nicholas traditions some other time, if I can be bothered. For now, try this site.
14th-Feb-2007 07:29 pm - Bollocks to Valentine's Day
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(Originally posted on MySpace)


Do check out this site if you haven't already. Especially if today isn't special to you, and even more so if there's someone who insists that it should be!

Valentine's day is nothing more than an opportunity to play on people's guilt in order to get them to buy, buy, buy.
If you wait for this day to express your true feelings then that's pretty sad. Do you really need to be told when and how to express your love?

I'm so glad we don't value the day as much here in the Netherlands up until now, even though this specific kind of commercialism is slowly creeping up on us lately... and we see more and more red, heart-shaped crap in the stores every year.

On the other hand, any reason for releasing a lot of BookCrossing books is a good reason, so I'm spreading 26 books with love related titles today ;-)
Check out last years pics.
But hey, at least I'm doing something no one is making money on!




26th-Dec-2006 09:37 pm - Here's mine, now show me yours
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(Originally posted on MySpace)
Here it is: my Christmas tree. Mostly the same ornaments as last year, just added a few. Which is fine, because it's a bigger and much fuller tree.
Well, it should be... I paid twice as much for it!

It looks so much nicer if you take the photograph in a darker room. But then you can't see the ornaments, just the lights. I tried taking a pic with the flash on, but it looked horrible.



And of course, there's a 'piek' on top:



I really like those transparent glass baubles. They're like soap bubbles. And you can put quite a lot in and still see the tree.

My tree stays until the sixth of january: Three Kings Day. Another tradition I guess. But a rather convenient one, because if it stays any longer it will probably get too 'crispy' to be moved without dropping all of its needles.
23rd-Dec-2006 09:44 pm - Christmas preparations
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(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...


29th-Nov-2006 10:27 pm - Ups and downs of being a self employed signwriter-decorator
bedrijfslogo
(Originally posted on MySpace)
Today I was informed that a certain assignment I was going to do next week was postponed.
The guy who was supposed to make the wall nice and even before I would be able to paint a marble effect on it, has a badly infected joint and can't work, so I can't either. There goes my income for December!

So I decided to try something I haven't done in years: go out and find some shop and café owners willing to have a temporary decoration painted on their windows for Christmas. Sint Nicolas would be nice too, but it's a bit late for that now.
I found the designs of frolicing Christmas trees I made at least five years ago, and even the HTML to advertise my temporary activities on my business' website. So now that the page is back up, the next step is to dress in nice white-with-paint stains and hit the street. I'll take prints of the designs (or if I can find them I might even laminate the original drawings and take those), some flyers to leave if I can't talk to the person in charge, and business cards.

I haven't done this in years, but it's probably a good idea. I might even come home with some new assignments for 'real' work. Wish me luck.


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