Thanksgiving in Holland 2012

A couple weeks ago, we hosted our 8th Annual Thanksgiving dinner. 31 adults and children shared a sit down dinner. The children outnumbered the adults. The food was awesome. Our potluck is a bit more involved, maybe more formal than a standard American potluck. Instead of a a buffet table, we have a seated dinner. Before that, three or four plated, passed hors d'oeuvres. This year, there was even a passed soup. Salads are assembled on site. Sides are passed from table to table. There were four pies and as many cheeses for dessert. Thanksgiving with our friends here in The Netherlands is nothing like the family Thanksgivings we had growing up. I loved that. I love this.

My job is mainly logistics. Um - chair? plates? forks? glasses? tables?! I take a lot of notes and keep them in my house binder for the following year. It includes a task calendar for the month before, week before, and day of. This year I added contact information for the butcher and the Gelderse Wijnbeurs as well as recipes that will return next year. All those notes keep me feeling a bit sane, or like sanity might be within reach.

I also cook a bit. I love pork, so we have Ribbe, Norwegian style pork belly. It's a two day process, prep the night before and then bake the day of. There are great instructions at My Little Norway. The plate under the meat is key. This dish is so good that should you accidentally have your pork ready two hours early (ahem), it will still be fabulous. A prep ahead Bourbon Gravy makes the perfect accompaniment and keeps kitchen time to a minimum when guests are waiting. A single recipe (no doubling) made more than enough for our entire group! This delicious Crispy Cream-Braised Potatoes and Fennel premiered this year. Cook the potatoes and fennel the day and pop everything in the oven just before dinner - easy peasy and yum.

Our standard dessert, the one we make every year and eat with lots and lots of whipped cream (remember this picture?), is Pumpkin Cheesecake. This recipe came into my family when I was in high school. It now holds prized place in our family cookbook and is a huge hit wherever it goes. I haven't been able to locate a copy on-line, so here it is for one and all.

Pumpkin Cheesecake

serves 12

crust (for springform pan)
1 1/4 cup (300 g) digestive cookies, crushed
2 Tbsp (30 g)butter, melted

filling
16 oz (450 g) cream cheese at room temperature
3 eggs
1 cup (225 g) sugar
1 can (425 g) pumpkin (you can also roast your own in the oven)
1/2 c (120 ml) amaretto
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon

Makes one 28cm springform pan, one 30cm fluted dish, or two 9 inch pie pans

1. Mix melted butter into crushed cookies with a fork. The mixture should be damp but not sticky. Add butter if necessary.
2. Pat mixture into bottom and sides of oiled pan. The crust should come to the top edge of either a fluted dish or pie pan. It should be about 2 cm high in a spring form pan. Set aside.
3. Beat eggs, sugar, and cream cheese until smooth.
4. Add pumpkin and spices. Beat until well combined.
5. Pour filling into pan. The filling should be just shy of the top of the crust.
6. Bake at 350 F (180 C) for about 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
7. Share and enjoy!

Papa's Birthday

Sunday was Papa's birthday. In our house, you get to decide on the menu for the day. We had pancakes for breakfast and pork chops, macaroni and cheese, green beans, and roasted pumpkin for dinner. We also baked two cakes for Papa to take to work on Monday, a German cheesecake and a marbled poundcake. My special helper cleaned the mixer for me.

Dinner was a huge success. Apparently, I need to make a lot more macaroni and cheese in the future. Peanut sat at the table until the dishes were done, eating beans and pumpkin in exchange for macaroni – both of which he would eat anyway. Macaroni just so delicious he wanted heaps.

The pumpkin and green beans came from the weekly market in Nijmegen. It's around the corner, so we've been going every Saturday. We buy fruit and vegetables, eggs, and cheese. We've also picked up lunch the past couple weeks – herring and lekkerbek, which is breaded, fried, seasoned fish. Also known as the “brown fish.” Didn't get enough this time around – who would have thought a three year old would like herring, with onions?

The birthday, the market, it's all part of building our family traditions. They are events and moments that I look forward to a little bit more every time. And how nice is life if you get to look forward to every Saturday – the mandatory grocery shopping part? It's exciting to watch our rhythm evolve as we settle into life here.

Eat: Pesto Cheese Rolls

I saw some delicious looking savory rolls at the market and decided to try my own version. The dough is half of a batch of Tassajara bread made with 50/50 whole wheat and white flour and no milk (powdered or otherwise). Rolled out the dough, filled, and then rolled and sliced like cinnamon rolls. The filling is pesto, aged cheese (belegen), and walnuts. The result is delicious. One playgroup later, there were only three rolls left for a late night, poorly lit picture.

The other half of the dough became a cinnamon sugar loaf. The Tassajara bread recipe is excellent. It's the most consistently successful of all the bread I've tried over the past year or so. The trick is the sponge method, don't even think about skipping it. Yeast, sweetener, all the liquid, and half the flour beaten 100 times before anything else happens. Using the same method also dramatically improved my pizza crust. I'm thinking these rolls might go into a weekly rotation. A batch a week would make a great option for a quick lunch or snack. Any filling suggestions?

Rhythm: Meal Planning

I'm a stay at home mom. That's five days a week full-time at home with two kiddos and all the joys, diapers, naps, spills, breaks, laughs, quite moments, hugs, and nursing that go with it. Rhythm – reading about it, learning about it, and finally trying to practice it – become a guiding principle for planning our days. We are slowly building more rhythm into our family life. One way we've done that is with a weekly dinner plan.

Actually implementing a dinner plan in our house came about after realizing that dinner planning could be loose, a pasta day, a Mexican day, and so forth. This approach limits my options just enough to inspire creativity. Within a set of parameters (it must work on a pizza crust), I get to find an interesting way to feed our family. This is the plan we are using now:

Monday: one pot meal

Tuesday: soup

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: pasta

Friday: pizza

Saturday: Chinese

Sunday: chicken

Within this framework, I plan a menu for the week, in pencil of course because there is a lot of readjusting! Friday pizza is a hit. We have crust and sauce recipes that are great. Making both has gotten easier every week. I made a quadruple sauce recipe to freeze for future use. Soup night has just moved to Tuesday because that's my new bakery day (German bakery around the corner – yum). Sunday chicken in the oven is always good. We usually have two days of leftovers instead of one. Recently leftovers has meant either a savory pie or ribollita.

It's a work in progress, our dinner rhythm. But even at this early stage, I find it simplifies my life and helps keep cooking more pleasure than pain. Since Papa started his new job, we start cooking when Pumpkin goes down for her afternoon nap. It's a nice part of our day together and Peanut looks forward to it. It's really something when he asks me what we're going to make for dinner. These are special moments – and learning moments for Mama. We have to eat, we love too cook, and we can enjoy it together, too. What are your tricks for feeding your family?

In other news: we should be getting a replacement dishwasher on Wednesday - hooray!

Eat: Pear Cardamon Sauce

Staying with the in-laws in September meant we got to pick pears from the same trees my husband picked from when he was a kid. Watching father and son go pear picking is just too sweet, especially because Peanut tends to stand in wooded areas and shout out with delight “we're in the forest!” Never mind that adults see a little strip of trees and bushes squished between a residential parking lot and a horse pasture. As far as Peanut's concerned, it's a forest, and he's right.

I quickly discovered that I had a bit of a problem on my hands. Say you convince your husband that taking a 2-year-old pear picking is a great way to spend an hour or so. Say they come home with a bucket full of pears. What does one do with the pears? It's a lot of pears. How about pear sauce? If apples make applesauce, pears must make pear sauce. So I gave it a shot and wow – the results were delicious! So good that they came back a couple days later with two buckets of pears.

Basically, it came down to peeling pears and putting them in a pot with a tiny bit of water, a few lemon peels (preserve color), and a few cardamon pods (my inspirational moment). They were fairly hard and took a lot longer to cook than apples, but when they were soft I ran a hand blender through it and called it quits. It would be nice to try it with a food press to get more texture. I'm also planning to cook it down a bit next time so it's less damp when it comes out of the freezer.

Pear Sauce with Cardamon

2-3 lbs pears

lemon

3 cardamon pods

Peel, core, and cut the pears into chunks. Put the pears into a good sized pot. Use a vegetable peeler to cut three thin slices of peel from the lemon. Add lemon peel and cardamon pods to pot. Cook on low heat for about an hour. Blend or mash as you wish. Cook down a bit more if you want a thicker sauce. Eat warm or cold. Freezes well.

Weekend: Skyscrapers!

The tall ships were in Chicago this weekend, so we went to take a look. Apparently a good number of other folks had the same idea, because Navy Pier was packed! Being the kind of girl who is still amazed by crowds and adjusting to life back in the US, it was a bit overwhelming. We saw, the Chicago Tribune building with pieces of stone from all over the world, some ships, a Dutch family that moved to Chicago last week, tables (and then trash cans) overflowing with fast food, Forrest Gump sitting on a bench (outside of chain restaurant with a name from the film), and a macaroni and cheese sculpture, to name a few.

These got me thinking again about some of the things that seem to keep coming up since we've moved back. One is the commercialism. Everything seems to be branded or franchised. Shopping is either the focus or incorporated into everything I've seen so far. The International Fair at Millennium Park was basically a set of booths selling "ethnic" items. These included the Jordanian tent selling sculpture "made in Jerusalem." Isn't Jerusalem in Israel? Guess it sells. To be fair, things aren't exactly better in other parts of the world. Somehow, it feels more overwhelming to me here.

Another thing that's catching my attention is what people eat while they're out. We've been pretty active the past few weeks and had a number of lunches out. As much as possible, I try to plan ahead and take. That means a lot of sandwiches and fruit or some version of easy to carry food made at home and transported in reusable containers. We drink tap water out of reused bottles. On other tables, though, there is a lot of fast food. Brought food is often just a packaged as bought food. Snack packages, juice boxes, and sodas. In other words, there's a food paradigm that's geared towards quick, convenient, and packaged. Why does it seem like a surprise? Maybe five years of working with colleagues where almost everyone almost always brought their lunch. That lunch was usually two or three sandwiches of the brown bread-butter-cheese/ham(rarely both)-brown bread variety. To drink: coffee, tea, or water. At work events, same sandwiches but they offered milk or orange juice to drink - a treat! Essentially, the norm was basic and kind of boring, but healthy. What I'm seeing while we're out is mainly reinforcing my efforts to keep us eating healthy and with as little waste as we can manage.

Our outing (yes, that's what I started in on) ended on a very positive note. Since we didn't end up buying tickets for the tall ships show, we decided to take the water taxi from Navy Pier to Michigan Avenue to save ourselves a bit of the walk. The view was grand and the Peanut loved the ride. Unfortunately, they turned off the fountain just before we got to go under it, but that would have been even more fun. All in all, a great adventure day.

Healthy Crazy Food?

My post about the crazy spaghetti hotdogs has elicited a couple of hilarious comments. In an email response I had a brainstorm for a great healthy alternative for moms (or anyone else) who loves the idea but doesn't eat hot dogs: tofu and soba noodles. Construct the creatures following the hotdog idea and dress with a sesame peanut sauce (I'll put a recipe below). Garnish with some sliced green onions. If you only use the green part of the onions, they're fairly mild and kiddies probably won't mind. There you go - healthy crazy food!

Sesame Peanut Sauce

1 Tbsp peanut butter
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil

Mix it up. Add oil to thin, soy sauce to salt.
These amounts are pretty much a shot in the wind guess, but it gets the proportions about right.

So - if you give this a try, please let me know how it goes! Of course, I could always consider trying recipes before posting them.

Roasted (stewed) Pork

One of my favorite recipes is my mom's Chinese roasted pork. It's actually stewed, but we always call it roasted, so that's what I'm sticking with! It's delicious, yummy, scrumptuous - I mean, wow! My friend just requested the recipe and after writing it up for her in an email I thought... wait a minute, maybe someone else will want it, too! So, here it is in my own recipe sharing style, which is pretty darn loose.

Roasted Pork
bunch or pork parts (best are fatty or with bones - also cheap!) cut into bite sized pieces
ginger (nice sized piece) - you can just give it a whack to crush and release juices
star anise (3-4 pieces)
cinnamon (1-2 sticks)
green onion (1-2 cut into thumb sized lengths) - optional
soy sauce - to about 1/3 level of meat
water - to about 1/2 level of meat

Cook low heat for at least half an hour, but can go as long as you want. Add water if the liquid goes down. If you can make and then eat later, it's good because you get yummier meat AND can scrape the fat off after it cools after first cooking. Lots of fat from slow cooking and fatty pork.

Also very good: hard boiled eggs. Best if cooked twice (as in cook with first day, then warm up again with second day and eat - yum)

Can use any kind of meat. Chicken also good. Lamb delicious.

Save the liquid (freezes well) when you're done and use it to start your next batch. It will be infused with all the flavors from the meat you cooked the first time and therefore be even yummier.

Underappreciated Vegetables

OK, let´s talk about kale. Until recently, all I knew about kale was that it´s unbelievably healthy and fairly tough. I mean tough in the "tough to chew" sense of the word. Kale is basically a good-for-you leafy green with a terrible reputation. In Holland, it's used mainly (only?) to make stampot. Stampot is a classic Dutch winter dish that is made by boiling potatoes, kale, and onions until everything is soft enough to mash. It's served with smoked sausage and gravy. Foreigners in the Netherlands are a bit obsessed with it because it's so... well, Dutch. It's cheap, filling, and not exactly a gastronomic delight. As a result of its popularity, though, washed, cut kale is in all the grocery stores in great quantity and low prices all winter long.

For the past four years, I've walked by the kale. For the past four years, I have been missing out. Thanks to a tip from mom (best cook ever), kale has become a favorite in our house. It's delicious, easy, and quick thanks to the double Dutch staples of pre-cut smoked bacon cubes and kale. I cook up this stir-fry recipe to accompany Chinese food and anything else. You can leave out the ginger if you want a more western flavor. I'll add in some amounts on the recipe, but my habit is to guess and toss and adjust as necessary. You can't really go wrong. Cooking the bacon over low heat first helps render out most of the fat, eliminating the need for any additional fat when you cook your vegetables. If you end up with too much, this vegetable stores and reheats well.

Kale Stir-fry
serves 4

300g kale
1/2 tsp ginger
1 clove garlic
100g bacon
salt

Cut the bacon into cubes or, if you're using strips, 1cm wide pieces. Cook them over low heat while you prepare the vegetables. Wash and slice the kale into thin pieces, removing the hard ribs. Cut the ginger in slivers and crush the garlic. When the bacon is starting to brown, add the ginger and garlic. Stir for a minute. Add kale. Allow to cook down, stirring occasionally for about 3-5 minutes. It will take on a rich green color. Toss in a wee bit of salt to taste (this will depend on how salty your bacon is). Serve hot and enjoy!

All credit for this little recipe and my love of good vegetables goes to Mom.

Best Burger in Haarlem

With no baby in the house yet, we're killing time and looking for entertainment close to home. Sunday morning the sun was shining and it felt like the first cool day of fall. Although you won't catch me saying this often, it was a beautiful day to be outside in (North) Holland! What these days make me really want to do is go for a long bike ride, preferably through the national park to Parnassia, but that doesn't work out so well at 39 weeks pregnant, so we settled for lunch at Dijkers.

Dijkers is a little place in downtown Haarlem, just up a side street from the St. Bavo church. They used to be half the size and only serve lunch, but sometime last year, they added the adjoining building and started doing dinner as well. Inside, they've got a beautiful fireplace and a super modern interior. We, however, prefer to sit outside in the sun. You get the added entertainment of watching everyone lined up next door buying their sacks of fries. Not our favorite fries place, by the way, but that's for another post.

While I've tried a couple of other things on the menu - good salads and sandwiches - the truth is that Dijkers makes the best hamburgers in town. They're flavorful, juicy, and served up on a yummy crisp bun. The only potential down side is that the burger is all you get on your plate. A token salad or side (they don't do fries at Dijkers) would be nice, but in reality the burger is more than enough food, so no real complaints here. Given that I've done some recent reading and commenting on favorites, ordering my favorite feels better now than it used to. My natural inclination is to try more different things if possible, but favorites are ultra-satisfying. Knowing both what you want and what you're going to get are such good feelings that maybe we should take advantage of them more often. In the meantime, if you're in Haarlem or planning to visit - have a Dijkers burger!

Weekend Eats

The weekend wasn't all sewing and knitting, of course. We also managed to eat some good food. Here's how it all came together.

On Friday, a friend sent me an email that I think was expressly designed to make me jealous. She announced that she'd be dining at this beautiful seafood restaurant in Oslo over the weekend. You're thinking, of course, what's the big deal? It's food that used to swim. Well, have a look at the picture on this page. Do you see all those platters lined up? My keyboard still hasn't recovered from me drooling all over it. Disgusting. I want badly to eat this stuff! So, I did what any reasonable person does. I sent a hurt-feelings email and felt sorry for myself.

On Saturday, though, I went to the library to pick up books and stopped at the market to check out my fish guy. This gentleman reliably has fresh, delicious fish with a decent seasonal selection. Last week, he had crab, live lobster, and langoustine! You see how my mind was working, right? Bought myself a kilo of langoustine and a dorado for the weekend and then went skipping home, well, as much as one can on a bicycle. That evening I made a we-can't-eat-in-Oslo dinner that made us rather happy. That would be steamed langoustine with a bit of lemon and butter for dipping, a fresh tomato and mozzarella salad, and one fresh baguette. Here's another visual for you:



No Norwegian sunset, but it was delicious. I feel a little bit better now.

Open Sesame

Sorry to have been away for so long, but a wicked cold knocked me out and in the middle of it, I went to a conference in Long Bach, CA. My health is returning and I'm home with the folks soaking up sun and good food now. That means time and energy again to blog!

My big Long Beach adventure was a Lebanese restaurant called Open Sesame. It came highly recommended via websites, the concierge at the hotel, and the nice lady who over-heard me asking for directions. We went with a group of seven and after and after an hour and a half (or more) of waiting, their common sense won out over my desire to try the food. So, we went down the street and had late night burgers.

On Sunday, however, I went with a girlfriend and the two of us were able to sit down immediately! It was, not surprisingly, a huge and pleasant shock. The restaurant is cozy and, especially since we were sitting in the section with the take-out counter, busy. We ordered a fried potato appetizer, a falafel plate for her, and a vegetarian plate for me.

My expectations for the fried potatoes was not high, but they were delicious! Cubed fried potato bits in a yum sauce (tomato, parsley, olive oil, vinegar, etc). The hot potatoes contrasted well with the cool sauce. My vegetarian plate was also good. It included hummus, baba ganoush, tabbouleh, falafel, and grape leaves. The baba ganoush was definitely the stand out option. The smoked flavor of the eggplant came straight through and it was delicious. The hummus, tabbouleh, and falafel were also good. The grape leaves were alright. All this for $25 was good news to us!

The food at Open Sesame was good and fresh. Whether it was worth an hour and a half wait or not, I won't venture based on what I tasted, but it probably wasn't. If anyone who waited with me reads this - my thanks and apologies all at the same time. However, if you can sit right down, it's good food at a great price! If you want to know more, check out a couple more reviews: here and here.

Three Friends

We went out for dinner yesterday evening in Amsterdam. They took us to one of their local favorites, De 3 Vrienden, or the Three Friends. Of course, on the walk over we thoroughly exhausted the really bad joke that we were each with three friends and therefore allowed to enter.

All bad jokes aside, we had a great dinner experience. The restaurant is a cozy place with book lined shelves, old fashioned wooden tables, and plenty of candles. The menu had about 20 different options, all priced at €8.50 each. Each option was labeled as a hot, cold or hot/cold dish and could be ordered in any combination or order our little hearts desired. We decided to order two courses each.

For the first course, I had a salad with crayfish tails and avocado with a piri-piri dressing. Delicious. It was fresh, light, and full of flavor. My second course was a confit de canard served with mashed potatoes and peas. Yeah - I actually got mashed potatoes and peas at a fairly serious food restaurant, and enjoyed it! There were some sauces on the plate that jazzed up the mash (I suspect truffle oil) and made it yum. But the shock of seeing that combination next to my innocent piece of duck was fantastic. I'm going to have to venture they've got a cook with skill and a great sense of humor!

Well mannered people would have stopped there as we had plenty to eat and had all enjoyed our meal. However we decided to go for dessert as well. I had the spekkoek (see borrowed picture above), nice thin slices, with cinnamon ice cream and it was a delicious combination. F thinks of any dessert with ice cream as an tribute to my father... who loves to add ice cream to dessert when we have it! Friends also tried the whiskey and liqueur tastings and both were also yum. Their whisky selection (you could choose from 6 options) was actually quite good and F tried the Talisker, Oban, and one other that we liked less so don't need to remember. The Talisker remains our favorite, though.

All in all, a wonderful evening. Good company, delicious food, and a completely reasonable bill. I'd gladly to back to De 3 Vrienden, especially since I just saw on their website that the menu changes every month! If last night was any indication, you can rely on a good meal and great service!