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!

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?

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.

A More Natural Home: Part I

Since moving back to the States, we use even more natural products at home, in the kitchen, for cleaning, and for beauty products. This project has been on-going for a while now, and it has been wonderful to take some bigger steps towards realizing the goal of more homemade and more self-sufficient. It has involved learning about a whole new range of ingredients and techniques. We now keep a lot of baking soda as well as borax, washing soda, vinegar, and liquid Dr. Bronner's to do most of our cleaning jobs.

My first ideas came from a couple of my favorite blogs. There, I found a recipe for homemade laundry detergent. We are now fullly converted to using homemade laundry detergent and it passes the Papa test. The Papa test means that Papa notices neither difference in quality nor extra hassle to use a greener product or method. It's a high standard. I made the first batches with Dr. Bronner's Peppermint and loved the fresh smell. Looking for a less expensive option, I tried Kirk's Castile for the last batch. It works just fine, but the scent is gone and it smells rather soapy. We're going back to Dr. Bronner's next time.

I've also found a useful scouring powder recipe and one for cleaning the toilet bowl, but forgotten to note where they come from. Here you go, though!

Scouring Powder
3 parts baking soda
1 part borax

I store this in a a recycled plastic hummus container with holes poked in half the lid. The other half makes a convenient shelf for my cleaning sponge.

Toilet Bowl Cleaner
You will mix this in the toilet bowl. Doing it on the counter results in a science experiment (trust me)!

1 cup vinegar
1/2 cup baking soda

They will fizzle like crazy for a minute and then settle down. Leave for a few minutes and then scrub for a clean bowl.

I'll follow up tomorrow with some homemade beauty products!

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.

Accidental Internet Finds

I ran across this image at Apartment Therapy while looking for information about IKEA's new SVABBA soap. The internet is a strange and fascinating place. Now to decide whether we should have spaghetti hot dogs for dinner or not....

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.