cooking at home, Dining out, Eating in Holland, Haarlem, Invite a friends for dinner, Leisurely cursing, restaurant

Should we dine out tonight?? Well, jeez, maybe…maybe…NOT?!

As an Italian who lives in Haarlem and has a serious passion for food I always feel embarrassed when friends come over and would like to have a little dining out in the town. The food scene in this city is inversely related to its beauty: “appalling” is the word which comes to my mind. And I believe it has to do with the customers: as long as they’ll keep cherishing the “all-you-can-eat” over “it’s food, it goes inside me, it turns into me! I’d better select what I’m going to let into my mouth” the restaurants here will be as follow:

-“Fried air&decor”, like the “Het Diner” by Herman Koch explains very well: much ado about nothing, pretentiousness at its best, hungry belly while leaving the premise not to mention quite lighter wallet and a head full of question marks: “did i truly have a “culinary epiphany”?”, “was it truly an “unforgettable experience”? Most (but not all) of the michelin-starred restaurant of the area belong to this category: m&l, cheval blanc, chapeau, de bokkedorns, de vrienden van jacob, etc etc most of these truly charge a lot for very little, quite skillfully presented and quite pretentiously put forward. Not for me, if I’d like a “caprese salad” (mozzarella and tomatoes sliced together, dressed with olive oil and basilico) I’ll make it myself at home, thank you very much, I will not pay 18 euros to be served one.

-“Decent cooking mismatched for top-of-the-pop”: here you have the various Lambermont, Willendorf, Truffles, etc. Good food, decent ingredients, correct cooking, but nothing else! No fanciness, no inventiveness, no nothing, nada. Again, the bill tend to be a bit on the high side for something I can also cook at home, with a bit of effort! Which goes most in being able to find the right ingredients, for those who don’t know about that (counting the millions, still) the meat they serve you is not from AH, and it tastes better, doesn’t it? But it’s not purchased in Brasil and air-freighted during the night, try the Lindenhoff in Abcoude! One note for you, Truffles people: nobody wants to wait 40 minutes between “gewoon” dishes, and if you’re going to serve me chantilly creme with strawberry for dessert after an endless night of waiting for my food, do expect me to be pissed off.

-to be continued-

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Food Fair, Olmenhorst, SlowFood, Uncategorized

The fair of the west AKA “SlowFood, fast chewing!”

And so we did the Langgoed Olmenhorst SlowFood fair, two beautiful non-“Dutch Autumn” days, meaning it was mostly sunny, ok some wind, yes, some wind, of course, and cloudy, sometime, yes, natuurlijk, but, hey! Come on! The Meaning Of Life by Dr. Frankenstin and Eye-gore doesn’t apply here! “It could be worse”, he said, “How??! How could this possibly be worse!?? We’re digging graves for corpses in the middle of night!”, he replied, “Could be raining”, he ended, before a thunder rattled and water started pouring from the rain.

You see the hint? It was not Holland! It would be raining, already! So, let’s not complain all the time, it oh-so-not-professional…who cares! I LOVE complaining, and ranting over and over, and so do you, don’t LIE TO ME! BUT: let’s calm down, there’s much more to rant (over) so let’s get to it.

Weather was  “fine”, as mentioned, peculiarly cold, I must add, but I had my 2000 watt ceramic grill from Rommelsbacher (fancy name, fancier tool!) so beat it! And I was there with my comfort and joy on Saturday, and with plenty of supplies: honing tomatoes, own-baked “rustico” bread and a lot, a swarming river of excellent E.V.O.O. And sunday: split peas soup, “a tres-chic concoction of water, salt and split peas” (to be read with the most jean-te-pattang voice you can perform, don’t know what I’m talking about: youtube “Denis Leary French Rant”, now). Unfortunately my joy of life couldn’t be there as she was running 21 km like this, for fun! And that was to add to my discomfort while facing the audience.

Now a brief note: I’m not always at ease, it is true, but I’m particularly upset by obnoxious morons, aren’t you?? And “food fairs” seems to be luring them like the Hamelin bloody Pied Piper! It’s easy to understand why, two words: “free fucking food”. And the F word couldn’t be more appropriate, as these peoples rarely care what they’re stuffing in the mouth, the only thing they know it’s that it’s free, they say “heerlijk” well before having actually having put anything in their mouths! They don’t care! More on that later.

Because a lot people cared, and I am glad about it. Lot of people asked the right questions, where happy to get the right answers, where delighted to taste something oh-so-rich, etc. A lot of people discovered that you can use olive oil for more than dressing a salad (oh my!) and dare to think “chef”. Like the “gay guy”, who usually cooks (the not-so-good-looking one, that is usually the case), and likes to cook “gay”, good for him! So he’d like to try some fancy oil (Orange, perhaps?) on some baked fish, well guess what?That is also how they do it in Filicudi, small volcanic island in Sicily, and it tastes delicious! Dellllllllicious! OK so I was happy to do some good, for once, and feed a lot of kids a lot of tomatoes, bread and olive oil, of course. I love kids. I gotta say I love their parents less. They park their kids in front of the food trays like Dickensian rascals, I am sure if I had looked good I would have seen some brown juta sacks coming out of their black-sooted hood. No way! Do these people ever feed their kids? Meaning: at their own expenses?? Or do they simply get busy on the calendar like: “Ok, tomorrow we’re in Bonjesfoort for lunch, their is the Expired Meat Market, and for dinner we’re going to Looten, the artificially-ripened cheese fair started yesterday!”. I got a message for them delivered for them during the fair, last Sunday: “Chili&Garlic Fucking Oil”, do you like it spicy?

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Uncategorized

Oh, la Tignes!

Forget about fancy ladies in raunchy fur coats and 1980s Bond movies, here comes Tignes! Which “Tignes”, first and foremost? Yes because, imagine this: the original petit village, in the folding of a charming green valley, was simply & forcefully evacuated in 1952 and then flooded, together with a big chunk of the same valley, to build a “lake”, the local tourism board will say, an hydroelectric basin, I will specify. But why a mini-Hoover dam in the middle of the mountains? Because there was going to be the need for a A_LOT of electric power. In fact after destroying the past the French Fries went on building the future: one of the most impressive ski resort there is, the so called “Espace Killy”, which is the joint of Tignes and Val D’Isere. PLENTY of skilifts, chairlifts, areoskis, underground train reaching mountain’s top and much, much more! PLENTY. Well, what’s the problem, then?! Ah, you felt it already, that there WAS going to be a problem. It’s blatantly simple: all this stuff costs an enormous, indecent amount of money. Think of building and maintaining heavy structures, massive structures, at 2500 mt. of altitude and for 6 months per year below zero C! That’s a lot of argent, too beaucoup, we might think. But, nope, the whole operation is structured for it: the place has plenty of pistes, plenty of uphill transport, what you need now is plenty of people to pay plenty of tickets, the infamous “skipass”. So you haul them here with cars, planes and traines (don’t take my word, check it out by yourself! http://www.eurostar.com/UK/uk/leisure/destinations/direct_services/ski_train.jsp) and where do you store them? Because it’s storage we’re talking about, here. Not “lodging”, nuh-uh, I told you on the first line: forget about those fancy movies. In stead of a small village at the bottom of the valley les Frogs have built A BUNCH of “resorts” (more on that later), most of them above 2000 mts, all of them with the same structure: huge condos (6 floors are pretty usual, usually multiplied by 4 or more times), stuck together around the beginning of the pistes, a bunch of shops selling all the same things (same ski, same boots, same jackets, same food, same postcards) and a few discos, bars, “cafe'” with one or two upscale hotels-cum-restaurant-cum-spa. I guess the total capacity of the resort I was in (Tignes La Val Claret) could have reached easily the 5,000 people, but for the 2010 Last of the Year party 25,000 people gather to dance on the snow at 2100 mt. with David Guetta deejaying. Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s NOT my kind of fun. Sounds more like the rightful punishments for all my numerous sins. But that’s what the whole place is good at, and it works like a well oiled clock! In the Easter week we paid EUR 429 for accommodation and skipass (two adults, 6 nights sleeping and 6 days skiing), now beat that! No wonder that Tignes is, yes, the paradise of young skier who want to have some fun on budget but also of the cheapos par excellence: the Brits. Remember the “famous” food critic? “The portions were huge!”, well we’re in the same scenario here: forget about the quality, the portions are huge, what the heck would you like more? I have one word for that: TREES. I will articulate just a little more: LESS people, MORE trees. That’s a “resort” of my liking and that’s where I’m going next year with my beautiful snow queen. All the same, thank you Tignes for the good time, I skied a lot and that’s what we were there for, ate out only once and I am glad of it, and if we turn our head towards the right direction we could still imagine how beautiful the place must once have been.

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Uncategorized

My own private Vinitaly-o

I got to Verona when it was still quiet, a day in advance. Paying my visit to a sick friend, what a contrast. The city was sunny, calm, green, not truly “heaven” but at least quite a decent shot of the “Romeo&Juliet” postcard the local administration would like to pass by. 

The following day was another story. The following day was the beginning of “Vinitaly 2012”. It sounds cheerful, doesn’t it? “Vinitaly”. Not so. It’s a mammoth, it’s a fierce win-a-thon where a “pavillion” is more like a KLM hangar fully loaded of stands and stalls, big and small, BIIIIIIIIG and small, HUUUUUGE and small, ENOOOOORMOUS and small. That sort of thing.

I love good wine, I switched to it many years ago, never went back. I don’t care how much a bottle costs, but how good it is. 

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cooking at home, Cooking in the Netherlands, Eating in Holland, extra virgin olive oil, marketing of oil, olive oil

Something about olive oil, finally!

Here is a little something I wrote in the Caribb…no, that was “The Penis Song”, I’m confusing things here. OK: this is a little something that I post in reply to an article in Dutch (I actually believe it was in Flemish. Unbelievable, but true, in 2010 there is still “Flemish”, and someone uses it to write! Amazing. Links and stuff at the end of the post.

“”Olive oil stink!”, correct! The bad one does, indeed. Indeed you can tell very easily a bad oil from a good one: uncork the bottle and smell, is it sour, acidic? Please, leave that bottle on the shelf, and pass the message to the generation before yours. And I will say that trade fair are truly not the “fairest” source of information
Let’s therefore proceed to some basic key-points: E.V.O.O. (Extra Vergin Olive Oil in short) and butter are different kinds of “food magic”, one is a purely veg juice (as you rightly mentioned), the other is a kind of extra-condensed milk (mostly its fatty part). They do different things, they taste different. Some people use it indistinctly but we state it now and forever: it is a mistake, even if you are Belgian, pun intended! What does the magic than consist in? Smoothing, mostly, but not exclusively. The fat particles cover certain receptors of our tongue and the food tastes better, but that’s not it: certain minerals in these two condiments (as I would consider them) make them taste good together with other foods. Or do they? Olive oil tastes good on itself! Isn’t that as per your article, one of the requirements for a generic olive oil to be labelled “Extra virgin”? I beg your pardon, I will therefore correct myself: E.V.O.O. does taste good! Meaning: a good, very good oil tastes NICE by itself! Try that with butter! Go ahead, chomp on a chunk of butter, or melt it down and sip it warm. Brrrr! Disgusting, isn’t it?? BIG difference than, keep it in mind. And that partially explains the success of such a product (E.V.O.O.) in countries which are strong butter producers and with a strong butter culture: E.V.O.O. tastes good! I will say extremely so, but I do admit to be partial, in this querelle. I trade and sell quality olive oil for passion, having been something completely different in a previous life. I love butter and I use it when I need it, which is: bread, butter and jam (it will NOT taste good with olive oil), when finishing a risotto, which I “started” with olive oil, by the way (so you do use butter and oil together, yes!) and in few other occasions (with anchovies, yum!) and I will never get caught without a butter “bullion” in my fridge. That said: my butter consumption is quite low compared to E.V.O.O. Maybe because I am Italian (but I’ve been living abroad for more than 10 years), most probably because I love it, certainly because I got lucky and started with the good one, I am an E.V.O.O.-centric cook. Which means that I will use E.V.O.O. for everything and anything EXCEPT few specific uses that will make me open fridge, take the bullion out and carve out a generous amount of butter. Not the other way around, and, I believe, more than marketing the goodness of the ingredient as well as the tastiness of the food is spreading E.V.O.O. and its cuisines (Italian, southern French, Spanish, etc) north towards cold and butter producing (and consuming) countries. Because it tastes good, because it’s healthier, because it’s easy and quick to prepare. THOSE are the reason why it became so popular therefore fashionable, not the other way around. And thank God for that! The meat-and-potato (fried in butter, holy baloney! How about the good old beef tallow??) McDonald’s style meal has enjoyed much a bigger marketing budget, believe me, and it is still losing the battle: as soon as people turn older, wealthier, more educated, or a combination of those, they switch to “the healthier alternative”. China, Japan are starting producing E.V.O.O., You said yourself that Australia and South Africa are already there! Humanity evolves learning about and adopting best practices, not sticking to “traditions”. Otherwise we would be still hanging from trees, like our ape cousins.

And now to the core business: quality. Italy is the second producer of olive oil but the first producer of E.V.O.O., and one of the greatest importer of “olive oil”, what does that mean? That we deal a lot with oil. That we consume more than we produce, that we like it good (hence the greater percentage of extra-vergin produced against the total) and that we leave the production of the mostly second-rate oils, mostly, to Spain, and for a good reason: the biggest Italian brands belong to…Spain! Bertolli, Carapelli and Sasso belong, together with Carbonell and other brands, to the SOS GROUP, actually the largest olive oil producer in the world. A quality producer? I probably cannot say so, and the März-Carapelli case certainly gives food for thought. For those who didn’t follow it: the German magazine “Merum” published an article in 2005 after a joint research with De Stern and ZDF television channel about olive oil on the shelf of Germany, which resulted, in large part, of “poor or very poor” quality. In 2006 one of the producers mentioned, as Merum is proud to tell the sinner, more than the sin itself, sue the magazine and the journalist, Andreas März, for libeling but in May 2009 the competent tribunal (Pistoia, where März, who’s an olive oil producer itself, therefore knows quite a good deal about it) declare that the libeling was not there, since none of the statement printed was false! And guess what? Carapelli didn’t appeal the verdict. So that’s it, quite a tombstone on the “quality” of olive oil of big producers.

If you’d like to read more (in German): http://www.merum.info/pagine/de/dettaglio.lasso?id=82&-session=degubox:42F94105055fa035A2grMY66BAE7&-session=merumbclub:42F94105055fa035A2llpx66BAE9

And quality is paramount, the difference between E.V.O.O. and just an olive oil is the same between a fine wine and just some grape juice you squeezed yourself and store in a bottle to ferment, will that make a nice bottle? Will you give it to your father in law for Christmas? I guess you would not, and rightly so. Therefore: it HAS to be good, and to be good there have to be a few requirements to be followed:
1) hand picked, and at the right time. Hand picked means that you don’t spoil the olive with something harder than its skin itself, “shaking” the tree been an option when the olive is quite mature, basically black, which is when will almost naturally fall by itself. But as every olive oil producer will tell you, the longer you wait to collect the olives, the more oil you get, but the lowest its quality. That’s why most of the quality E.V.O.O. producers pick the olives when they’re still quite green, and they will not fall, even if you shake the tree with an earthquake…
2) squeezed as soon as possible? Yes but with some forewords… the olive is pested by the olive fly, which deposit eggs which turn into larvae which feed with the pulp that we usually squeeze to get the oil, if you squeeze too early, the larvae won’t come out of the olive and you’ll squeeze it as well…the best, and most expensive solution seems to be leaving the olive spread on nets for 24 hours to allow pests to leave the olive and then bring them to the mill. The key factor seems to be to avoid to pile up olives in bunches which will only squash them and ferment them, causing unwanted acidity level.
3) from a small estate. There’s no “boutique” in olive oil, I don’t believe in it, but I believe in producers who are proud and feel strongly associated with their product, therefore, will have much more troubles sending the “wrong bottle” to the tasting panel. Yes, there’s a tasting panel, as you mentioned, it is mandatory for the producer to submit a sample for qualified tasting to be able to call its oil “extra vergine”, olive oil been quite unique in the market as, I believe, the only product which gets tasted before being labelled. Each olive oil. Therefore, since every producer has to send sample bottles, there’s a lot of “fooling around” with all those bottles! But it’s quite different for small estates: their name is on the label, and they are there to be found in their estate, most of the time, therefore if you are not 100% convinced of your expensive purchase, you know where to find them! Try your luck and send an email to the brand manager in the consumer division of the Grupo SOS to complain you didn’t really think his oil was that good! Good luck, and good night.

Not to mention: large estates means more time to the collect and more time to the mill, and more mills even and storage facilities in protected atmosphere for ideal preservation, and not every olive oil deserve it! Let’s face it, there are a lot of olive oils which simply don’t taste good enough! They’re too bitter, too light, etc, though being perfectly healthy and nutritious. These oils will go feeding the production chain of generic “extra virgin” and “virgin olive oil”, which are sometimes made with blends of 10-12 different oils, just to obtain a mix which is suitable for the market, meaning, which taste good enough and makes the highest possible margin, at the lowest possible cost.

With a small estate you will not be able to have all this “alchemy” going around. Two or three “cultivars” are the norm for many of the small and medium producers, even better: the DOP (Protected Denomination of Origin) grants that those cultivars are the real deal, are the real “Parmigiano Reggiano” made in the area of Parma and Reggio (and few selected others), not in Germany! Or Morocco, Tunisia or Turkey, in the case of E.V.O.O. Those oils are perfectly fine, when you want to buy Turkish or Moroccan olive oil, but they sound like a cheat when you’re purchasing something that the marketing says: “Grown in the sun of Tuscany!”

At last, one note: there is a lot of fun in tasting olive oil (how about butter?), just like there’s in tasting wine. Monocultivars are becoming increasingly popular, and for good reasons: all of the E.V.O.O.s, nowadays, tend to taste the same. Good, in general, but quite similar. It’s the market, baby! Just like a LOT of wines are tasting similar because of Mr. Robert Parker (Oakish? Vanillish? Sweetesh?Brrr…) so to discover what a real “olive juice” is tasting like, consumers are willing to experiment, and I have seen them happy, very happy of their discoveries! As I don’t carry yet any monocultivar in my selection, I do a lot of tasting privately for those who would like to try. It is still a niche market, but I am pretty sure the Zinfandel “in purity” is not for everyone, either!

As always, reading and growing informed is the best thing to do, there are many good publications available on the market, from true experts like Judy Ridgway, Marco Oreggia, etc. It is of paramount importance that we know more about the food we eat and how we spend our money! A concluding examples:

To hand-pick a 100 kg of olives an expert worker will have to work 10 hours (and it is hard work!!!), 10 kg being 2500 olives of medium size (4 gr) and those 100 kg can yield something like 15 liters of olive oil (but that’s on the high side, quality producers can get as low as 8!) in a good year. How much are you willing to pay that worker? 10 euros per hour? 15 euros per hour? Just to give you an idea, a baby-sitter can ask you easily 7-8 euros per hour, in Italy. But let’s say 10 euros.

So you have a VERY good worker (100kg in 10 hours!!! 25,000 olives a day!) which work hard for little (10 euros/hour) and you get a GOOD result in your harvest, collecting 15 lts of olive oil from your olives, therefore spending 100 euros for 15 lts or 6,7 euros per liter…

I repeat: 6,7 €/lt, or 3,35 €/500 ml or 5 €/750 ml.

Just to pick-up the olives.

You then realize that if someone is asking 3-4 euros for a 500 ml bottle of “excellent” Italian extravirgin olive oil (some supermarket chain here in Holland do that) you are left wondering: “how can a bottle of oil costs less than a packet of cigarette???”

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Leisurely cursing

I am too lazy to start ignoring, I will ignore this whole “ignore” process.

“Lady Gaga”. Who the fig is this lady G.? Can someone please explain why should I bother not giving a bloody juicy damn about this “singer”? Yep, those are quotes, my young friends. Yep, they DO mean that I tend to consider anybody who changes dresses oh-way-too-often as someone too busy doing somewhat else, therefore, to be proficient in the Art of Singing. Because it’s an ART, you dolts, guess what? It has a fucking MUSE inspiring and protecting it! NO, NOT the band…oh just forget-IT. Maybe I’m too old, just plain and simply old, very old, ANCIENT even, I’m still not giving a fuck about another “singer” called “Madonna”, yeah, more quotes, I like quotes! And all those beyonces, rihannas, parishiltonkimkardashianschristinaaguileirasshakirasbritneyspearsesandWTF! WAY too many to be able even to start NOT giving a pimple!

And they do this, and they do that, and they do him too, and they dress like this, and they get married pregnant etc etc ETC. WHY, why oh why should I care about it? I can BARELY care about my many, many friends, they are dear to me and are a_lot. Spread all over the continents. I have a life, it’s enough! More than enough! Why the hell should I buy a newspaper to read whatever the fuck miss Suckitall is doing today, WHAT do I care? Can I just choose my own skank to follow, like: on the street? “Hey, you! Yes, you, Trashey! Tracey, whateva! I like you, let me follow the Epic of your Life! Please! Have a fan in me!” Sure thing I’ll get arrested, real pronto. How can people live like that? Meaning, with pictures of you being constantly taken, what a bore! Jeez-us. Talking about “camera whores”, these are “camera nymphos”! And they are ALL, unmistakably, unfailingly, dumb as hell! And they do one-dumb-thing-after-another, it would be more fun to watch someone playing Bridge! Any idea why Bridge didn’t really turn “popular” (background laughing) on the Net? I’m sure you got one.

OK, fine, I do understand there are some imbeciles who really cannot do without celebrities and their “swanky” lifestyles and lifetimes, but why drop pictures and articles about them in mainstream media??? No way! Let’s confined them where they deserve, some sort of media ghetto, like porn or manga.

Perfect for Ms. Lady G., she got the costume already!

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Uncategorized

The COMPULSION of writing a blog!

It seems that the universe is willing to share his (or her) thoughts with you, even the most trivial, no, I correct myself, ESPECIALLY the most trivial ones. Who gives a damn if you saw the new nissan micra passing by on the street? Uh? Who, WHO could possibly CARE about THAT? On the other side: how many deep, profound and important, life-changing sentences, articles, extracts, excerpts, novellas or vuvuzela have you read recently? Zero? Same here. People don’t think before writing! Hell, I’m know I’m not! But, and that’s the difference, I try at least to be playful with words, and make you laugh. Because I love you, you nasty filthy rotten bastards!

That said, let’s talk about food blog and food!

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cooking at home, Eating in Holland, Haarlem Jazz Fest, Invite a friends for dinner

Haarlem Jazz Fest! All but Jazz!

So once a year this town goes banana and hosts the “largest free jazz fest”, nice, isn’t it?

There’s just a liiiittle problem with that: the jazz. None. Nowhere to be seen, there’s funky, rock, soul, beat, pop, bluegrass, caribbean, ska, , hummerofgod POLKA, younameit. But as soon as someone starts an Aeolian scale: people leave, in a hurry, even. And they do leave, oh boy if they leave. Oppe-te oppe-ta, as the locals smartly say! So what to do for a jazz lover like myself?

The answer seems to be only one: invite a friend you can’t say “no” to (yes, that kind of friends, yes, with long beautiful hair, and, yes, with BIG beautiful eyes, no wonder-bra needed for those mammasantissimas) who wants to go there, wants really wants please please please, and, oh well, what am I supposed to do??!

Cook a wonderful dinner, spend a few bucks on wine (hint: a bottle worth less than 12 euros is basically a soft-drink with a fancy label) and happily dance the polka! Just don’t call it jazz, c’est tout!

So, temptative menu for this zaterdag recites as follow: baked ravioli with aubergine, pesto and mozzarella with “PINK” Tapon Rosé, rabbit “alla cacciatora” matched with Lachryma Christi from the Vesuvio area, risotto with coulis of crustacean, accompanied by a suave Austrian Pinot Noir and papa-made amaretto tiramisu, with 25 years old white port, and fuck it! Let’s dance this bloody polka! I’m GOOD at this polka thing, tja!

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Uncategorized

“Düud”

They call me “Stacey”. They call me “Jane”. They call me “dude”. I understand we are not dealing enough with food in this “food” blog, but, hey, life’s tough, get a fucking Arai, ok??? They call me names. I am not whining&moaning here, I am just, quite normally, pissed with the fact that people cannot resist the temptation to say things like “hey guys!” or “hey dude!” or “yo man!”, or whatever that bunch of matter which will be exchanged for waste in a few years they have in their head will suggest them. What’s wrong with my name? Can we have an age definition and STICK TO IT, forgossake? Uh? Please? ReallyfuckingPLEASE? Like, until 18, you’re a dude. Than you’ll be a “guy”, until you’ll be 29. From 30 onwards, you are a MAN, you know, those things with BALLS attached? That one. And if you’re good, and fight hard, and kick butts and have really a shiny killer twinkle in your eyes, than you’ll be called: “Sir”. I LIKE IT. I like “Sir”. I like the hissing sound of it, it rhymes with “don’t mess with me”. I like it.

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cooking at home, Cooking in the Netherlands, Eating in Holland

Oh zo goed! Cost het?

Dutches, they like Italian food, they love it. They hog it like there’s no tomorrow, and who knows?! Maybe they know better! Maybe there IS no tomorrow! Behold, my mozzarella!

They like it because it’s tasty? Nah. They like it because it’s fancy? Nnnnnnnnah. So, why exactly do they like it? Well, because it is fancy and tasty for its PRICE. Dutches will happily switch to Champagne&Oysters, curse my nuts if I would not!

But as a someone said once: “My dream? A night out with cocaine&hookers. The reality: a night in, diet coke and internet”.

That said, Dutchland is no Monte Carlo, not so many Ferraris around, and also not so many of those hulky Russian guys driving those fancy Italian cars like they own the street, which is probably true, therefore: it’s a nice place! No-nonsense, nor fake, libertarian without a taste for excess, and still remembering the terrible winter of 1945, I am a person who feel for this. “Thrift” is still a good word in the Dutches’ universe, and I believe they love Italian food for that: because it delivers a terrific “bang” for their beloved geld!

That said: they can, at times, go too far.

Let’s be frank here: way.too.far.

Because of well-studied psycho-dynamical reasons “exotic” food always taste more interesting, exciting. That is all more true when local food is, how to put it? Boring? Really boring? Killing you softly with that daily boredom’s poisoning? Well then! The local trading tradition, spanning centuries and having given a mighty luster to the otherwise too-worldly true greed of the Batavian soul, come to the rescue! Let’s import some fancier stuff! Let’s do it! NOW!

But, and there is a but and everybody saw it coming: it is going to cost us money. Real money, not “The Hobbit Special Edition” Monopoly’s one. And the locals, who are smart but do love their money, seems to have no problem to fall into the contradiction of exchanging as little money as possible to purchase as “exotic” as possible, fancy-named, foreign food! The result? Well, let’s just say that France is quite happy to have an outlet for the “Final Destination” of 70% of their aenological production, which, guess what? does not really make it to the standard of “excellons” that the Froggies are used to for the internal market. Translation: they dump their rubbish here.

And guess (again) what? A lot of other countries do the same, as well. As long as you do not want to spend more than 2,68 euros on a bit of Feta Cheese that has to be flown-in from all the way from a 2000 km away biological farm in Peloponnosos just be sure of a few thing: you are not getting any Feta cheese and that piece of peloponneso that is related to you now happens to be either in Germany or Limburg.

That’s life. Get a helmet, and not a toy one from Bob De Bouwer. I know, I can already hear the huffy replies: “but the real ones are expensive!”

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