Sunny Day Pasta (Pasta with asparagus, feta, onion, lemon)

This is for days when you come home with a pink nose from the sun. For when you’ve been riding your bike, or lounging around on a terrace. It is for days with ice-cream cones and chats with friends. For the end of a warm afternoon reading the papers or a juicy book. It is for days like today.

Asparagus, feta, lemon and onion pasta

Serves 1

200 gr slim green asparagus
1 large red onion
25 gr feta
zest of half a lemon
1 tbsp lemon juice
large handful basil leaves
1 tbsp olive oil
a short pasta shape, enough for one person

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil.

Peel the onion and slice it into slim wedges. Crumble the feta.

Heat the oil until warm. Add the onions and lower the heat. Cook until soft.

Wash the asparagus and snap off the woody ends of the stems. Slice each stalk in 3 cm lengths. Separate the tips and the other pieces.

Add the pasta to the water when it boils and set the timer for three minutes less than you would to fully cook the pasta. When the timer sounds, add the asparagus pieces, but not the tips. Set the timer for two minutes and add the tips when it sounds. Boil for one more minute and drain the pan. (If the simultaneous timing makes you nervous or you are not sure your asparagus are slim enough to be done in three minutes, cook the asparagus separately until they are tender but still firm.)

Leave the pasta and asparagues to cool for a minute or two. Add the softened onions, the feta and the lemon zest and juice. Mix thoroughly. Chop the basil into fine ribbons and add them too. Serve.

Regaining Control (Fresh Tomato Risotto)

My e-mail inbox is taunting me. Every day I go into the office determined to empty it. Answer the messages that need answering, toss the rest. Sometimes I get as far as dwindling down the unanswered pile to 20 messages or so, and the overall mess to under 100. Then I leave for an hour and *bam* - the screen is filled with bold-face e-mails jostling for my attention.

“Neh-neh-neh-neh-neh, you can’t get rid of us. Neh-neh-neh-neh-neeeeeeh.”

Okay, the noise is in my head, but the bizarrely quick procreation of these buggers surely isn’t. So the battle resumes. If I’m lucky, I leave the office with as many messages in my inbox as when I came in. And while it is nice to be needed, it is also a tad intimidating to see my inbox spiral out of control.

After a day of battle, I want something to remedy the madness. Calm, simple food that takes little effort and does exactly what it is supposed to do. No jeering from my pans or oven, no inexplicable multiplication. I have found that risotto is a perfect answer to these demands. I skip the stirring and just boil the rice with the amount of broth the package tells me to. The rice plumps up from the liquid, but in a desirable rather than an uncontrollable way. Twenty minutes later, I have a pot full of soft, luscious food that only needs some flavorings to make a great meal.

Tonight I mixed in a quick fresh tomato sauce with lots of garlic for a clean, upbeat taste. I added slices of olive for punch and topped it with a fried egg for kicks. The latter wasn’t such a great idea: the yolk added a good extra creaminess, but the white didn’t bring anything. No matter, though. There are so many other toppings that would complement the base. Slices of fresh mozzarella, chunks of creamy gorgonzola or shards of salty parmesan. White fish fillet, finely chopped anchovies or squid rings. Crispy bacon bits, smoked chicken or beef strips…

Yeah.

‘Cause I need more endless lists.

Fresh tomato risotto

Serves 1

75 gr risotto rice
1 shallot, finely diced
olive oil
250 ml hot chicken broth
200 gr cherry tomatoes (regular tomatoes work too)
2 cloves garlic, minced
toppings to taste

Heat a glug of olive oil in a thick-bottomed sauce pan. Add the shallots when the oil is warm, and cook until they are translucent. Add the rice, stir until all rice has a film of oil and cook until most of the grains are translucent. Add 180 ml of broth, lower the heat and cover the pan. Simmer for ten minutes.

Meanwhile, halve the cherry tomatoes or chop the tomatoes in roughly evenly sized pieces. Heat a second glug of olive oil in a second small pan and add the garlic. Cook for a few seconds until it loses its rawness. Add the chopped tomatoes and heat gently. Simmer until the rice is done and the tomatoes have mostly disintegrated into a chunky sauce.

Taste the rice after ten minutes. The rice probably isn’t done yet- add more broth to prevent it from drying out and sticking to the pan and cook until the rice is tender (it usually takes about 20 min for me). Add the tomato sauce and mix thoroughly (you can remove the tomato skins if you like, but I never bother). Cover the pan and leave to stand for five minutes or so. Mix in toppings, if using. Turn out onto a warmed plate and top with more additions, if you like. Serve hot.

To Market: Dappermarkt

One of the best things about my house is the food shopping in its vicinity. There are Middle-Eastern supermarkets with gorgeous, cheap produce, there are bakeries with turn-over so high bread gets sold straight from the oven, there are three different fish mongers, and a small but well-assorted eco-store. And there is the market, where I bought the bounty you see up there.

When I bought my house, I spent about a year looking for a place in the right neighborhood, in the right building and for the right price. It had to be close to the city center, with neighbors who weren’t as cookie cutter similar to each other as in my old neighborhood, and the building couldn’t be built after 1930. I looked, and I looked and I looked. And looked some more, before I admitted something had to give, because it just wasn’t happening. Three months later, I bought a shoe-box sized apartment in one of the ugliest 1980’s buildings on the street, right next to the railroad tracks.

I think of it as an excellent deal in disguise. I don’t have to look at my ugly building when I am home and its 1986 vintage means the walls run perpendicular and the plumbing and electricity work faultlessly. The tracks mean I have no buildings opposite me, so light floods my shoe box. What’s more, the house may be small but it has a large(-ish) balcony facing west, so I can sit outside in the evening quite a few months of the year.

And there’s the food shopping, of course. The market around the corner isn’t just any market: it has been voted best market in the Netherlands for two years out of the past three. (Nope, I don’t know who voted. But hey, someone thought it was the best.) There are a few too many stalls selling cheap socks, discount shampoo or ugly synthetic clothing for my liking, but to each their own. And there’s plenty for me too: There are excellent produce guys, one specializing I potatoes and onions alone- oh, how his displays makes me wish I liked spuds. There is fresh fish, and chicken and popcorn. There is a guy baking caramel waffles and boiling fresh corn on the cob. One of my favorites is the Moroccan-owned olive stall, where the salty globes wink at you in a dizzying array of sizes and colors. And there’s a “Farmer Piet” stand, that puts a big grin on my face by selling large hunks of luscious cheese.

Oh, and your sells get wrapped up in these:

Gotta love the market.

Food from Far

Basket with peppers, Xian, China

Broccoli with Benefits (broccoli salad with bacon and raisins)

My man is hiding behind the curtains. More accurately, he is blocked from my view by the curtains because he is outside. Not just hiding behind the curtains, but sitting on the other side of double pane glass, shivering behind a stack of papers. He was working and “Samantha Who” on the television was bothering him. So he settled on the balcony in seven-degree cold.

I offered to switch off the TV, but he has bouts of chivalry over odd things. Christina Applegate with no memory turns out to be one of them. Good thing then, that I made us broccoli salad tonight. I am sure his immune system appreciated the help from the brassica goodness.

While it is a lovely bonus, being healthy is not enough for a salad to make it onto my dinner rotation. Especially not if it has broccoli. Luckily for my man’s immune system, I have a friend who knows how to make nearly anything palatable. And while her tricks usually include lashings of butter, big globs of mayonnaise or generous amounts of cheese, the one she uses for broccoli is more friendly on the arteries. It has a modest helping of bacon bits and some raisins and makes broccoli taste seriously good. Okay, so it also has lots of mayonnaise, but you can replace most of that with yogurt without comprising the taste.

Tonight, I combined my friend’s tricks with a SmittenKitchen idea of using tangy dressing with onions on raw broccoli. And the mix worked, if I do say so myself. You get salty, you get sweet, you get tangy and you get crunchy, all while munching through an impressive dose of vitamins and minerals.

Bring on the seven degrees. On my man, that is.

Broccoli Salad

Serves 2

500 gr broccoli, florets and stem
100 gr bacon bits
handful of plump raisins
1/3 cup mild yogurt
1 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tbsp onion, finely chopped

Wash the broccoli and peel the stem. Slice the broccoli as finely as you can (using a knife, a mandoline or food processor).

Fry the bacon bits until they are mostly crispy, but with a soft bite.

Combine the yogurt with the mayonnaise and the onion. Season with salt and pepper to taste (keep in mind the saltiness of the bacon).

Put the broccoli in a bowl with the fried bacon bits, the raisins and the dressing. Toss gently until thoroughly combined.

Strawberry Love

Things I love about strawberries

· They smell of summer. Just one whiff, and I am in my sun lounger, shaded by a large parasol, sipping a cold drink. In my mind. Because strawberries are not teletransporters.
· They form the base for the quickest, most elegant dessert I know: washed, hulled, quartered strawberries macerated in sugar and balsamic vinegar.
· They make a lusciously refreshing lunch, spread over fresh white bread covered in real butter.
· They look downright festive in a glass of sparkling wine.
· They’re here!

What do you love?

P.S. For the parents:

No three-star chef

Tonight I joined this list of healthy goodness into dinner:

Fava beans
Fennel
Bacon bits
Lemon juice
Extra-virgin olive oil
Wild Alaska salmon

Made it look like this:

And then got this reaction from my man:

“Uhm… so, this is really healthy, right?” After which he ate the fish, pushed the rest of the food aside and filled himself up with butter-slathered bread. What's worse, he had a point.

Right. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go have a rather large piece of chocolate.

Slinky Shrooms (grilled oyster mushrooms with garlic and vinegar)

Grace is not my middle name. My movements have no flow or ease to them. I have stumbled over more doorsteps than I care to remember, I am intimately familiar with numerous sidewalks from slamming into them face first and once I ended up with my right leg stuck inside a Cuban sewage pipe. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I nearly launched myself into a pile a of bricks this evening. And I wasn’t, but it still came as a bit of a blow to the ego that the only thing between me and a bloody face was the sand that slowed my frantic stumble.

When I got home, I needed graceful food to even the balance. The gazpacho I was planning to have was bumped off the menu. It was chunky and destined to leave big red blotches on my white shirt. Instead, I decided on setas a la plancha. Setas a la plancha. Doesn’t that sound supremely graceful? And its English translation, “grilled oyster mushrooms”, is almost as charming.

What first attracted me to this recipe weeks ago is the technique used to cook the mushrooms. You toss them in seasoned oil and then fry them at high heat on one side only. I was intrigued. Would they taste differently if only one side got direct heat? But it took this long to make them because the recipe also intimidated me. It calls for expensive, high-quality sherry vinegar to dress the mushrooms after frying. My most expensive vinegar cost a few Euro’s in a French supermarket and it is fake balsamic vinegar. Probably not what they mean by “good quality Spanish vinegar”. When I got home this evening, I didn’t care anymore. I wanted a touch of elegance and if it had to come from a humble place, then so be it.


Good call. The mushrooms are easy to prepare, and ready in under fifteen minutes. They look elegant and taste great, even with the lowly French vinegar. A bit smoky from the high heat, intense from the garlic, lively from the vinegar and smooth with the olive oil. I am not planning on making a routine out of semi-embarrassing myself in front of my neighbors, but if I get a plate of these every time I do, I might learn to appreciate my lack of grace more.

Setas a la Plancha, Humbly

Adapted from Moro London, Sam and Sam Clark, via Het Parool

Serves 4

500 gr oyster mushrooms
salt and pepper
4 tbsp olive oil
2-4 tsp vinegar (sherry or red wine vinegar)
1 small clove garlic, finely chopped just before use
½ tsp dried oregano

Cut any thick stems from the mushrooms. Tear them in half if they have grown into a tube shape so most of the spore sides can touch the pan later. Mix three tbsp of oil with salt and pepper to taste and toss the mushrooms gently with the mixture.

Heat a thick-bottomed skillet until very hot. Add a single layer of mushrooms, spore side down. Softly press down the mushrooms and cook until the bottom is nicely browned. Transfer to a bowl and cook the rest of the mushrooms in the same way. When all the mushrooms have been fried, mix them with the rest of the oil, the vinegar, the garlic and the oregano. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Amsterdam Food

Sign advertising coconut cake.

I think my local baker's is looking forward to the summer.

Waffles to Celebrate (yogurt waffles)

Put your hands up in the air. Higher. Higher. All the way over your head.

Slap a big smile smile on your face.

Excellent. Now wave those hands from side to side. Put some swing in it.

You know what, why don’t you add a little butt-motion? Shake it, baby. Shake, shake, shake, shake it!

And you’re doing a happy dance. Yay. I love it.

If yesterday was a day for being still and remembering, today is a day for celebrating, for feeling down to our toes that we are alive. Alive! ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!

Festive days need festive breakfasts, methinks. Sure, a slice of bread with peanut butter is nutritious and will fill you up. But will it put a smile on your face? Like one of these would?

I had this beauty a few weeks ago to celebrate the start of the long Easter weekend. It was crispy on the outside, airy on the inside and perfectly sweet. Covered in powdered sugar and whipped cream, it was the waffle of my dreams.

Another one was called for to start today off right. Unfortunately, I live about 100 km away from waffle perfection, and while I will do silly things for food, traveling an hour and a half for a waffle is not one of them. Which is where my favorite food blog comes in: SmittenKitchen. Deb always seems to have the perfect recipe for whatever I want to eat, and today was no exception. Well, except for one thing, but she was honest about it. My dream waffle was crunchy and she told me this waffle was going to be ever-so-subtly crisped. Still, subtly crisped and fresh from my waffle iron seemed mighty good to me.

So, out came the yoghurt, the flour, the sugar, the butter, the… wow, one needs a lot of things to make waffles. Look at this shot, of my counter top right before I added the batter components together.

That’s a lot of dishes. Luckily, the end result was worth it.

Deb was right: the outsides were gently crisped and the insides were soft. Topped with a glug of maple syrup, every bite made my taste buds smile.

Now give that butt one more shake, to celebrate the yogurt waffle.

Asparagus to remember (asparagus with soft onions)

Today is the fourth of May. A day to honor those we have lost in war. Today we realise we are lucky to be where we are and that it isn’t self-evident, that it has taken hard work and pain to get here. Hopefully, that message sinks in and we do something with it.

Big words, but I don’t know where to let them take me. I am not brave, I don’t fight and, well, I don’t have a clue. Heck, I couldn’t even think of something appropriate to cook for today. What do you eat when you are supposed to be still and thoughtful, sobered by what has gone before? I thought of eating dry bread accompanied by a glass of water, but then I laughed at myself. I tried to think of black foods to eat, but felt that pasta with squid in its own ink would be dramatic rather than sober. And then my current affection for asparagus stirred and I decided the tall white stems would be dinner.

Asparagus are not the obvious solemn food. They happily whisper of spring and new beginnings. They sing “enjoy me now, we’re precious”. Around for a short time only, you cannot afford to dither or they will be gone before you get around to them. And maybe that is what this day is about, for the moment. About being here, today, and realising just how precious that is.

Asparagus with Soft Onions

Serves one, easily multiplied

1 small bunch of white asparagus, about 300 gr
1 large onion, sliced into thick half moons
2 tbsp olive oil + 1 tbsp for serving
1 egg

Thoroughly peel the asparagus, taking care to remove the stringy outer skin from the whole length of the stem, starting from just below the bulbous tip. Cook until tender but still firm (in a pan of water, over steam or in the microwave, with just enough water to cover the stems; start checking for doneness after ten minutes whatever method you use).

In the mean time, boil the egg to your liking. I like the yolk to be just a little runny and the white to be cooked through, so I boil a medium egg for about six minutes after I drop it in rapidly boiling water. Also heat about 2 tbsp of olive oil in a heavy skillet and add the onions. Fry them until they are soft and light brown.

When the asparagus are done, put them in a shallow bowl or arrange them on a plate. Sprinkle with a tbsp of olive oil and toss them gently to give them a glossy sheen. Finely dice the egg. Spread over the top of the asparagus, and sprinkle with salt. Layer the fried onions on top. Enjoy hot or warm.

Dip Quickly (bagna cauda)

Dip, dip, dipdipdip. Dipdipdipdipdip.

You will have to dip quickly to keep this slippery stuff on your vegetables. A mixture of oil, anchovies, garlic and butter is bound to slide right off your dipping vessel. But if you’re quick enough, it will slide right into your mouth and it will be so worth it.

Much more than the sum of its parts, this mixture of pungent ingredients becomes silky and luxurious when heated, a wonderful dip for vegetables. Through some sort of secret process, or perhaps magic, it transforms Belgian endive into a sweeter version of itself and gives grilled zucchini a lush loveliness you would never suspect it can possess. I imagine it would be lovely with lightly steamed broccoli as well, and in combination with green asparagus… my salivary glands start working overtime at the mere thought.

Happy quick dipping!

Bagna Cauda

This is not an exact recipe- with something this intense, you will want to adjust proportions to your own liking. I will give the amounts I used for a dinner for one, though, to give you an idea of where to start.

Serves one, easily multiplied

Based on Nigella Bites

4 tbsp olive oil
6 anchovies packed in oil, drained
2 cloves of garlic, minced
knob of cold butter, about 2 tbsp

Gently heat the olive oil in a small saucepan. There should be enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan. If not, add more. Add the garlic and the anchovies and continue heating gently, stirring regularly until the anchovies have “dissolved” in the hot oil. Then remove the pan from the heat and add the cold butter. Whisk until the butter is fully incorporated and the mixture has thickened slightly. Taste, and add more butter if you like, then whisk again.

Serve with leaves of Belgian endive, strips of grilled zucchini or other vegetables with a bite. Keep warm if possible and dip quickly.