When the weather is as great as it has been the last few days in the Netherlands, my appetite changes. The barbecue has already been lit a couple of times and salads have been eaten too. This homemade salad was made as a quick side dish and consisted of all kinds of lettuce, corn, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, avocado and a pesto dressing. A nice, quick summer salad.
When I am eating at my girlfriends parents’ place I know I will not leave hungry. Some time ago they made this delicious paella. With a bright afternoon sun shining on our heads, it was just like I was back in Spain. It was made with original Spanish fideua, filled with vegetables and all kinds of seafood.
After a hard day of work this dish is just heaven. A variety of pasta, garlic, red onions, pepper, spinach and shrimp. Shortly stir fried in a pan. Simple, easy and quick, but also very tasty.
When I eat a thick piece of brown bread like the one above, I want to have enough toppings on it so I can really taste the toppings instead of only bread. Instead of a thin slice of ham or salami, I want slices of crispy smoked Dutch bacon, topped with a large omelet which give you a rich and filling lunch just when you need it.
Made by a quick and favorite recipe, this dish is one that I make quite often. Although not made the traditional way this mie goreng still tastes good, I can assure you that. This quick version consists out of the all important main ingredient mie to which I added chicken, whatever vegetables are around, sambal, sweet soy sauce, oyster sauce and spices among other things. With the mie, the chicken and the vegetables it is a whole meal in one dish.
Porkchops are cheap and it is always fun to marinade them. That’s way they are a regular on the menu. I call marinating them fun because you can marinade them with a lot of stuff and most of the times it will come out delicious. It still depends on how crazy you are going to make it for yourself, but with most spices, herbs and sauces the porkchop will taste good. What I do most of the time with porkchops, and this time was no exception, is putting the porkchops in a large pan and just see what is in the house and put that with the porkchops in the pan. Since there were a lot of things in the house there are a lot of ingredients in this marinade, but some things that were definitely in there were: onions, red onions, garlic, sweet soy sauce, chili powder, paprika powder, salt, pepper and sambal. Possibly there’s some honey or mustard in it. After putting everything into the pan into a nice marinade, I put the pan into the fridge to let it rest in the marinade. After that, they went into the pan:
After a while they were ready and I can only say that they taste very interesting, in a positive way. These porkchops are not highly culinary and the flavor combinations are not well thought of, but just following taste in making them they produce really delicious porkchops.
What you see above is used as garnishing. From left to right you see parsley, Mung been sprouts and spring onions and above that some fried onions. It is used to garnish the black beef soup that is known as rawon:
Rawon is a black, or dark brown, beef broth/soup that is filled with all kinds of different and tasteful spices. One way to serve rawon is to serve it with rice, hence the name nasi rawon. What you do is you get a deep plate, then you scoop some rice on your plate, get some of the soup (don’t forget the meat!) and pour it over your rice and finally you get some of the garnishments as seen above and you garnish your nasi rawon. What you get looks something like this:
It tastes especially good with some sambal!
Although this does not look appetizing (yet!), whenever I see this in the fridge I know I’m going to have a great meal that evening. Because lamb meat is always good! And especially in a dish called gulai kambing, which is something like a lamb stew.
Since I never have made it myself I don’t know exactly how to make it. First thing though is putting some bumbu (a paste made with different spices) into a hot pan:
The next few steps consisted out of adding the meat, water and coconut milk into the pan. Some extras were added to make it at least a little bit photogenic:
Preferably served with rice, the final dish looks like this:
Believe me when I say that it tastes so much better than this pictures make it look! Tender lamb with a stew full of spices, just great.
Some days ago my girlfriend and her mother came over for dinner. My mother said she would cook a ‘rijsttafel’ for them. A ‘rijsttafel’ is probably the most important and well known culinary heritage that the Dutch have from the colonial era when the colonized Indonesia. A ‘rijsttafel’ which literally means ‘rice table’ consists out of different side dishes that are eaten with rice. People can make the ‘rijsttafel’ as elaborate as they themselves like. The number of side dishes varies and even the rice can be eaten differently. All the (side) dishes that are served are Indonesian, but the tradition to eat them all together as side dishes is something typical from the colonial era. The picture I have included above isn’t the best one for a few reasons. Firstly the photo isn’t that great. Secondly, it doesn’t show every dish and finally this is a picture of the left overs. It is my mothers (oh so fine) habit to cook too much food so the day after we still have a lot!
From top to bottom you see a bowl with bean sprouts and cabbage. Then a bowl of nasi (white rice) then a pan with brown sauce. This brown sauce is known as ‘pecel’ which is a sauce that looks like ‘gado gado’ but it is different. Both are a version of peanut sauce but they contain different spices. This ‘pecel’ was to be served over the bean sprouts and cabbage. There were fried onions to be used as a topping over the rice. The second bowl with a brown content is ‘rendang’ which is a meat dish. This one was made out of roast beef and a spicy coconut sauce. Further more you can see bami goreng (fried bami) with chicken and vegetables like onion, carrot, garlic and some more. At the bottom you can see some chicken wings and chicken legs but these were bought spiced and ready.
As I said before this weren’t all the dishes that we had the night before. Missing on the picture are ‘tempeh goreng’ which means ‘fried tempeh’. Tempeh is a product made out of soybeans and is in this case fried. Also missing was the side dish called ‘sambal goreng telor’ which means fried sambal eggs. As you could have guessed this is a dish were cooked eggs are put in a sambal sauce that has been fried before (the sambal that is). We also had ’emping manis’ which means ‘sweet emping’. The ‘sweet’ is added because normally emping has a bitter taste to it. Emping is a form of ‘krupuk’ that is made out of melinjo (nuts). And finally, the thing missing on the picuter were the egg rolls filled with shrimps.
With all this food on the table it was way too easy to eat too much and unfortunately I did. Twice. Because the next day I just did it again.
I didn’t make this, nor did I eat this. But I want to eat it right now! This was the result after following a sushi workshop by our mutual friend ‘N’. After asking I was informed that what you see on the plate is this:
The bottom row consists of nigiri sushi, salmon, tuna, shrimp and yellow tale.
The row in the middle consists of norimaki with cucumber.
The top row consists of kani uramaki sushi with avocado, king crab, cucumber, sesame seeds, mayonaise and lettuce.
Dude What's My Food? 