Guus Bosman

Yesterday evening we went to Southpoint Mall to do shopping, which was very nice.

This morning the weather was absolutely gorgeous and Sasha and I ran our errands together. This afternoon I'm reading on the balcony, in the sun.

Dutch cuisine is strongly influenced by the Indonesian kitchen and around here it's hard to find some of the ingredients that I used on a daily basis in Holland.

I didn't quite realize it in the beginning, but condiments like sambal manis or ketjap manis, or things like nasi aren't for sale in regular supermarkets. Thai cuisine is more popular here, so there are similar curry pastes to sambal available but there is much less variety. I really like sambal manis, a sweet mild sambal.

A couple of months ago I ordered some Dutch ingredients by mail order, including mixes for babi pangang and foo yong hai and seroendeng, roasted coconut with spices. I almost finished the sambals so I was very happy when Petra told me about a store in Chapel Hill where they carry Indonesian condiments: A Southern Season. A wonderful store!

This week I made Italian meat balls. This was great fun to do and very rewarding. As far as I can remember this was the first time ever that I made these.

I used turkey meat because it's lean and delicious. I prepared the meat balls on Sunday evening with garlic, finely cut onions, Worcester sauce, an egg, breadcrumbs, salt, pepper & chopped up parsley. I used a recipe from a recipe book. The meat balls stayed in the fridge for 24 hours and I baked them in olive oil for a couple of minutes Monday evening.

I had also made a fresh marinara sauce with garlic, a little bit of onion, basil, thyme and peeled tomatoes and I cooked the meat balls in the sauce for 15 minutes.

My usual cooking style is 'experimental': try it out and see what tastes nice. However, using these recipes is great fun too. It really helps to have a guideline in what makes a great dish, and Monday's dinner turned out great.

Today we had the second portion of the meat balls. As an experiment I cooked tonight's tomato sauce with a different canned tomato: Cento tomatoes imported from Italy ($1,99 per can). The sauce was nice again, but not significantly better than the sauce made from Whole Food's tomatoes on Monday.

There is actually an even more expensive tomato type, San Marzano, which is supposed to be even more delicious and sells for $3,49 per can. That may be nice to try a next time too. One thing I learned is that there shouldn't be too much marinara sauce over the pasta; next time I'll use only half a can for sauce for the 2 of us. Of course there is no need to always use the very best tomatoes, but I'm curious to see if what the taste difference between regular and expensive canned tomatoes. The next step of course is to use fresh tomatoes to make a marinara sauce.

Today I ran some errants: I went to the post office, super market, shoe maker, library, dry cleaners and Target all in one afternoon. Since nothing is close to each other that means a lot of driving.

Shortly after we moved to Durham I found a good shoe maker nearby, one of the important amenities to have around. It's a family owned business and they do shoe repair and clothes alterations. I've been at Butlers a few times and their work is of high quality.

The only downside is that it's hard to get to their store as the entrance for cars is very steep. If you're not careful the car won't get enough clearance and you'll hear a loud scraping sound under the car -- not nice.