Guus Bosman

I like to joke: "how can a country that put a man on the moon be so incapable of producing good bread?" An exaggeration, of course; there is plenty of good bread available if you know where to look, but in general Dutch bread is much better than American bread.

My yardstick is the bakery in Middenmeer: a small village bakery which creates amazing breads daily, like bakeries throughout the Netherlands.

This weekend I found a bread that is as good as the bread in Middenmeer: an honest whole-grain bread with seeds. Sure enough, it is produced in a German bakery (Guglehupf) and is called "Copenhagen multigrain".

I finished my French book today and in the afternoon visited Belen and Esteban. We went for a long walk in the late afternoon, just like yesterday.

I know, I know, not healthy... but so delicious!

Tonight I made kroket for the very first time. It's a deep fried meat snack, and very popular in the Netherlands.

I compared three different recipes to create my own, and it worked well. The crust was great, the filling tasty. Not 100% like in the Netherlands yet, but very close.

I'm making Dutch pea soup (erwtensoep) and red cabbage with apples tonight. Visiting the Dutch stores this weekend inspired me.

It was the first time ever that I've cooked with celeriac, knolselderij in Dutch. It's an ingredient for the pea soup, according to the recipe I'm using. It smells good.

It's that time of year -- days are shorter, it's getting cold and thus time for some good old Dutch cookies.

We made speculaas this weekend for the first time and it worked out very nicely. I used the speculaas spices Ettie and Gerben gave us.

The reality with baking cookies is that it's great to have 1 or 2 cookies, but that two pounds of dough make more cookies than anyone could ever eat. So I'll bring them to my work tomorrow, as sort of a birthday cake.

(Here's a recipe in English).

We had a great weekend together. We went out together on Friday, saw friends on Saturday evening and had no major activities.

Tonight after the gym we cooked a Dutch soup, groentesoep met balletjes. The "Dutch" in the recipe is mainly the use of small meat balls (pork/beef mixture) that are boiled with the bouillon before you add the vegetables.

Nothing beats the taste and smell and warmth of a home made soup.

I found a large supply of ketjap manis last week.

Ketjap is an Indonesian sweet soy sauce and important ingredient in the Indonesian kitchen. Sometimes they carry it in A Southern Season but not consistently. In Grand Asia Market I found ketjap from an Indonesian brand, ABC, and when I knew what to look for I saw it in the local Asian store in Durham also.

I just finished the second of the two bottles we brought from St. Maarten so we'll try out the flavor of this new ketjap soon.

Here's an example of the use of hagelslag.

The dessert "gele vla" is a one of my favorites and it is served with chocolate sprinkles, lots of them.

I made seroendeng tonight, an Indonesian mix of peanuts, coconut and spices.

It came out nicely; it has the mouth feel of the coconut that I like about seroendeng and was tasty. A next time I'll put a little more spices with the coconut so it has a stronger flavor. I added a tiny bit of sambal to the spices and that worked out great.

I found real gula jawa at the Asian store. I've never used it before, it's palm sugar (see picture, the dark brown stuff).

Today we baked a dessert, French profiteroles. It was a wonderful success.

Interestingly, it turns out that the recipe for profiteroles is very similar to my favorite Dutch gebakje: the moorkop. The difference is the filling; instead of ice cream a moorkop is filled with whipped cream.

We tried both versions -- the French profiteroles with vanilla ice cream, and a small moorkop. The bakery in Middenmeer serves moorkoppen with a piece of pineapple on top.

It's a neat idea that we can bake our own pastries, even a good old moorkop.

I got nostalgic for a dish that I haven't had for a long time, a slavink.

A slavink is a meat patty wrapped in a thin layer of bacon, based on a Dutch recipe. We used to eat them frequently in Holland. The are sold pre-made in most butcher stores and supermarkets, and I had never made them by hand before but I found a good recipe online.

The author of that (great) recipe presumably lived in the US for a long time, since he writes: "We eat them here with vegetables and potatoes but they are also good cooked on the BBQ and served on buns with ketcup and mustard."

The patty is made of a mixture of ground pork and group beef, with seasonings. I'm pretty sure that the (breakfast) bacon that I used is a bit different than the ontbijtspek you'd use in the Netherlands, but I found a brand that wasn't smoke flavored so the end result was pretty authentic. We had a great meal, with some rice and a green salad, and I made some extra that I'm keeping in the freezer for busy days.