Guus Bosman

Chicken with tarragon sounds less delicious than 'poulet poêle à l'estragon', but that is of course what that is.

After an easy Sunday I cooked a Julia Childs dish and that turned out delicious. I used the huge Dutch oven that I recently bought. We had Argentine sweets for dessert.

This weekend is graduation weekend, and the parking lots are completely full since many parents are in town for the ceremonies and to help the graduates move out of their apartments. Classes have officially ended, so the 'quiet time' start again, until the end of August. Oprah Winfrey was at Duke today to give the commencement address.

A few weekends ago we had guests for lunch, and I wanted to make a fully vegetarian onion soup.

Obviously, onion soup is mostly vegetarian by itself, but the exception is the bouillon which is typically based on beef. So the night before I made a vegetarian bouillon for the first time. It was a lot of work, but interesting to do, and the result was very good. I used half of the bouillon for the soup and froze the rest of it.

The recipe was something like this: bake carrots, celery, potatoes and onions in the oven for 45 minutes so they become crispy. Then, put those vegetables and a bunch of herbs in a big pan of water, bring to a boil and simmer for a long time. Interesting enough you can even add the skins of the onion (not baked); they'll give the bouillon a nice dark color. At the end, you filter the vegetables and herb out and you're left with the bouillon.

The lunch the next day was a great success, and the soup was well received.

I realize that it may sound like I do nothing but cooking these days. Having said that: tonight we cooked nasi goreng with real krupuk and it was great.

Nasi goreng is an Indonesian fried rice dish which is popular in the Netherlands.

In Grand Asia, an Asian grocery store near my work in Raleigh, I found real Indonesian krupuk; crackers made of shrimp. They are deep fried for a minute or so in the pan and expand to three times their dry size.

Last but not least I experimented with a peanut sauce from Hong Kong, and that was a very lucky choice. It was delicious, a great combination of sweet and spicy at the same time.

For the first time in some 5 years I cooked shoarma tonight. The last week or so we’ve really been in a Dutch cooking mood. While shoarma originates in the Middle East, it is very popular in the Netherlands and when we lived there we cooked it quite often (shoarma is spelled shawarma in the US).

Many butcher shops and super markets in Holland sell pre-marinated ‘shoarma meat’: usually pork, sometimes lamb or chicken, with a marinade of spices. The traditional way to serve the meat is in a warm pita bun, with a generous portion of a garlic dressing (knoflooksaus). You can't find this premarinated meat or the prepared dressing in the States, but I found a number of recipes for them and we liked the result. The knoflooksaus was especially good, and very close to what I remember from the Netherlands.

Below is the recipe that I used tonight. A next time I'll change the shoarma mix -- it was good but not quite like in Holland.

Yesterday I cooked babi pangang and oh boy, that was delicious. I don't think I've ever made babi pangang before, but inspired by all the Dutch things last weekend I prepare pork ribs in a marinade on Sunday night. It stayed in the fridge for 24 hours and I cooked it yesterday. It was an excellent dish and got great reviews from my audience.

I also made a small pan with sauce, but that didn't turn out very nice. The recipe called for tomato ketchup, which should have been a warning sign, and the result just wasn't delicious. Next time I'll use another recipe.

The meat in the babi pangang is pork, but there are a couple of different cuts you can use. Yesterday I tried pork ribs, another time I'll probably go for boneless meat. In Holland a great choice would be speklapjes (pork belly strips). Marinade the meat and let it stand for at least an hour, preferably over night (see ingredients below).

Tonight we made shiitake mushrooms with angel hair pasta.

The mushrooms are sauteed in onion, garlic and olive oil, and then made into a nice sauce with wine, chicken stock and some cream.

It's served with a very thin pasta, and topped with Parmesan cheese and some parsley.

I had a healthy lunch today.

Tonight we went for our first sub-freezing run of this year. It was cold, but with long sleeves and a cap it wasn't too bad.

We had pizza tonight from the dough I prepared last Sunday. I placed the dough in the fridge and now, 4 days later, it still worked.

The pizza wasn't anything fancy: just olives with the left over Fontina cheese and a bit of mozzarella. It came out nicely -- I used fresh olives instead of canned ones and it makes a big difference. I underestimated the time it takes to make the pizza so we had dinner pretty late.

For the regular reader it no surprise if I say that I like cooking. Like father, like son: Jaap is experimenting with making camembert cheese. A very interesting experiment -- good luck!

Yesterday afternoon I cooked a recipe from La Bela Vita, a book with recipes from Tuscany, Italy. It has a beautiful picture of their four cheese calzones so that recipe was the first one I tried.

It took a lot of work to make the dough and the stuffing but there is something very satisfying about making dough and baking. The recipe called for chopped thyme in the dough, that was a nice touch.

The main part of the stuffing was a mixture of different cheeses. I used Bulgarian feta cheese, a little bit of Fontina and Parmigiano-Regiano and mozzarella. In addition, I put fresh oregan, parsley and basil, chopped roasted peppers and meat from an Italian sausage. Lots of chopping!

The end result was very delicious. I don't have a picture of the inside of the calzone but there is a nice empty space in them, with a layer of the stuffing which looks white from the cheeses, and green from the fresh herbs.

Tonight we had boerenkoolstamppot for dinner. Don't you love those long Dutch words? I received the excellent advice to cook it with some bacon which worked out really well.

While traditionally paired with rookworst in Holland or kielbasa in countries where real rookworst is not available, tonight I served it bone-in pork chops with fresh mushrooms and thin slices of onion.

For the bacon I used North Country Smokehouse's cottage bacon that was cooked in a skillet for about 20 minutes. For the stamppot I used a recipe from a Dutch book and it called for onions. I found that a bit strange, since I don't remember that boerenkoolstamppot typically has onions in it. It worked well though: the onions made the dish more juicy and the result was delicious, especially combined with the crispy bacon.

For the Dutch readers: do you use onions in boerenkoolstamppot?