Guus Bosman

Dutch cheese is the best cheese in the world, and I brought about 6 pounds coming back from Holland this weekend.

I went to the market in Wieringerwerf, and took 3 chunks of different types of cheese, ranging from medium old to very old ('crumbling'). So delicious!

I felt like cooking something special tonight and I made a pizza.

I used a different recipe than usual: I used whole wheat flour for the pizza's dough. I could say that this is more healthy and that's why I choose it, but the reality is that the regular flour we had was expired.

Whole wheat flour is great for a pizza! It makes a delicious and strong crust. I baked the crust without topping for 5 minutes on 500 degrees before baking the whole pizza on 425 degrees, and it turned out to be crispy and just right.

A next time I should buy a different meat. I wasn't quite satisfied with the Genoa salami I used tonight: not enough spices and not tasty enough. The sauce worked out quite well, I made a light tomato sauce with a bit of garlic and fresh oregano.

Tonight I attended a Wine 101 class at A Southern Season in Chapel Hill. It was really enjoyable.

The wine buyer of A Southern Season, Jay Murrie, introduced the group of about 20 people to six different wines, three whites and three reds and explained some of the differences about the various grape types and wine regions. I don't know a great deal about wines and this was a very nice introduction.

Somewhat unusual post-Sideways, I don't really care for Pinot Noir too much (or perhaps I haven't found the right one yet). A very pleasant surprise was the 2006 Merkelbach Urziger Wurzgaten Riesling Spatlese, a German sweet wine. I didn't think I would like it at all: a sweet, white wine but it was quite good.

I took a cab to the store because I wasn't sure how much drinking would be involved. I'm happy I did -- those six glasses were well over my driving limit.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and this weekend is the start of the summer season. The weather is excellent; it's close to 90 degrees.

I made a summer lunch: baked caprese salad (slices of baguette with tomato, mozzarella and basil) with an insalata mista from radicchio, arugula and cumcumber.

We had a little bit of wine left from last night (Luigi Bosca, one of my favorites) and it was a delicious meal.

Are you Americanized if you have to look up how much 150 milliliter is in cups?

A while ago we bought an electric grill. I use it on the balcony and it's great as it gives a real grilling flavor, and it's much nicer to grill food outside.

Tonight we had kebabs from Whole Foods: chicken with bell peppers and onions. Delicious, but 1 kebab is too much for 1 person. I made some Indonesian peanut sauce on the side.

By the way, 150 milliliter is slightly over 0.6 cups.

When I worked in Rosslyn we often went for lunch in Pho, a Vietnamese restaurant.

They serve a number of delicious dishes, and I especially like the noodles soup with Vietnamese meatballs. There is always Sriracha sauce on the table, a hot chili sauce. I'd never tried the sauce before and I really like it. It has a natural deep red color, and it's very spicy and very tasty.

I found it in A Southern Season two weeks ago and bought a bottle. Tonight I had green beans and it worked great with this Sriracha sauce.

There is something very relaxing about preparing a meal, and I enjoy cooking a lot. Especially in the weekend I like to cook somewhat more elaborate dishes. I've been experimenting with new recipes the last few weeks, and tonight I tried two Asian dishes.

I made Thai Noodles, a very tasty stir-fried noodles dish with a coating based on fish sauce and soy sauce, with jalapeños peppers and garlic. I've made it twice before but tonight it was a lot more spicy than the previous times. I think I didn't clean out the spicy parts from the jalapeño pepper completely, and I can still feel the burn on one of my fingers also.

Next to the noodles I prepared a new dish: stir-fried shiitake mushrooms with carrots. I had never cooked with fresh shiitake mushrooms before, and wow, they are so delicious! I stir fried them with sliced carrots, ginger and a sauce based on rice wine, soy sauce and sesame oil.

Stir-frying is one of my favorite cooking methods and it has a wonderful dynamic. First, I spent about an hour preparing. Slicing, chopping and measuring and mixing the sauces -- everything slow and methodical, cleaning up the kitchen as I go. Then the last part is completely different: as soon as I put the noodles in the boiling water there are 10 minutes when everything happens at once. It requires some planning and it's great when everything is ready exactly at the same time.

It was a delicious dinner but next time I won't combine two stir-fry dishes, no matter how much fun the cooking is. It's nicer to have more variety in cooking style on the plate, like boiled rice or plain noodles. I marinated chicken with a ginger and hoisin sauce for tomorrow.

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.

Good news for Dutch Starbucks fans: the company will open its first branch at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam this summer.

The "coffee giant" will just open a single branch for now, which is only accessible for airport passengers who have gone through customs. Starbucks has not mentioned any future expansions yet.

See the first job advertisement for barrista's for at the airport.

Thanks to various readers of this website have pointed out this news to me. A good step forward for Dutch coffee lovers!

Last night I made couscous, inspired by my father's couscous dish. He placed a recipe for couscous on his website a while ago.

Interestingly, one of the ingredients is "koeskoes kruiden", literally "couscous spices". If you'd do a google for "koeskoes kruiden", like I did, you'll see as a first result... indeed, my father's website.

Further research learned that the spices may have been turmeric, ground cumin and paprika powder.

The result, over whole grain couscous, was nice but a little bit bland so I'll have to keep working on getting that right.