Guus Bosman

This weekend I baked bread again, and it worked out well.

I changed the recipe a bit: less sugar, slightly more salt and less butter. The recipe still calls for 2 tablespoons of margarine, which is a bit too much so next time I'll try to reduce that again.

Per your request, here is the recipe (it makes 2 loafs).

This weekend I had time for a cooking experiment, and today I baked two loafs of white bread.


I've made bread before but that was always from a bread-mix package. This was the real deal -- flour, yeast, salt, a little bit of butter and honey (we were out of sugar).

I made a crust with egg yoke, and I made sure to let the bread dry on an (improvised) rack for a few minutes so the bottom crust stayed crispy.


We just had it for lunch and it was delicious. I'm rather proud.

While my parents are here my father is doing a lot of the cooking, and I really like it.

There are a lot of family recipes that he is making and that I hadn't had in a long time.

Favorites include omelet hete Sahara, couscous with sauce, and various nice salads. Tonight Jaap cooked beef with apricots in the oven. Delicious!

Yesterday I basically spent shopping. In the morning to two supermarkets, and in the afternoon I went to a mall to get a new pair of shorts and a dough roller. I spent some time in the bookstore at Pentagon City, drinking coffee and browsing some books.

When I was traveling back from Pentagon City by metro, I realized I didn't have my house key with me. I was pretty sure I had brought it, so I was afraid I had lost it. At the front-desk of our building they helped me out and somebody came with me to the apartment with a master key. It turned out that my keys where inside, on the bar.

In the evening I made a pizza. It was the first time I made pizza myself in the U.S., not counting the months of labor in my first summer job in Tannersville grinding garlic and making tomato sauce. I couldn't find the pre-dosed mix I usually made the bread with in Haarlem, so I did it the old fashioned way: flower, hot water and yeast. Of course, that process takes longer, so I ate very late.

The result was very good, with a very tasty and crispy crust.

Since a few days Starbucks has a new coffee on display: Aged Sumatra. Every now and then they have packages of special coffee beans for sale, and I was really curious about this one.

The beans of this coffee have been aged five years, which gives a taste. It is supposed to have been discovered when the Dutch V.O.C. ships transported coffee beans from Indonesia to Europe, which took many months.

I asked if there was a way to try the coffee, without having to buy a package, and when I came in in the afternoon when it wasn't very busy they custom made me a cup of coffee from these beans. They used a French press for it (which I believe is known in Holland as a Turkish' coffee machine).

I liked to coffee a lot, it has a very special taste: a more mellow and smoother flavor than regular Sumatra, and far less acidity. It was nice, but I don't think I'll get a package of this for at home. I prefer the regular blend in the mornings.

I really love to start the weekend this way. Sleeping in, having breakfast together, and slowly drinking coffee all morning.


We're still using the package with coffee that I brought from the airport more than two months ago. During the week there is fresh coffee from the apartment downstairs so we never make our own coffee. The coffee from the package ("breakfast blend") still tastes great.

I've been arranging some paperwork this morning. It feels like there are two sets of paperwork that need attention: the American one and the Dutch one. Jaap and Mieke help us a lot with the Dutch paperwork, which is wonderful.

Yesterday I went to my bank in the lunchbreak, to see what's going on with my debit/credit card. Currently I have a card that I can only use to get cash money from the ATM, but when I opened my account five weeks ago the lady said I would receive my real card within two weeks.

The bank representative found out yesterday that the lady forgot to request this card for me, so I'll get one within two weeks from now. I think it was one of the first times that this lady opened a new account for a customer. No big deal of course, but to have a real credit card would be very convenient. I still have a Dutch credit card also, but I prefer not to use it.

We didn't buy breakfast this weeked, and somehow there were no donuts with the coffee downstairs today. So I bought breakfast on the way to work.

I went to "Brooklyn Bagels". The smell and atmosphere there reminded me of our first summer in the U.S., in the resort in Tannersville, NY.

A bagel is a typical American thing; it's a circle shaped bread bun, thick, and more chewey than regular (European) bread. You can eat them as-is, but they are often toasted. There's a huge variety of flavours: this morning I had a regular bagel, but there are also bagels with cinnamon, poppy seed, onion or salt, or for people who can't choose: "everything".

I had egg salad on my bagel -- not a very smart choice when it comes to eating decently in the office.

I try not to go there too often, but it's a difficult temptation: the coffee-to-go shop in Haarlem. I like the coffee here at Chess a lot, but the fresh espresso in Coffee To Go is extremely delicious. Today I bought a customer card that gives me a 10% discount.

The people working in the shop are often involved in coffee- and espresso making contests; on their website there's a short manual on making espresso's.

This week I've been working at home a lot. Writing goes a bit easier here sometimes than at Chess.

It made me restore an old habit: drinking tea while studying. The point is that I'm often reading in the evenings and then I don't want to drink coffee. However I forgot an old lesson, that some types of tea contain a lot of caffeine too...

Slept pretty bad; it took me an hour to fall asleep. In the style of drinking to get rid of a hang-over there's one thing giving me hope... the sound of the coffee machine.

Yesterday we've made bread, I never did that before. It was easy and the result is very delicious.