A Swedish Mum Cooking in the Netherlands
For work I went to Arnhem and that was a golden opportunity to continue my series about Dutch pastries. Arnhem is a city in the east of the Netherlands. It’s a quiet little town (could also have something to do with, that it’s August – …
After another long hiatus I’m back with my blog. I don’t seem to be able to get into the habit of blogging. After an entire day at the office, which is more or less 8 hours in front of the computer, it doesn’t feel so tempting to set up the laptop and start writing. I’m going to start doing a little everyday instead, if from that one blog post per week comes out, I’m happy.
A friend went to Japan and she brought me back kitkats and during a party we got to try Sukiyaki pringles.
First I tried the Sakura Matcha.
It had a sweet smell and the taste was actually mostly just sweet, but it had a creamy taste, so actually pretty nice.
Hokkaido Melon does really smell like melon and tastes like melon as well. This was my favorite of the bunch!
Kyoho Grape smells synthetic and is not very nice, it was like bad chewing gum.
The wasabi kitkat doesn’t really smell of anything. The taste is mostly sweet and afterwards a wave of wasabi mixed with sweet comes in. I can’t decide if I like it or not.
Green tea has a nice green tea smell and tastes like green tea. I liked it.
After a bbq one evening a group of friends and I got to sample the sukiyaki pringles. They were very flavourful: a bit of chicken stock taste mixed with salt, it worked great with beer!
All in all, the packaging of the kitkats was really pretty and most of the flavours were good, my list is as follows.
Can’t wait to visit the country myself and sample some more. Now I just wonder how/if the kitkats that were left over survived this hot weather…
Today I’m starting a new series: Dutch pastries. I will present Dutch pastries from around the country. I’m hoping to discover more than just over-sweet heavy stuff. Maybe there will be some travel involved, I hope. The adventure of gebak begins with the Bossche Bol …
I love making sushi!! I still need practice for making the rolls nice and neat, but I like the versatility of sushi, with just a few ingredients and imagination you can create a beautiful and tasty thing. Yesterday we went to the market in Delft …
Today we finished the last left-overs of the cabbage rolls, including two hamburgers.
A Swedish way would have been to make a potato pancake – called Raggmunk. I might do a recipe of that as well. But we didn’t have any potatoes. What we did have were mungbeans. And I’ve made Korean mungbean pancakes as a party snack before and we didn’t want to eat another potato dish.
You’ll need this for 8 small pancakes:
Start with soaking the mungbeans in some water for an hour. Chop the spring onion.
Drain the water and rinse one-two times. Put the beans in a bowl or container that allows you to mix them with a mixer. I only have a handmixer but these beans just turn into a paste really easy. It should have a firmer hommos consistency. After mixing, add spring onion, sesame oil, salt and pepper and press in the garlic. Stir.
Heat up some oil in a pan on medium-high heat. Use one tablespoon of paste for one small pancake and spread it out to circles of about 7 cm in diameter. Fry on both sides for a few minutes.
Serve with a dipping sauce made out of soy and rice vinegar.
Or like we did, with the left-overs from yesterday: Cabbage rolls including hamburgers -hamburger set-up using the pancake as “bread” is optional – and the sauce (which didn’t taste so much the day after, I have to say) and a orange-feta-walnut salad. Voila!
I’ll hope you’ll enjoy the pancakes as a snack or side-dish!
Thanks for reading.
If there’s one dish that’s really Swedish (?), it’s cabbage rolls, even though cabbage rolls are eaten over entire Northern Europe. There’s a story (probably not true) behind the Swedish cabbage rolls. The Swedish king Charles XII with his entorage had fled to the Osman …
Since summer is long gone (or so I thought) and we’ve been working for a while now non-stop, it was time for a little vacation. This time we went to Oslo, Norway to visit friends. We flew with KLM from Schiphol to Gardemoen …
One of the good things about living in the Netherlands, is that it’s quite easy to get Indonesian food both in normal supermarkets and toko’s (Indonesian supermarket). There are also a number of Indonesian restaurants in every city. In The Hague, I can recommend De Poentjak at Kneuterdijk 16, a bit of an old-fashioned restaurant, but the food was delicious.
In Sweden, Indonesian food is rather uncommon. There’s lots of Thai food, sushi and Swedish-Chinese food – but not so much Indonesian to my knowledge.
At the supermarket in the Netherlands you can buy packages of instant noodles called Mie Goreng (meaning fried noodles). I’ve never liked instant noodles, so I was quite happy when I found this recipe: http://www.fussfreecooking.com/recipe-categories/meatless-recipes/homemade-instant-mi-goreng/
I’ve found this recipe a few years ago, now this is how I make the dish.
You will need to grab this from your pantry:
A comment about the noodles here, these aren’t the noodles I usually use for this recipe (either wok noodles or udon noodles) but this is what they had at the supermarket at the moment. I used to buy the cheapest wok noodles from the Jumbo (big supermarket chain in the Netherlands) but they stopped stocking them, so I have to go out on a hunt for noodles at the Asian store soon!
Ingredients (I used what I had left in the fridge – your recipe might differ accordingly)
Vegetables and meat
For the sauce
The rest
For the onion oil, pour about 2 tablespoon of sunflower oil in a pan. Heat up the oil. Slice the onion.
Fry the onion until it gets brown and crispy. Take the onion out of the oil on a plate lined with kitchen paper (to drain ). Add about 1 tablespoon of the oil in a small bowl. Put the pan off the heat. Don’t clean the pan, you’ll need it soon!
Slice the carrots, the celery and the spring onion. Take some bacon pieces out of the package. Like below.
Start boiling water in a pot. While the water is starting to boil, prepare the sauce. In the bowl with the onion oil, add ketjap manis, ketchup, sriracha, white pepper and about 3 drops of sesame oil.
Mix.
When the water is boiling, throw the noodles in and stir. Follow the directions on the packaging, or rather, taste: it should be slightly underdone (have a white center) when you take them out, because you’re going to fry them later. Drain in a colander and massage with some sesame oil.
Fry up the bacon in the pan with the left over onion oil on high heat, until crispy or however you want it. Press play for the best sound in the world!
Add the vegetables. Stir. Cook for 2-3 minutes. I like my veggies crispy!
Add the noodles. Stir all the time. If the noodles get stuck in the pan, add a few splashes of water. Stir stir stir. Fry for about 1 minute. Lower the heat if it gets too hot (I cook on electric….sadly). Add the sauce. Continue stirring until the noodles are fully cooked, about 1-2 minutes. Taste regularly to check the done-ness.
Pour in a bowl. In the pan, add some more sunflower oil to fry an egg. Sunny-side up! Put the egg on top of the noodles. Sprinkle with the fried onion and cilantro. Now eat!
I hope you’ll enjoy this recipe. It’s a nice lunch dish, if you like hearty lunches. I make it a lot when I’m working from home.
For work I was visiting the Dutch island Vlieland. In other to get there I had to take the ferry from Harlingen. This is Harlingen port the evening before I went out to Vlieland.
