MONDAY
Manuel made ramen with the smoked turkey stock he prepared last night. It featured hard boiled eggs with crispy chilli oil (I’ll have to write a whole newsletter about that), broccoli, carrots, cabbage, noodles and furikake.
TUESDAY
We received a present today from a colleague and friend and passionate cook: a stamp to make corzetti, coin-shaped pasta from Liguria. It will make a good Sunday project.
We had spinach and ricotta tortellini and a red chicory salad with pomegranate.
WEDNESDAY
A friend came by for a work meeting and brought a Dutch pastry for which I have a soft spot. It’s called Tompouce, named after a Frisian performer, who in turn named himself after General Tom Thumb. It’s like a Napoleon with a pink glaze, and to quote Wikipedia, “the market allows little variation in form, size and colour”, and it shouldn’t. It’s iconic in my opinion:
You can find them in most bakeries and pastry shops but a popular place to get them is HEMA, which is like the dutch version of Target. They sell 14 million of these every year. That’s 40,000 a day.
Dinner. My all time favorite soup and probably the original Recipe on Rotation was given to me by my friend Sarah’s mom. It’s a red lentil soup similar to Moroccan Harira, but without chickpeas. I was basically sous-cheffing Giona beginning to end.
I served it with Aloo Paratha, which I have been meaning to try out for a while. I followed the recipe and microwaved the potatoes against my better judgment. Thankfully I had an extra one lying around, because the first two came out dry, shrunk, and ready for a senior home. I’ll boil them the old school way next time. Other than that it’s so good and easy to make.
THURSDAY
Little energy and or time to cook. I am grateful for my gifts from the freezer. We had pasta with kale & walnut pesto.
FRIDAY
Made a Hazelnut Citrus Torte in the afternoon for the sole reason I had a leftover bag of - a very small amount of - quinoa flour in my cabinet drawer that was bothering me.
I bought ground pork at the market Wednesday with pot stickers in mind (never made them before), but postponed that idea and used it to make tacos instead. We had cauliflower tacos (regularly on rotation) and I improvised ground pork tacos by doing a random search and riffing on a recipe I am too embarrassed to link to.
SATURDAY
It’s December 5th, and the Netherlands celebrates Sinterklaas en masse. If you’re not Dutch, the only reason you might know about it is because Sinterklaas’ assistants used to be / still are in some places in blackface. This historian explains the racist history behind the character (it’s in Dutch, sorry). On Sinterklaas, families celebrate by exchanging presents and poems. We do a small version of this since we moved to Amsterdam and it’s the one night I cook Dutch food, usually Boerenkool met Worst: Kale and Sausage (and mashed potatoes). I make it my own by mixing the mashed potatoes with this kale sauce as well as kale cut in thin ribbons and parmigiano. The potatoes are topped with a kielbasa-like smoked sausage. I got my mother to eat it, so that’s a success.
SUNDAY
Made the corzetti with Giona and my mother. We had two types of dough, one with semolina and eggs, the other with soft wheat, no eggs. The former we served with leftover kale sauce, the latter with a walnut sauce (typical with corzetti) and ricotta.
Ciao!
Anna