Royal April 30, 2009
Posted by tuimeltje in dinner, food.Tags: festive, soup
2 comments
Today it’s Koninginnedag, the celebration of the Queen’s birthday, which means that I’ve seen an overwhelming amount of orange with the occasional flecks of red, white and blue, of course. As my wardrobe is entirely devoid of orange I did not join in, so I’m making up for it online.
Oh, yes.
Most of the morning was spent in a relatively small fisher’s village next to my city of birth, where things are celebrated with some more enthusiasm and patriotism (both 1st and 6th of the national anthem and the provincial anthem were sung) than you might see in larger cities. Not that nothing is organised in larger cities, mind. I remember very well the decorated bikes and the sundry games (spijkerpoepen!) I played to be rewarded with a brightly-coloured candy stick or lollipop.
And the freemarket. That’s always fun. Mostly kids selling their old toys or playing whatever instrument they can get their barely-trained hands on, but sometimes there’s good stuff to be found there. I’ve not been in a few years, but this year I went near where I live. I bought me a puzzle and some Tartex, considered buying a medical encyclopaedia from the 1970s, and if they’d already had the cables and such, I’d most likely have bought a laptop.
Might still do that next week, once the cables and such are in.
Anyway.
Your exposure to orange isn’t limited to me brushing up on my extremely basic coding skills to give you headache-inducing letters. As I can’t be bothered to show any patriotism, community spirit, or conformity by wearing something orange, I figured I could share my culture and heritage and whatnot through food. Orange food.
Carrot soup.
Carrots aren’t particularly Dutch, as far as I know, though I suppose it’s more indigenous than many of the things easily found in supermarkets these days. But they sure are orange.
While I can find various soups when going through old posts, I can’t find any soups that are specifically carrot soups. A few contain carrots, and a few are orange due to liberal use of things like pumpkin or red lentils, but I couldn’t find a carrot soup.
Odd.
I’m sure I’ve made one before, and I really thought I’d posted about it.
Oh well. It doesn’t really matter now, you’ve got pictures of it right here.
Basically, what I did was do the dishes that have been in my kitchen for some weeks (yes, weeks. I’ve hardly been home these last few weeks, remember?), get my large pan, pop a good many cumin seeds in it, chuck in two chopped onions, then either nine or twelve scrubbed and roughly cut carrots (II stopped counting at some point. You can just go with whatever amount you find appealing, really), some water, a bit of garlic powder, some kentjur powder, and a miso bouillon cube. I let that heat up until the carrots were soft enough to purée. After puréeing it and adding a bit of water to make it more soup-ish and less mash-ish, I added a nice bit of lemon juice. I also added a little bit of salt and tamari as the I’d kind of skimped on the bouillon cubes.
I would’ve liked to have added some ginger. I love the carrot-ginger combination, but as you can see in the picture, the little bit of ginger I had left was all wrinkly and wooden. No longer suitable for consumption, that bit. And what with this being a national holiday and all and me forgetting to buy it earlier, I didn’t have anything fresher, so I used the kentjur as a substitute. Not quite as nice, but better than nothing.
Apparently there’s some comedian somewhat confused about Dutch holidays and trying to figure out Koninginnedag. Go watch!
Swiss Food July 29, 2008
Posted by tuimeltje in breakfast, food.Tags: festive, randomness, swiss
4 comments
Because August 1st is a relevant day in the life of me and I wanted to live in Geneva after visiting it just once, I thought I’d play along with Zorra’s Swiss National Day event.
Either make something Swiss, or make something red and/or white.
My knowledge of Swiss foods doesn’t extend beyond rösti, müesli, cheese, chocolate, fondue, and some mysterious dish generally referred to as “raclette” which I suspect involves cheese, but that won’t stop me.
With the recent trip and the moving and me finding out about it relatively late, this is going to be something simple. Initially I wanted to make some rösti because I love that stuff and unlike the other Swiss foods I know about, it’s vegan by default. However, when looking for some instructions, I came across this lovely recipe video mentioning something about chilling the potatoes overnight being necessary. And with the deadline being today, well, that wouldn’t have worked.
It also taught me Dutch people tend to mispronounce rösti, even when they remember the ümlaut.
So I googled for a bit, working my way through a variety of NOT VEGAN meat-and-potato-and often-also-cheese dishes before realising I’d probably best stick to some traditional Birchermüesli. While I’ve spent a good many mornings breaking my fast with something the label insisted was, in fact, müesli, or at the very least muesli or even cruesli, I don’t recall ever eating anything like the original version.
So. No time like the present, eh? And what better occasion than Swiss celebration.
While there are many variations, I figured I’d best start with the basics, which also serves the purpose of this post best.
Some of the recipes I found specified that the apples should be the sour sort. While I like my apples, I’m not sure which ones are generally seen as sour, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the Granny Smith was on that list. I just got whatever organic local kind I could find at the supermarket, which ended up a good old-fashioned jonagold.
What I made:
How I made it:
-Soaked a tablespoon of oats in three tablespoons of water and a tablespoon of (bottled, not freshly squeezed) lemon juice.
-Let it stand for a while.
-Added a tablespoon of soyamilk.
-Cut a jonagold apple, with my Swiss Army knife of course, and shredded it over the oats.
-Mixed it all up.
-Ate it, enjoyed it.
I think I may have messed up with the quantities somewhere. I ended up with a little bit of oatmeal-like stuff and a lot of grated apple.
As for some more random Swiss-ness, mixing it up with some veg*an-ness, there’s this vegetarian restaurant, Hiltl, in Zürich, which is over a hundred years old. I want to visit it.
And to mix random Swiss-ness up with some lovely piping, something I loved before I even knew about veganism, I give you this, a video of an old Swiss bagpipe.
Twigs and Tofu 