zuurkool.

In less bitchy news, Klary has a nice piece on sauerkraut up at Smaakpraat.nl, (sorry mother dear, it's in Dutch). This is especially relevant for me since I've been eating sauerkraut every day that I haven't eaten mole in the past week. Dinner at Greetje kinda got me started on it and I haven't been able to stop...I think because I haven't actually had it with sausage yet. So that will be tonight's dinner, in an effort to get the zuurkool monkey off my back.

But the main takeaways from Klary's article: rinse your sauerkraut well before using it (if you've never done this before, you have been eating something very different from what sauerkraut can be like); and toss a glass of kirschwasser over it after it's cooked and before serving. The latter tip is a new one for me and I hope to try it out tonight if I can manage to drag my ass out of the house to go get some kirsch.

EDIT: I did not drag my ass to get kirsch b/c there's not a liquor store in our neighborhood (how is that possible? This is supposed to be a bad neighborhood), but I did drag my ass to the corner to get some sausage. Actually, I got two, in order to have a bit of a taste-off: Weidenaar kookworst from Friesland, flavored with nutmeg and ginger; and Spar Gelderse rookworst, flavored with MSG and fake smoke.

Actually the Spar rookworst is about the only packaged rookworst I've seen without MSG (here called e621 or smaakversterker (literally "taste amplifier", which sounds like the title of a Boris CD)), which is why I bought it. But it does have fake smoke.

Worst in general, but specifically rookworst is a bit nostalgic for me...when we first moved here, we were renting an apartment for two weeks until we could move into our actual apartment, and during those first two weeks I have no idea what we did other than watch music videos (you could count on seeing Aaliyah's "More Than a Woman" or Basement Jaxx' "Where's Your Head At" once every 20 minutes, as a result I associate these songs with the squirrel-like naivete we possessed back then) and eat the following five items exclusively:

1) Wokkels
2) Eggs + Sambal Badjak
3) Couscous with butter and Heinz Curry Sauce
4) Kletskoppen
5) Rookworst + Huisman Zaanse mustard (possibly the dorkiest link I've ever linked)

I can't imagine why we didn't buy groceries...maybe we didn't want to mess up his refrigerator? I think he didn't have an oven, only a stovetop burner. But I really can't begin to understand our rationale for this diet. But anyway, I guess my point is that we were sweet and unblemished then, and those memories smell like rookworst. Or something. Whatever, I'll reveal the extremely unsurprising results of the worst taste-off in my next post.