duk, duk, duk.

Enjoyed my own Little Black Saturday today, meaning: I shopped. But it wasn't crowded at all out, and I bought mostly secondhand books, including this cookbook for a dollar: Tony Chachere's Cajun Country Cookbook. Published in 1972 (or pre-Justin Wilson in terms of America's familiarity with Louisiana cooking), it's homespun but adventurous, and applies a rather omnivorous approach to protein, including recipes for armadillo, raccoon, frog, turtle, and nutria.

Afterwards we went to Sushi Ken for lumch that made me pretty jealous. $7.50 for miso soup. salad with ginger dressing, rice, 5 pieces of sushi and 5 pieces of tempura. It was all very basic but tasty and authentic. The menu was huge and completely Japanese, the kind of place you could visit many times without eating the same thing. Will Amsterdam ever have a Japanese restaurant like this?

While we were out, Dad went to the car show (I guess I'll have to explain this at some point) and would be returning home hungry. Pitts wanted to make him pork chops, but didn't feel like breading them, which is the way he likes them, so I volunteered to try this using a modified Epicurious recipe. My family doesn't eat pink pork, but the chops were so thick that they stayed juicy despite being "fully cooked".


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double-thick pork chops
parmesan, panko, orange, rosemary

1 cup panko
2/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon dried rosemary, minced
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
2 large eggs
4 bone-in center-cut pork loin chops (each about 1 inch thick)

2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
lemon juice

Preheat oven to 425°F. Mix panko, cheese, rosemary and orange zest in a flat dish for breading the pork. Salt and pepper this mixture to taste. Whisk eggs in medium bowl to blend. I double-dipped: rolling chops once in panko mixture, then dipping in eggs, then again in the panko mixture.

Melt butter with oil in heavy large ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add pork chops to skillet and cook until golden brown, about 2 minutes per side. Transfer skillet with pork to oven, or transfer to baking dish. Bake about 20 minutes. When they come out, give them a squirt of lemon juice over top and another grate of black pepper.

















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Since we moved across town from Cult Videotheek, easily the best video store in Amsterdam, it's been tough to find Asian movies with English subtitles, and I've fallen pretty far behind in what's one of my favorite regions for independent cinema. As of tonight, however, I'm now almost caught up on the films of Korean director Kim Ki-duk: after dinner Pitty and I finally followed up our Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring from last week with Bin-Jip (3-Iron) and Samaria (Samaritan Girl).

All of which came from Netflix, which seems like a pretty good idea: you pay a monthly fee and get to rent as many movies as you can watch. You select them online, creating a queue (that's what they call it) of what you want to watch. They mail you 2 at a time, starting with the ones at the top of the list, you can keep them as long as you want, and when you return them they send you the next movies in your queue. Very dot-com, yes, but beats going to the video store unless your video store is Cult.