thanksgiving.

Whaaat a fukken life: a warm cozy apartment, 3 laptops, 2 phones, legal weed, prescription sleep aids, a giant industrial fan from the 50s, homemade vegan 'nduja, mozzarella, hot water, plumbing, homemade kimchi, a great mattress, streaming media, ok one actual mouse, but really, what are we complaining about. We being me. 

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'nduja.

75g home-dried tomatoes

or just sun-dried tomatoes, which NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR but bear with me: if they're not herbed or treated in anyway or packed in oil this can still be a good ingredient, you just want 100% unfuckedwith dried tomatoes

1/4 cup hot water

2 garlic cloves
1 tsp smoked paprika
2 tsp gochugaru
1 tsp crushed dried red pepper, the hot kind
1 tsp fennel seed or possibly 1.5 tsp
1 tsp coarse sea salt

Blend to a chunky spread. I threw a dried apricot in there the last time and it might have made a positive difference in terms of structure and sweetness. I also made a 'nduja butter out of it which is, as you can imagine, better. 

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the hideous vegetarian sausage roll project take 2.

This is the successful (-tasting, not -looking) version. It still needs a pinch of adventure somehow, but it tastes pretty great as is plus you'd never guess it was tofu.

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vegetarisch saucijzenbroodje.

400g tofu, frozen and defrosted

1 large onion, diced small
2 tbsp butter (i bet you could even make this brown butter for extra boom)

1 tsp, up to 2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg, to taste (important, this should be the top note of the end result, but juuuust barely identifiable)
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp onion powder
1 tsp paprika powder
1 tsp ginger powder
a pinch ground coriander
1/4 cup ketjap manis, or more, to taste
3 tbsp ketchup
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
salt to taste

1 egg, lightly beaten

8 sheets 5 x 5 puff pastry

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Crumble tofu with your hands until there are no pieces bigger than, say, a kernel of corn.

Spread tofu on a single baking paper-covered baking pan (speak English much?) and roast in 150°C oven for 15-20 minutes, or until lightly browned and dry and spongy.

While that's happening, sauté onion in butter until browned, 15-20 minutes.

Combine spices in a bowl and then add roasted tofu and sauteed onion. Mix and squish with hands until thoroughly combined. Then yeah assemble into sausage rolls (?) and bake for 15-25 minutes or however long it takes.

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the hideous vegetarian sausage roll project.

Take 1: pretty much total failure, except for the hideous part.

Things that worked: freezing tofu, pulsing the thawed version with seasonings, sauteeing/caramelizing in a pan, then roasting on baking paper to dry everything out.

Things that didn't work: the seasoning. Something went horribly wrong in the earliest stages, leaving a rather nasty aftertaste, and all signs point to either Worcestershire sauce or allspice/pimiento as the culprit. I've had this happen with allspice before, so that's my suspicion. Here's what I think did work:

400g tofu
3 tbsp ketchup
1/3 cup ketjap manis
2 tbsp mustard
1 tsp nutmeg
a lot of black pepper

and then some other spices that I haven't figured out yet.
sauteed in 2 tbsp butter

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also:

autentico mexicano.

Good news for the eight Nederland-based readers of this blog: there's finally a real soft corn tortilla maker in town. They're called Tortilla Factory, based in Halfweg, Mara met some of the folks behind it and yes they are very friendly and very Mexican. You can order their tortillas via their website, or possibly via some other electronic means but their website is down at the mo, I'll update with deets when it's up.

Also, good news for the two readers of this blog who live in this very house: I'm making stamppot for the first time tonight, using dear, trusted KK's eight-year-old eG guide as my own basic guide but taking a liberty or two. I'm doing a very non-traditional and kind of Southern onion and black pepper gravy, which is where more than half of the ingredients are coming from.

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stamppot (kale and potato mash with smoked sausage).

500g potatoes
500g kale, rinsed and chopped fine
water to cover
pinch salt
one knob butter
milk to moisten

300g rookworst or other smoked sausage

2 shallots, quartered
one small sweet onion, diced medium
125g lean bacon or lardons
2 tbsp water/stock/wine to deglaze
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp cream
enough milk to eventually make the right amount of gravy, I ended up using at least 1/2 cup
a pinch thyme
a dried sage leaf or two, crumbled
several grates of nutmeg
more freshly ground black pepper than seems prudent
salt to taste

So cook your bacon/lardons over low heat for 20 minutes or so, or until the fat is full rendered and meat is crispy. Remove from pan and set aside. Put the shallot and onions in the pan and deglaze with the wine, water or stock. Add butter and cook on low for 10 minutes or so. Add cream, milk, herbs and spices and simmer on low for 10-15 minutes or until sauce is appropriately thickened.

For the rest, cover the peeled potatoes with just enough boiling water to, well, cover. Add kale on top, and mostly cover. Simmer for 20 minutes or until taters are done. Now, you could apparently also put your sausage in this water and heat it up that way. When potatoes are done, remove sausage if you're doing it this way, then drain the rest and return kale and potatoes to pot. Mash together, add butter and enough milk to reach desired consistency. Salt to taste.

Serves 4 if you double the sausage.

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carrots like mom used to make.

3 cups sliced carrots (1/4-inch thick or so)
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp raw sugar
salt to taste

Steam carrots until almost the way you like them, for us this is about 10 minutes. Take carrots out of the pan. Melt butter in pan, add sugar, stir til sugar dissolves, adjust sugar and butter to taste, return carrots to pan, stir to coat, salt to taste. Served 2 as a side, but we ate a lot of carrots.

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rotterdam tripe vendors.

The street from Rotterdam Centraal to the studio is nothing but tokos, Chinese/Surinamese restaurants, jewelry stores, Turkish bakeries and snackbar/kebab shacks. It's a food street. On Saturday there were three Surinamese beef tripe vendors within three blocks of each other, all selling bloedworst (blood sausage), bere (stomach), and fladder (intestine)...I don't even think Amsterdam is allowed to have mobile street vendors. Had I not had a show to do that night, would I have eaten street tripe? Probably, yes. The last time I had it was great, under even less sanitary conditions most likely.

hemaworst.

HEMAworst, €2 @ Centraal Station. Snap for days. Smoky as all get-out, but I still reaaally wonder what these would be like on the grill.

I wouldn't eat the whole thing at once if you plan on doing anything other than sleeping or drinking afterwards...I didn't (I mean I didn't eat the whole thing, I didn't even eat the bun, nor did I sleep or drink afterwards).

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Holy shit am I busy for the next few weeks. You'll probably barely hear from me until I'm in Brussels (nine days from now) or unless I can't sleep, which, yes, is entirely possible.

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theeworst.

So, I go to the grocery store pretty much every day. It's kind of my one consumer-gratification outlet: we don't really buy any tangible goods these days other than food, books and DVDs. Well OK sometimes someone buys a pair of boots or an infinite reverb pedal or a replacement staff mixer, but generally speaking, grocery shopping is my one regular opportunity to "buy things".

This daily ritual means that I've probably been to our local Dirk van den Broek more than 1000 times. And somehow today was the first day I noticed something called "theeworst" (see above). Theeworst means "tea sausage", which was mysterious-sounding enough to where I had to buy some. Here's what it looks like with the lid off (brace yourselves):

Highly unappetizing. Something about its appearance is uncomfortably reminiscent of a modern sex toy called the Fleshlight (I'm not going to link to it here, but you should Google if you're not familiar with it). But yes, theeworst is essentially spreadable smoked sausage made from pork and bacon. According to Wikipedia, it originated in Poland. It tastes.........ok. Definitely of industrial origin. I bet a handmade version would be way more super.

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bye bye sugar! + luxelinks.

Hi there. Took a couple days off b/c, yeah, I'd been blogging a lot and a break seemed prudent. Also I got tired of thinking about my diet, if you can believe that. So I just ate fish and kohlrabi and nuts for a couple days. You didn't miss anything.

One of the worst things about the post-drinking, not-smoking time is the swwweeeeeeeetttt ttttooootttthhhh. It's bad. Chocolate becomes way more significant than normal.

I came up with an unorthodox solution though: I bought some chocolate that is so intensely bad that it literally makes you not crave chocolate anymore. The ingredients are: Ecuadorian cacao, banana fructose, cacao nibs, cocoa butter, and non-GMO lechitin. I love chocolate and banana together under most circumstances, so this looked very promising. Plus: it's totally fair trade! All locally produced in Ecuador by local people. On the back it emphatically proclaims: "Fair prices and empowerment for farmers!"

It tastes like.....space chocolate. Chocolate you might be forced to eat in space because normal foods don't work up there. Or like if someone made an especially delicious piece of blackboard chalk, delicious compared to regular blackboard chalk. Everything is wrong with this. Bad.

Except: it does cure your chocolate craving, nearly permanently. I bought a bar 3 days ago and there are still 4 squares of it left, and I no longer have any desire at all for chocolate. Mission accomplished, I guess.

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In other Unsatisfactory Purchases news, today after my desperately-needed haircut, I stopped by the Wednesday Haarlemmerplein market and bought these from a newish butcher there:

I know I said I was off the pork, but...circumstances conspired to put me in the wrong place at the wrong time. I bought two truffle sausages and two "lavender/ginger" sausages because, well doesn't that sound adventurous?

There's a reason that not everyone is making lavender/ginger sausages. Inappropriateness. Like biting a pork-flavored air freshener. The truffle ones were OK, truffley, but kind of unimpressively so. Neither deserved to tie the shoes of those pikante merguez I had last week from the Moroccan guy on our street. And these were 4 times as expensive. Bogus.

Pikante Merguez is a pretty good name for a racehorse, or for my North African noir alter ego.

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Speaking of circumstances and conspiracies, last night I found myself on the Zeedijk with time to kill and a rumbly tummy. I thought: hey, why don't you check out one of those places that you've wanted to try up here but that if you tried them on a date and they sucked you'd be really angry?

So I did, I went to China Si Chuan Kitchen on the Warmoestraat. And.....it was totally satisfying. I feel safe in saying it's the most Sichuanish place in Chinatown, if not the only one. Very few Cantonese dishes, almost everything Sichuan. I had, eh...the Sichuan duck in onion sauce: very thinly sliced duck with lots of julienned onions, ginger, peppers, and carrots. Really good and surprisingly light (possibly explained by the fact that I'm not much of a white rice eater).

Looks like it would be easy to order something that was swimming in chili oil, so if that's not your thing you may want to stick to the dry-fried dishes. Service was very sweet and efficient and it's a cute room. I'd go back in a second. Not cheap, but nothing on the Zeedijk really is except for Kam Yin. Go here instead though. My Chinese "friend" Xue says it's very authentic, and completely comparable to Sichuan restaurants in China. I say "friend" because she's one of those FB friends that you don't really know very well. I met her like 3 times 5 years ago. Like that. Anyway.

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OK, that's all for now. I'm probably not going to be cooking much of interest over the next couple days, need to reconnect with my studying. Took another 70-question practice test yesterday morning and got a 90% (yay!) but I was doing way too much guessing. I don't want to have to guess at all.

I had an entertaining/sobering discussion about the test with my hair guy Alex and we agreed: there are certain kinds of immigrants who will be totally fucked by this test. If you haven't been to a university and don't know how to study, or are someone who is kind of "kept at home"...yeah, no dice. But I guess maybe that's the point.

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turf and surf.

This is Mara in Bergen, summer 2007, with a bratworst, a freshly opened jar of The Best Mustard in the World, sautéed peppers, and a cold bottle of rosé. To the trained eye, it's obvious that Mara is approaching a state of maximum happiness in this photo. Experts in Marawatching call this stage "pre-Jimmy". I'll have to post a photo of full-blown "Jimmy stage" for comparison's sake.



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I was wandering around in the vast, dimly-lit halls of the Vegetarian Duck archives down on the 3rd floor, when I came across this abandoned recipe languishing in the stacks. I do have a piece of marlin in the freezer that I've been avoiding because I didn't feel like being disappointed, but maybe it's time to see if the below actually generates something edible.

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marlin in tarragon-madeira broth with fennel and pistachios.

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2 marlin filets.
juice of 1 orange.
1 tbsp dried tarragon.
1/2 stick + 1 tbsp butter.
1 cup lobster stock.
1 tiny bottle madeira wine maybe 2/3 cup or so.
1-2 tbsp tabasco sauce.
3 tbsp cream.
olive oil.
1/2 cup pistachios, smashed once.
1 fennel bulb, diced small.

Combine lobster stock, madiera, 1/2 stick butter, and orange juice in a saucepan and reduce for 20 minutes.

Coat marlin with olive oil and bake for 20 minutes in a 200C oven.

Meanwhile, saute fennel over med-low heat in 1 tbsp butter for 10 minutes, until lightly browned.

Affter 20 minutes, add tarragon, fennel, tabasco, cream, and pistachios to saucepan, and simmer while you broil the fish for 5 minutes to brown.

To serve: ladle some broth into a bowl, place marlin in broth, then with a slotted spoon grab fennel and pistachios and strew over top.

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brainstorming.

Unfortunately I find myself awake and sleepless after a very disturbing dream about an ex-girlfriend. And there wasn't even any sex.

I was sitting at a table in a modern Italian restaurant (a la...Babbo, let's say, but not Babbo) before it had opened for dinner, say 4pm, in a tuxedo, waiting for something, all the lights were off inside but there was still enough light outside so that you could see everything fine. A menu was on the table. A wedding party noisily exited of one of the back rooms, just having done some post-wedding thing, post-wedding because the bride was in white, and...lo, the bride was my ex.

We were surprised to run into each other there, but not like, "Wow, haven't seen you in forever," more like people who see each other regularly and are just surprised to run into each other somewhere unusual. I said something like hey, that's three years in a row we've seen each other here at this place. She sits down next to me but facing me, it was one of those banquette thingies, and starts talking about something. When she turned to her right, toward the rest of the restaurant, to look around, I could see that she was wearing a lot of makeup, as brides tend to do...but there was something really garishly wrong about the part around the temple side of her left eye.

Not wrong like, this is the part where she's actually dead or anything...it was just unfinished, strangely white and shiny. So while she was talking, I blended it in with my thumb and it looked better.

And, sadly....that's all i remember. The bad part was Lynchian in it's level of scary evilness but the specifics elude me. Well, a little girl's body was pulled limp from an ocean harbor by a crane, but then the sun shone on it and it was alive and waved to the crowd; also, I'd hidden a Christmas present for someone (R. Scott Hanson I believe) somewhere and couldn't find it. I knew it was in a high place, somewhere that I had to stand on tiptoe to reach. But while I was looking for it, I was also embarrassed about the gift because it seemed cheap and lame, it was some kind of old "classic" piece of literature in it's original paperback version, with notes scribbled on the cover. I think Scott's parents were getting dressed to go out during this.

None of this was scary, just menacing...the bad part was happening simultaneously, though, and it had something vaguely to do with my ex, and with me being part of a group of 6 very bad people who received instructions about what specific bad things to do via an intricate system of cubicles and P.O. boxes. There were toilets involved as well. Ominous, no?

And so you see, I am awake, with only a couple of hours of sleep under my belt. Leaving me to ponder things like "what will I do with the thawed salmon in the fridge?" I also have some merguez I bought yesterday, mm-hmm, yes...now watch as I attempt to deploy some maple syrup as the bridge ingredient here, and a dab of orange marmalade as well, for a kind of Seattle brunch vibe:

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marmalade-glazed salmon with merguez sausage and maple sweet potatoes?

1/4 cup orange marmalade
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
1 garlic clove, pressed
250gr salmon filet

4 merguez sausages

2 sweet potatoes
1 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp butter
grated nutmeg

toasted pine nuts, minced chives and minced cilantro for garnish


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We'll see...