How to be mega lazy and still eat well…

The sun is shining, the days are warm and and balmy and you finally dare to get your lily white legs into some shorts (at least within the privacy of your own home). After the long, dark and cold months of Winter, Summer has officially arrived !

It’s also the time when even a food obsessed cook like me, finds that the heat has sapped my energy and I feel more like flopping down in a shady spot in the late afternoon after commuting home from work than spending time in front of a sweltering stove. Quick, easy, tasty summer recipes are the order of the day.

I have have gathered a huge variety of recipes … yes, many have been tweaked to make them more kid friendly (moderation of onions, hot peppers etc) but all of them depend on a few cooked ingredients and the addition of fresh vegetables or salad to make an easy summer meal. Often I bulk cook the meat for these dishes advance and freeze in meal sized portions, and in the morning put a container of cooked meat in the fridge to thaw and just heat it though later that evening.

Famous Burritos Recipezaar Recipe No. 165431 by Creation in Hope (photo © Kiwidutch)

Taco seasoned meat for instance, goes wonderfully in burritos or tortillas and has the added bonus of being an economical meal that stretches well for both unexpected (or expected) hordes and being a crowd pleaser no matter how picky your guests: be it with plain boiled rice, sweetcorn, cucumber, grated carrot, avocado, lettuce, tomato, or grated cheese, everyone can sort though the simple range of topping ingredients and find something that takes their fancy.

It’s also a ” serve yourself ” sort of meal and hands on (which is great for getting children interested in new veggies). This means more time with your guests, and a very relaxed meal. Over the years I have made this often for a crowd, and all you really need are some paper towels or a damp cloth to wipe sticky fingers after they have been clicked clean.

Summer meals are all about being as lazy as possible… I have discovered that if you are just a little bit efficient, and you spend a little time preparing in bulk taco sauces, pasta sauces etc in advance and stashing them into your freezer, then you can still eat healthily and well and be very lazy indeed.

Me? I am mega efficient in this respect… ergo I must therefore be the laziest Summer cook on the planet.

You know, somehow I don’t actually have a problem with that ….

A cheerful Dutch rite of passage…

 

Photo © Kiwidutch

It’s the end of June and the end of year exam results have been published for students in their final year of high school. It’s a Dutch tradition that students who have ” Geslaagd” i.e. passed their final exams celebrate by hoisting the Dutch flag onto their flagpoles on their houses and attach their school bags (signifying that that since they passed their exams the bags are not longer needed)

I took a walk around the neighbourhood to collect a few photos of this cheerful traditional Dutch rite of passage.

Photo © Kiwidutch

No place for a flagpole but the celebration is clear... (Photo © Kiwidutch)

Photo © Kiwidutch

Photo © Kiwidutch

Photo © Kiwidutch

Photo © Kiwidutch

Photo © Kiwidutch

Photo © Kiwidutch

Photo © Kiwidutch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These neighbours probably celebrated their success together (Photo © Kiwidutch)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grandma, and her legacy that changed my life…

Potatoes with Roast Recipezaar Recipe No.152029 by Chris Reynolds. Photo © Kiwidutch

My Kiwi Grandma may have been an average cook, but she was a baker par excellence…

As a child I was fascinated with her kitchen: she had a row of old fashioned drawers, built into the cabinet at the end of her kitchen. The handles were unusual, they were recessed into the drawers, with a little metal loop that also recessed into the handle itself. Everything stayed flush with the cabinets when they were closed. I adored those handles.

The draws that were extra special were at the bottom of the cabinet ensemble, they were longer than they were wide and when you pulled each of the handles at the top, the drawers would tilt forwards towards you, the top of the drawer would be nearest to you and the bottom staying flush with the rest of the cabinets, so when pulled out it made a triangle shape.

These bins were lined and filled to the brim with flour, various types of sugars and ingredients that she used often in her baking. No plastic containers in sight. Her baking bowls were a thick plain crockery and Gran could beat up cream that came in the short, solid glass bottles in no time flat with her solid hand egg beater. It had a smooth easy action that even kids could manage and an even smoother wooden handle from constant use. Modern experts in kitchen gadgetry should take note: this was my favourite utensil in all Grandma’s kitchen. It may have been called an egg beater but I think it actually spent most of it’s working life creaming butter and sugar and whipping umpteen half pints of cream.

Cake, biscuits (cookies), slices (bars) in this home were made and stored in large metal tins with airtight lids that had faded pictures from various advertisements or floral arrangements. Wonders emerged from those tins.. delectable delights of cookies topped with homemade marshmallow, chocolate chip cookies, muffins lighter and tastier than any available in shops nowadays were among the vast rotation of delights that she made regularly . Scones emerged fresh out of the oven were light as air and were to die for. … served warm, dripping with lashings of strawberry, raspberry or apricot jam that came from the laden garden that started a few steps beyond the back door and cream freshly whipped with my favourite egg beater.

The fruits and veggie garden were pretty much Granddad’s domain, the flowers ( mostly roses) in the front garden were Grandma’s pride and joy.

Granddad was of the generation who enjoyed a solid but monotonous menu of meat and three veg, the latter severely overcooked by todays standards, and items like rice contributed to maybe 10 % of the years diet and pasta pretty much never. Potatoes, boiled or mashed were the mainstay of the week and he took a packed lunch every day of his working life : sandwiches with home made corned beef, cheese and homemade pickles, bacon and egg pies, mince pies ( ground beef ) or chicken pies: home made and hearty fare.

I spent many happy hours in my Grandma’s kitchen and having one of the few working mothers of my generation, I learned many a thing there that I never had the opportunity to learn at home. Most of all, I learned a love of home cooking and a delight in producing food with your own hands that people adore. I learned that “simple” ingredients can produce magic when treated well and that the difference between fresh picked garden produce and what’s on offer days old at the supermarket is massive.

These days I live on the other side of the world in a large apartment with no garden… I dream that one day I will have a garden like Grandpa’s… one day, it’s a dream at least. On the other hand I try daily to have a kitchen like Grandma’s … o.k., yes with some rather major differences: I adore cooking with an international selection of ingredients, if it’s not offal, then we have probably tried it (or will one day). We try and eat healthily and encourage our children to too… so the baking is far less than in Grandma’s day. I also work full time so the practicalities of time are also a factor… but most of all, Grandma’s spirit is alive and well in my kitchen, I learned from her one of the many legacies that I hope most to instill into my children: a love for homemade food.

Grandma’s best advice: ( the bakers amongst you will especially understand) ” the most important things you will ever need in your kitchen are: clean hands and strong arms.“

.. and if only I had been wise enough then to have added: …. ” and a brilliant egg beater” .

Marshmallow Shortcake Slice Recipezaar Recipe No. 128032 by Jen T. Photo © Kiwidutch.

How was I supposed to know?….

Yesterday the car went into the Garage … it had been making funny noises for a week and we were having trouble changing gears as smoothly as usual.

Hubby and I consider ourselves to be careful drivers, I mean we  use indicators, let people into the main traffic queue before us  and actually stop for pedestrians on crossings…  although I will admit to being tempted at taking out  a Dutch cyclist every now and again. ( you need to know that many of them habitually run red lights and necessitate you slamming on your brakes to avoid getting them under your wheels)

This is turn necessitates trying not to let the abusive language slip out of your mouth and into the ears of the innocents in the rear in their child seats… or trying to quickly trying to convert the  larger profanity that you were thinking, into some far less explosive expletive  that is too far gone in the rapid thought process and about to exit your mouth involuntarily.

The next step after that is that said innocents then spend the rest of the car trip telling me off for saying the “S”  word, and telling me gleefully in their best school master voices that “we are going to tell Papa on yooooou“

Photo © Kiwidutch

Just to be clear on one point though: I never ever hope to kill a Dutch cyclist,  that would awful.  I do however have moments where I wish them bad Karma and this mainly takes the form of ” I hope you have a flat tyre next time it rains  Buddy !”

Meanwhile back to the car…  they broke the bad news into stone cold facts: the gearbox is in a bad way,  it’s going to cost and “why didn’t you bring it in earlier? it’s actually mechanically unsafe to drive in this state”

err… what?  it was working ok, (apart from some sloppy gear changes ) and as soon as we heard noises out of the ordinary we booked it in for an urgent look… personally  I am thankful that nothing terrible happened while we have been driving our unsafe car unawares, but I do think  that I can’t be held accountable for not actually knowing what happens under the bonnet…  am I supposed to?

What do I look like? … a mechanic?

What IS it that is so compelling about the Portuguese Kitchen?

Duro Valley, Photo © Kiwidutch

How have I developed a passion for all things Portuguese? basically it was a twist of fate that arrived via marriage: I fell in love with Hubby, who arranged that we honeymoon in one of his most favourite countries, and under these romantic circumstances I found myself in turn smitten by the culture, people, music, Azulejos (tiles), Port, history, weather, scenary and last but very much not least.. the cusine.
Since then, Dear Husband has been inspired to learn the Portuguese language and many return trips later, our love affair with Portugal only grows.

Whilst I have no problem to translate basic Portuguese recipe ingredients, Hubby is the one who usually helps me when I’m looking from some serious translation help. Might this maybe have something to do with the fact that he knows that helping out means a new Portuguese meal is coming to our dinner table soonest?

My aim is to slowly work my way though all of my growing stash of Portuguese cookbooks, trying everything (except offal which we both detest) along the way. Hubby is eager to bag all the slippery seafood items, and the mushrooms that I am allergic to, and Me? I’m casting adoring eyes on the fish…

Sadly I think I need to have more than one lifetime to achieve this, but heck let’s give it a go anyway!

Our love of travel, encompasses not only Portugal, includes visits to Sao Tome and Principe and the Cape Verde islands: these ex-Portuguese island colonies having amazing character and history all of their own.

Port is also a hobby of ours and we are dedicated to finding and trying the best Ports that we can afford as often as possible during our lifetime, (sigh) what a chore, but someone has to do it…

With the aid of my Portuguese cookbooks (in both English and Portuguese) I love to learn more about how the landscape, history and the Portuguese have inspired and influenced the cuisine, the wildly variant ways that basic ingredients can be used in one region to another and how to get amazing results out of a sometimes eclectic combination of ingredients.

Like most people with an obsession, err… passion, I expand my cookbook collection at every given opportunity and regularly look for lesser known and hard to find volumes where older, historical recipes and the background to them can enlighten me as to how Portuguese food has evolved or indeed why it has stayed the same in a given local area or in a wider region. We travel as frequently as possible to Portugal and have Portuguese friends both in Portugal and here in The Netherlands.

Our obsession is sadly so far gone that our two small children, bilingual in Dutch & English think that it is completely normal to be able to loudly sing some of their favourite Portuguese nursery rhymes (in Portuguese) from the ” o dvd das musicas da Carochinha ” series that we were given by a Portuguese friend LOL.

Portuguese cuisine, is now something of a life long passion and I need no excuse to frequent the two Portuguese speciality shops in the city (naturally…. one cannot be truly objective until you have slowly but surely, over the years, tried every item in the shop… as to leave any product untried would be a grave error of judgement) and <sigh> these product trials of course necessitate that I cook Portuguese food as often as possible,… and spend even more time writing and photographing food (and anything else Portuguese that I can get my hands on).

So this new blog will certainly indeed be fuel to my addiction, but when is that not a good thing?
….and hopefully I can inspire readers to share the joy of a cuisine that shines just as brilliantly as some of its Mediterranean neighbours without getting into the spotlight nearly as much as it deserves.

I hope that I may inspire many seasoned or budding cooks to discover of the hidden treasures of Portuguese cuisine… is this an impossible task? maybe, maybe not.. but let’s have a go…

Duro Valley, Photo © Kiwidutch

Being the offspring of two cultures is quite literally: a mixed blessing.

Being the offspring of two cultures is quite literally a mixed blessing. There is always the realization that you never fit 100% into either culture, and that your world view is permanently imbibed by subtle differences of the distinct influences that you experienced during your upbringing, the vast differences of languages and a myriad of other tiny bits and bobs that came into your life if you grew up differently to your friends who had both parents and relations and the same ethnicity, language, religion and culture.

My Father speaks English.. well he thinks he does and yes, for most people he does.. and they understand him, more or less. Let’s be honest, some understand him more and some understand him a lot less. There’s a simple reason for it too, and that’s the bilingual wonder that even after 50 years in his adopted country he still sports a Dutch accent thick enough cut into wedges and the distinctly different sentence structure produced by a European childhood, that reveals itself in little oddities that would make people smile, frown, look surprised or just plain confused.

Even though I grew up with it, it still takes me by surprise now and again. Like when I was a child and he announced that he was going to fetch “ ags” .. yep, it was Winter so maybe he was going to chop wood… or since it was a cold morning maybe a hot fried breakfast on the cards ? eggs/axe are still two words that he uses that require a strong idea of the context so that you can have any hope of guessing what he meant. And yes, he was offended if we ever got it wrong.

I find that it’s often assumed that a mix like mine: New Zealand /Dutch will be rather easy: ok, aside from the obvious language difference, it should be pretty much the same living style with just the addition of a funnily written address : after all, going from living in a western society on one side of the world, to living in another western society on the opposite side of the world should be comparatively simple…. right? …

oh soooo ….wrong!

A Blog is born (yeah, yet another one)

Baked Zucchini Recipezaar Recipe No. 27480 by Sueie, Photo © Kiwidutch

So Who is Kiwidutch? a food obsessed, cooking crazy, attention-to-detail craftwork , travel freak who happens to love photography of all of the above. A multi cultural, multi lingual product of what’s fast becoming a typical 21st century family, i.e. spread out between the Northern and Southern hemispheres due to marriage, job, kids and wider family tree ties.

I’m interested in supporting local products, business and people, but also love to encourage a wider International way of thinking, learning and communicating so the ” Local Heart, Global Soul” title of this blog completely sums up my thinking on Life, living abroad, my love of travel and how I want to be as a human being.

I follow nzedge.com to keep up to date with what the small population of Kiwi’s ( New Zealanders) are doing as they venture around the world and ” Local Heart, Global Soul” was a phrase from nzedge that I connected with so instantly that I asked permission to thieve err ….borrow it for my blog name. Permission was duly given and credit where it is due: kudos Brian from nzedge for conveying such an insightful thought in such a succinct way.

I have taken all of the photos in this blog myself… and they are not for free use or to be downloaded or copied: if you are interested in any of them please contact me via the comments box.

This is a blog about my passions… cooking, craft, art, photography with snippets of how my family and I live and interact in the culture and country we live in or the one that we are currently visiting.

I hope that if you too have a Local Heart and a Global Soul, that you will join me in my sojourn…

Relaxed dining out with small children is feat for the brave…

jelly(jello)wedges. Recipezaar Recipe No.210992 by Pikake21, Photo © Kiwidutch

Most parents know that relaxed dining out with small children is feat for the brave.

Inexperienced and innocent parents start out full of hope but quickly discover that the end results range between nightmare and a disaster as your toddler/pre-schooler/seven year old disintegrates into “enfant terrible” with the attention span of a gnat.

All day, and before you entered your chosen establishment they have been on their very best behavior so you rashly thought “ what the heck, at last, a good day to treat ourselves to a meal that we didn’t cook ourselves and excellent, no washing up”.

Ah ha the best laid plans of mice and men…. as surely as if my surname had been Murphy, the Best Behaviour bomb detonates about 5 minutes after you have ordered, which is precisely the time it took for our offspring to have outgrown the novelty of the new surroundings, explored every corner and worn out their endearing smiles with the staff.

At best you can hope for a bad case of fidgets, at worst they will start sliding out of their chairs, exiting under the table and start pestering other diners or crawling on the floor under the waitresses feet as you spend the rest of what was supposed to be an enjoyable meal trying to catch the small wiggly one, trying and failing to disguise a slow run as a “a fast paced nonchalant walk” as you retrieve them back to your table (again), telling them in your quietest but most forceful voice that ice cream won’t be happening ever again in their lifetime if they don’t get their little butts back onto seats pronto, pin on their listening ears and at least make miniscule attempts at stuffing the food that you are paying for into their mouths.

Eating out with kids often means that you might need to reckon on spending most your restaurant time in lavatories with kids that suddenly need to pee pee 3 time in a row, telling siblings to stop fighting, stop kicking each other under the table, telling them to stop saying “yuck” to every second item of food that they see (be it theirs or that of other diners), or for the umpteenth time that their fizzy drink requests got a “ no” the first time around (as it always does in our family) and will still get a “ no” the 84^th time they ask too, so why bother to keep asking?, and trying to explain to a pre schooler that standing at the head of other diners tables and staring at them intently whilst they eat is rude and definitely not an activity of which we approve or encourage.

At the very least be prepared to try and eat your now mostly cold meal whilst containing the now caught but wiggling child on your lap.

At home our offspring don’t dare do half the things that they suddenly dare to in a restaurant and I go from being a firm mother at home to looking like a half witted ninny seemingly powerlessly out of control as my little dearest turns on his best tantrum for the whole world to watch. Of course the “ audience factor” has a lot to do with that, since the Time Out seat in our bathroom is a very lonely place to warm a little butt at home but the carrots and cucumber that he eats willingly at our dinner table must suddenly look to this bevy of startled strangers like snippets of poisoned fare placed daintily on a fork and that he is rightly fighting for his life.

Chocolate Marshmallow Cream Recipezaar Recipe No.220484 by twissis, Photo © Kiwidutch

Even the sweetest of babies have their moments… it’s one of the true the mysteries of life that our almost never sick daughter treated us in turn to her best bout of continuously overflowing diarrhea, serial vomiting, and sudden high temperature in three different restaurants during 3 different holidays in various parts of the globe…. and that when you desperately need 4 nappies in seriously quick succession you have only packed two, and the one and only time you didn’t pack spare clothes for a head to foot change is the one time that you needed them urgently or that if you do miraculously do have everything for them but that they have heaved out so much onto you and that having done that have now returned to a state of happiness or sleep, but that now you are left in no fit state of sight or smell to sit and even look at food let alone remotely enjoy it.

Lessons learned, for the next four years we pretty much traded restaurant meals for ordered in take-aways, until they were a little older and us a little wiser, but one day we summoned up the courage to try again.

Now it’s time to go out on a quest in search of the only thing on a menu that could be the recipe for eating out success: a Child Friendly Restaurant.