There is something very relaxing about preparing a meal, and I enjoy cooking a lot. Especially in the weekend I like to cook somewhat more elaborate dishes. I've been experimenting with new recipes the last few weeks, and tonight I tried two Asian dishes.

I made Thai Noodles, a very tasty stir-fried noodles dish with a coating based on fish sauce and soy sauce, with jalapeños peppers and garlic. I've made it twice before but tonight it was a lot more spicy than the previous times. I think I didn't clean out the spicy parts from the jalapeño pepper completely, and I can still feel the burn on one of my fingers also.

Next to the noodles I prepared a new dish: stir-fried shiitake mushrooms with carrots. I had never cooked with fresh shiitake mushrooms before, and wow, they are so delicious! I stir fried them with sliced carrots, ginger and a sauce based on rice wine, soy sauce and sesame oil.

Stir-frying is one of my favorite cooking methods and it has a wonderful dynamic. First, I spent about an hour preparing. Slicing, chopping and measuring and mixing the sauces -- everything slow and methodical, cleaning up the kitchen as I go. Then the last part is completely different: as soon as I put the noodles in the boiling water there are 10 minutes when everything happens at once. It requires some planning and it's great when everything is ready exactly at the same time.

It was a delicious dinner but next time I won't combine two stir-fry dishes, no matter how much fun the cooking is. It's nicer to have more variety in cooking style on the plate, like boiled rice or plain noodles. I marinated chicken with a ginger and hoisin sauce for tomorrow.

Yesterday evening we went to Southpoint Mall to do shopping, which was very nice.

This morning the weather was absolutely gorgeous and Sasha and I ran our errands together. This afternoon I'm reading on the balcony, in the sun.

Yesterday I enjoyed a "Southern afternoon".

First off, the weather is amazing this weekend. Temperatures are in the mid-80's which is almost 30 degrees Celcius. In the Netherlands that's about as warm as it gets when it's a good summer day, and it's only March.

Since we moved to Durham I've been exploring the various local radio stations here. Lately I've been listening to two country music stations; 99.9 Genuine Country and 94.7 QDR. The latter has nice Americana music on Sunday evening, but most of the time these stations broadcast mainstream country music. It took me some time to get used to it but I enjoy listening to it.

I drove to Chapel Hill with the front seat windows of the car open, listening to songs such as "Sweet Country Music", "Tennessee River" and "Anyway" by Martina McBride.

I was on my way to a store in Chapel Hill that, appropriately, is called A Southern Season. I took an exit too early in Chapel Hill and on a parking lot I asked a friendly elderly lady for directions. She was very nice and told me that the store has a great reputation. She then asked me where I was from and said "Welcome to America!".

In the store I spent some time in the aisle with Indonesian condiments and an middle aged Southern lady asked me if I was "finding anything good". She said: "I like to hear you talking".

Dutch cuisine is strongly influenced by the Indonesian kitchen and around here it's hard to find some of the ingredients that I used on a daily basis in Holland.

I didn't quite realize it in the beginning, but condiments like sambal manis or ketjap manis, or things like nasi aren't for sale in regular supermarkets. Thai cuisine is more popular here, so there are similar curry pastes to sambal available but there is much less variety. I really like sambal manis, a sweet mild sambal.

A couple of months ago I ordered some Dutch ingredients by mail order, including mixes for babi pangang and foo yong hai and seroendeng, roasted coconut with spices. I almost finished the sambals so I was very happy when Petra told me about a store in Chapel Hill where they carry Indonesian condiments: A Southern Season. A wonderful store!

When I walked through the isles my eyes fell on this bottle with Dutch curry. It's a ketchup with spices that is often used with fried snacks. I'm not particularly fond of it, but this is the first time that I see this sauce outside the Netherlands. It gives an indication of the rich selection A Southern Season has to offer.

Ketjap manis, sambal trassi, sambal manis, mixes for sambal stir fry and Indonesian satay, sambal oelek, sambal badjak, and in the right bottem corner mixes for various Indonesian sauces. When we lived in Amsterdam Bijlmer I get these same brands from local shops.

Mie are Chinese wheat noodles that are popular in the Dutch kitchen. Bami goreng is an Indonesian dish based on fried noodles.

After seeing this rich choice I wasn't really surprised to find hagelslag...

...and that the "wall of chocolate" included Dutch Droste wasn't all that surprising either...

...but they even have Friese Keukenstroop! I can't remember ever seeing that in the US before.

I bought a couple of things. Sambal manis of course, and a package for Indonesian peanut sauce (which is different than the Thai peanut sauce that is popular here). I also bought some other Asian condiments like rice vinegar and sesame oil.

One of the things about the new site that I received feedback on were the comment subjects.

In the new system it wasn't always clear what article a comments was for, especially in the Recent Comments block on the right hand side. I didn't like that either.

The beauty of Drupal is that you can download and install optional modules that change the default behavior of the site. Today I installed the comment_subject module that makes the comment subjects a lot more logical. Users still have the option to change the subject of a comment but the defaults make more sense now.

This week I made Italian meat balls. This was great fun to do and very rewarding. As far as I can remember this was the first time ever that I made these.

I used turkey meat because it's lean and delicious. I prepared the meat balls on Sunday evening with garlic, finely cut onions, Worcester sauce, an egg, breadcrumbs, salt, pepper & chopped up parsley. I used a recipe from a recipe book. The meat balls stayed in the fridge for 24 hours and I baked them in olive oil for a couple of minutes Monday evening.

I had also made a fresh marinara sauce with garlic, a little bit of onion, basil, thyme and peeled tomatoes and I cooked the meat balls in the sauce for 15 minutes.

My usual cooking style is 'experimental': try it out and see what tastes nice. However, using these recipes is great fun too. It really helps to have a guideline in what makes a great dish, and Monday's dinner turned out great.

Today we had the second portion of the meat balls. As an experiment I cooked tonight's tomato sauce with a different canned tomato: Cento tomatoes imported from Italy ($1,99 per can). The sauce was nice again, but not significantly better than the sauce made from Whole Food's tomatoes on Monday.

There is actually an even more expensive tomato type, San Marzano, which is supposed to be even more delicious and sells for $3,49 per can. That may be nice to try a next time too. One thing I learned is that there shouldn't be too much marinara sauce over the pasta; next time I'll use only half a can for sauce for the 2 of us. Of course there is no need to always use the very best tomatoes, but I'm curious to see if what the taste difference between regular and expensive canned tomatoes. The next step of course is to use fresh tomatoes to make a marinara sauce.

Cento Italian peeled tomatoes.

Last weekend when we were in New Jersey we could still see melting snow on the streets.

In Durham spring is clearly starting. As I am writing this there is a bird singing outside, which is somewhat annoying but a hopeful sign of spring.

Last night we had dinner with Belén, Estéban and Hernan and we had a really nice evening.

This morning I went to pick up our car and after a cup of coffee I'm on my way to Southpoint to get a haircut. A good hairdresser is another of those important amenities to have around, but I haven't really found a good one yet. Regis is not bad but it's in the mall and quite far.

Spring at the Belmont.

Blooming trees.

Today I ran some errants: I went to the post office, super market, shoe maker, library, dry cleaners and Target all in one afternoon. Since nothing is close to each other that means a lot of driving.

Shortly after we moved to Durham I found a good shoe maker nearby, one of the important amenities to have around. It's a family owned business and they do shoe repair and clothes alterations. I've been at Butlers a few times and their work is of high quality.

The only downside is that it's hard to get to their store as the entrance for cars is very steep. If you're not careful the car won't get enough clearance and you'll hear a loud scraping sound under the car -- not nice.

Tonight I upgraded the server to OpenBSD 4.0. This is the first time I upgraded the operating system remotely.

It was a bit scary because I couldn't walk to the console if something would go wrong, but the upgrade went fine. The package management system of OpenBSD made the upgrade of applications like MySQL, PHP and Apache a breeze. I upgraded to OpenBSD 3.9 in October of last year when I was in the Netherlands.

The server has been very unstable this week. I'm pretty sure this is fall-out of the full hard disk and things should be better now after I did a fsck. Sorry for the inconvenience, dear reader.

Elke mentioned that sometimes a message "Unable to connect to database server" appears for a while. This should be taken care of now -- the database server will start up automatically after a machine reboot.

One of my all-time favorite books has been voted the "best Dutch book of all times". It's The Discovery Of Heaven by Harry Mulisch, a novel about the mystical journey of a man to return the Ten Commandments to Heaven.

The vote is based on an internet poll, and I am always skeptical of those because it's so easy to manipulate. However, this first place for what is De Ontdekking Van De Hemel in Dutch is completely deserved. The second place was for Het Huis Van De Moskee by Kader Abdolah, a book completely unknown to me. I looked it up and it was published in 2005.

Strange that this new book ended up above such classics as Max Havelaar or De Avonden, which I suppose proves my point above the unreliability of internet polls (or the odd literary taste of the people that voted). Simon Vestdijk's books didn't even make it into the top 10, neither did Erik, of het klein insectenboek by Godfried Bomans.

The Discovery Of Heaven was published in 1992, the 2nd year I was in high school. Although at that time reading Dutch literature wasn't high on my list with favorite things, I enjoyed reading Mulisch a lot (and so did many of my classmates). In 2001 a movie made of the book came out, which was okay but not as brilliant as the book.