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.

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.

Good news for Dutch Starbucks fans: the company will open its first branch at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam this summer.

The "coffee giant" will just open a single branch for now, which is only accessible for airport passengers who have gone through customs. Starbucks has not mentioned any future expansions yet.

See the first job advertisement for barrista's for at the airport.

Thanks to various readers of this website have pointed out this news to me. A good step forward for Dutch coffee lovers!

Last night I made couscous, inspired by my father's couscous dish. He placed a recipe for couscous on his website a while ago.

Interestingly, one of the ingredients is "koeskoes kruiden", literally "couscous spices". If you'd do a google for "koeskoes kruiden", like I did, you'll see as a first result... indeed, my father's website.

Further research learned that the spices may have been turmeric, ground cumin and paprika powder.

The result, over whole grain couscous, was nice but a little bit bland so I'll have to keep working on getting that right.

Cutting the ingredients.

Just after putting the ingredients in the pan.

This weekend I baked bread again, and it worked out well.

I changed the recipe a bit: less sugar, slightly more salt and less butter. The recipe still calls for 2 tablespoons of margarine, which is a bit too much so next time I'll try to reduce that again.

Per your request, here is the recipe (it makes 2 loafs).

First, create a flour mixture. Combine the following ingredients.

• 2 cups of flour
• 2 table spoons of sugar
• 3 teaspoons of salt
• 2 envelopes Fleischmann RapidRise Yeast

Notice the use of RapidRise Yeast -- this type of yeast should not be dissolved in water, unlike traditional yeast. Then, warm the following:

• 1,5 cups of water
• 0,5 cup of milk
• 2 tablespoons of margarine

Stir the heated liquid into flour mixture. The liquid should be warm, but not hot -- certainly not boiling. Mix it through the flour mixture for 2 minutes. Continuously add 3 to 4 more cups of flour until you get nice soft dough. The dough should be slightly sticky, but not too sticky. Knead for about 10 minutes. Cover, let rest for 10 minutes.

Then, divide the dough in two and place in greased loaf pans. Cover the loaf pans with a cloth and let the loafs rise in warm place for 45 to 60 minutes. Brush the loafs with egg yoke for a nice crispy crust, and bake for 25 to 30 minutes at 400°F. Don't forget to cool the loafs on a wire rack so the bottom doesn't get to soggy (the first time I baked the bread I didn't have a rack -- chopsticks make a fine improvised rack).

This weekend I had time for a cooking experiment, and today I baked two loafs of white bread.


I've made bread before but that was always from a bread-mix package. This was the real deal -- flour, yeast, salt, a little bit of butter and honey (we were out of sugar).

I made a crust with egg yoke, and I made sure to let the bread dry on an (improvised) rack for a few minutes so the bottom crust stayed crispy.


We just had it for lunch and it was delicious. I'm rather proud.

I made two breads, a small one and a large one. Because we don't have the bread pans I used a round lasagna pan. It makes the bread look like a mushroom.

A slice of the bread. Airy, with a great crust.

While my parents are here my father is doing a lot of the cooking, and I really like it.

There are a lot of family recipes that he is making and that I hadn't had in a long time.

Favorites include omelet hete Sahara, couscous with sauce, and various nice salads. Tonight Jaap cooked beef with apricots in the oven. Delicious!

Yesterday I basically spent shopping. In the morning to two supermarkets, and in the afternoon I went to a mall to get a new pair of shorts and a dough roller. I spent some time in the bookstore at Pentagon City, drinking coffee and browsing some books.

When I was traveling back from Pentagon City by metro, I realized I didn't have my house key with me. I was pretty sure I had brought it, so I was afraid I had lost it. At the front-desk of our building they helped me out and somebody came with me to the apartment with a master key. It turned out that my keys where inside, on the bar.

In the evening I made a pizza. It was the first time I made pizza myself in the U.S., not counting the months of labor in my first summer job in Tannersville grinding garlic and making tomato sauce. I couldn't find the pre-dosed mix I usually made the bread with in Haarlem, so I did it the old fashioned way: flower, hot water and yeast. Of course, that process takes longer, so I ate very late.

The result was very good, with a very tasty and crispy crust.

Since a few days Starbucks has a new coffee on display: Aged Sumatra. Every now and then they have packages of special coffee beans for sale, and I was really curious about this one.

The beans of this coffee have been aged five years, which gives a taste. It is supposed to have been discovered when the Dutch V.O.C. ships transported coffee beans from Indonesia to Europe, which took many months.

I asked if there was a way to try the coffee, without having to buy a package, and when I came in in the afternoon when it wasn't very busy they custom made me a cup of coffee from these beans. They used a French press for it (which I believe is known in Holland as a Turkish' coffee machine).

I liked to coffee a lot, it has a very special taste: a more mellow and smoother flavor than regular Sumatra, and far less acidity. It was nice, but I don't think I'll get a package of this for at home. I prefer the regular blend in the mornings.

I really love to start the weekend this way. Sleeping in, having breakfast together, and slowly drinking coffee all morning.


We're still using the package with coffee that I brought from the airport more than two months ago. During the week there is fresh coffee from the apartment downstairs so we never make our own coffee. The coffee from the package ("breakfast blend") still tastes great.

I've been arranging some paperwork this morning. It feels like there are two sets of paperwork that need attention: the American one and the Dutch one. Jaap and Mieke help us a lot with the Dutch paperwork, which is wonderful.

Yesterday I went to my bank in the lunchbreak, to see what's going on with my debit/credit card. Currently I have a card that I can only use to get cash money from the ATM, but when I opened my account five weeks ago the lady said I would receive my real card within two weeks.

The bank representative found out yesterday that the lady forgot to request this card for me, so I'll get one within two weeks from now. I think it was one of the first times that this lady opened a new account for a customer. No big deal of course, but to have a real credit card would be very convenient. I still have a Dutch credit card also, but I prefer not to use it.

Making coffee on Saturday morning.