After watching a couple eye opening documentaries about processed foods and permaculture there is no turning a blind eye on processed food anymore.

It also helps that my husband is much more conscious about nutrition so I don’t have to explain anymore why, for instance, the eggs I buy are more expensive and why I only buy biological meat. Initially his interest was only our own health but after learning more about the bio industry I believe animal welfare is also on his mind.

Keeping in mind, health, nutrition, environment and animal welfare makes shopping and cooking a more challenging experience. Since all processes and food chains are so globally linked you are not always aware of the impact something seemingly innocent on this side of the globe has somewhere else. This awareness initially froze me to the point that I didn’t know anymore what to cook or buy, why and where. It almost made me give up but I’m happy to say that I found my head again and it’s full of energy, will power and ideas about cooking.

I’m aware that food is going to be a bigger expense for us this year but getting cancer, damaging the environment and sponsoring the bio industry has a much higher cost. So how about that for a new year’s resolution, we’re joining the health, food and love revolution full heartedly. 

The inspiration:

http://www.foodmatters.tv/ ( a bit sensational but has some good points) 

The movie HOME on youtube (beautiful filming) 

The books: Fit door gezonde voeding, auteur: Klaus Oberbeil

                 Het Omega 3 kookboek, auteur: Michael van Straten

The website: http://www.permacultuurnederland.org/ (plenty of English versions as well) 

The book: Woman’s Wisdom, Woman’s body by  Christiane Northrup

These are some of the books and films I watched but it’s only the ones I remember of the top of my head. It’s a good start and it automatically leads you to more and more and more…

Photo Credit: Lotte Hoeksema

A month ago and friend came by with her new camera to do a food photo shoot at my place. It was a great day, I was busy cooking while she pictured everything in my hands on the table and out of the oven. As a result I have an entire folder full of mouthwatering pictures out of which I can’t choose.

Ingredients:

Bottom:

100 gram rolled oats

125 gram flour

1 tsp anise seeds

30 gram sugar

200 gram butter

Filling:

350 gram yogurt (10%)

4 eggs

3 tbsp cranberry compote

1 tsp dried lavender

3 tablsp honey

cacaopowder

PhotoCredit:

Lotte Hoeksema

You can choose to make the bottom with crumbled cookies (like kandijkoeken) as well, than you can omit the sugar.

Melt the butter

Mix the flour, oats, sugar and anise seeds

Combine the two and decorate a round cake tin with it.

Press the mixture to the bottom until it’s more or less a flat bottom without and holes in it.

Prebake the bottom on 180C and let it cool down.

Mix together the yogurt, 4 eggs, honey and lavender until everything is combined. Swirl the cranberry through the mixture with a spoon.

Poor the filling on the prebaked bottom and bake it in the oven until it’s set.

To serve you can dust the top with cacao powder but I think it would be even nicer with a layer of melted chocolate on top. Put it in the fridge before serving.

Whoever tries to taste before it cooled down will get punished immediately, it’s far from tasty when eaten warm.

Dusting the cake while holding it out of the window is a great idea on a less windy day…

And again, the credit for the pictures is for Lotte Hoeksema

Lychee Cocktail

For 6 small cocktails

-          Canned Lychees on light syrup (ca 500gr total weight)

-          250 gram frozen red fruit

-          1 tblsp chopped mint

-          150 ml vodka

-          Optional: crushed ice

Keep 6 lychees aside and poor the rest into the blender. Mix the fruits and syrup on the maximum speed until mushy.

Add the frozen fruits, mint and vodka, mix again shortly.

Put the lychees on a cocktail picker and place them in the glasses.

If you want to add crushes ice, do this just before serving. Poor the drink into the glasses and serve.

Cheers!  To Spring!

What saved me a million times when there were no more leftover is tahina. Because I make hummus every Friday there is always tahina in the house. Nothing is nicer during lunch time than getting your hands dirty while scraping out a good bowl of tahina with some veggie or a piece of bread.

It’s dead easy and great. In this house we like our tahina nice and sour with a lot of lemon juice but it’s up to you.

Tahina

2 tablespoons raw tahina

5 tablespoons lemon juice

1 minced garlic clove

Pinch of salt

Pinch of cumin

1 tablespoon of yogurt

Water

Optional: chopped parsley and sumac for decoration

Mix everything together and add enough water to make the tahina liquid. It should be thinner than hummus but thick enough to stick to your bread when you dope it. I love to eat it with cucumber and tomato in the summer. Friends keep voting for raw onion but I’m not a fan of that. Bread is of course always a great thing.

Even though nature comes to life again when the temperature is well above zero degrees, the vegetables are not yet to be persuaded, there is still a big chance of frost. We have to live of cabbage, potato’s onions etc for some time still or, if we can’t resist, eat a water inflated tomato bomb.

I’m not a big cabbage fan but it is what the land offers us in this time of the year. Hence my mission became: how to make something tasty out of a cabbage.

Cabbage salad

Cut some red cabbage into very thin stripes. Do the same for an equal amount of lettuce. With a fork mince some fettah and add some sesame seeds, olive oil, lemon zest, black pepper and za’tar. Mix everything together well and add some juicy green olives.

Another option

Cut the red cabbage in very thin stripes. Do the same for the lettuce. Cut cucumber in long, small stalks.  In a bowl mix together a tablespoon of tahina, 4 tablespoons of lemon juice, salt, a minced garlic clove,  a tablespoon of sesame seeds and a tablespoon of yogurt. Add enough water to make a dressing. Mix well, it will get lumpy first but this will straighten out if you keep on stirring. Mix everything together.

I’m in dubio about making a new vegetable garden coming spring. Last June I moved to Amsterdam where I have a wonderful garden with a little garden shed. It was a little late to plant many vegetables then, especially because the big cherry tree covers a big part of the garden in shade.

I thought by myself that next year I would start early with planting. I would even make a plan in January about what to plant and where. I would order the right seeds and nurture them in the house, then I would tilt the soil in the garden and make a nice and soft bed for my baby plants and eat the entire summer out of my own garden. This idea sounds wonderful, it’s music to my ears but this week my ears caught another sound that shattered my plan.

A dear friend of mine is looking for an apartment in the city. She happened to view an old building where the real estate agent handed her a report concerning the state of the ground the apartment is resting on. She was shocked by the fact that there was so much poison under her feet and contacted the city hall about the case. They comforted her in the strange way of stating that this result is nothing exceptional, apparently all the ground in the city is polluted like this or worse.

The consequences of this shocking, but not very surprising, news are: that my vegetables will not be as healthy as you would expect from a home grown crop. The lettuce might not appear blue but in fact it might as well be. The question that immediately popped into my mind is, how much more unhealthy these city grown veggies actually are compared to crops farmed in the countryside. The country side can’t be that clean either, as pollution will be carried there in the form of rain and farmers use pesticide and fertilizer that sink into the soil.

Growing your own crops in a little city garden is a very romantic idea, but is it actually a healthier alternative?

After three and a half weeks of rice and noodles I’m happy to be back in my own kitchen. I discovered the Thai kitchen, sometimes even in the mornings, and I started to appreciate spicy food. In times the tears were running down my face and I felt the flames shooting through my throat but it was all for the good, I’m spicy proof now; a chili doesn’t scare me anymore.

Most of the ingredients were new to me and I couldn’t get myself to taste everything but I felt quite a hero already when ordering frog clay pot, and preserved eggs (eggs marinated in bull urine). After this adventures lunch I thought a safe carrot cake was well deserved. You can imagine the horror when I found some worms/caterpillars in this steamed and carrot flavored mushy cake.

At first we tried to avoid eating from the thousands of road eateries that have their restaurant on the back of their motorcycle, no refrigerator or running water. But after a while we became careless, like with the anti mosquito spray, and luckily our sensitive European/Israeli stomachs didn’t complain.

We also found out that the cheaper the food, the better it is. When a place starts to be pretentious or cater to westerners it hurts the taste. Three times we craved European food so much that we sat in an overpriced Italian restaurant and twice it was a disaster. Let Thai cooks cook Thai food, that was what we found out.

We had a fabulous cook on the live aboard diving boat in the Similan Islands. She cooked some amazing dishes but when she tried to make us something European on New Year’s Eve, with the best intentions, we were somewhat disappointed and missed her Thai cooking art right away.

A Thai market is something different. Fresh fish is very important on the coast but also sweet water fish is on the menu. The fish are crammed in small buckets with just enough water to keep them wet. Crabs are tied alive, sitting neatly in a row waiting for a buyer.

Even though pork is on every menu, some of the small road restaurants didn’t have anything besides pork, even the candy is layered with fluffy pork on top, still we didn’t see any life pig. Plenty of chicken running around, cow’s next to the road but not one pig? They do appear in pieces on the market so it’s probably just not a popular pet.

The Thai kitchen doesn’t have any use for an oven; food is prepared in a wok, steamed or fried. Fish generally comes fried or prepared on the bbq and they don’t believe in preparing it shortly to keep the meat juicy, deep frying is the preferred method.

They don’t see the point in vegetarianism either; all dishes come with some type of meat or fish.

I really don’t mean to be negative about Thai cooking, I ate some beautiful curries and papaya salads. The fruit juices are heavenly and also the simple steamy soups are a delight but there are a couple of things I missed.

For one, there was no bread! There is no bread in the Thai kitchen! The same for cheese; I didn’t eat any type of cheese for three and a half weeks. To make the trio complete: wine. The little wine there is, is relatively expensive and there is of course no wine culture. Of course you can find everything when you search well, especially in the touristic places.

I did find out that the Thai kitchen is relatively easy when you are in possession of the right ingredients. The challenge back home is to find ingredients like pickled radishes, Thai coriander; tiny green eggplant the size of a pea, tamarind/chili paste, keffar lime leafs and so on.  So I’m on a mission, I didn’t make any Thai food yet but I better start soon now the memory of it is still fresh.

The pictures below are from some of the dishes I made on the Thai cooking Farm. It was a very nice course. Like most cooking schools around, we went to the local market where they explained about some of the key ingredients.

On the farm every person had his or her own cooking station and we made all the dishes ourselves from scratch. Our teacher first gave an explanation about the dish, then he gave away all the tips and tricks while cooking it ones himself. After this little show we had to  copy him and eat it all. I had a nice group of people, there were nice conversations at the table and at the end we were brought home by car because we couldn’t walk anymore after 6 courses.

This is what you need (makes about 8 sides)

500 gram beetroot

Big handful of fresh spinach

1 cup yellow peas

1 pear in cubes

3 tomatoes

Chunk of fettah

½ cup full yogurt

5 garlic cloves

2 red onions

Bay leaf

1 tablespoon dried thyme

A handful of chopped mint

Teaspoon sumac

2 tablespoons balsamico vinegar

One tablespoon honey

One tablespoon cider vinegar

Pepper and salt

Lemon juice

Cook the yellow peas with the bay leaf and one chopped garlic clove until soft but not mushy.

Cut the onion and tomatoes in parts and slice 3 garlic cloves. Heat a layer of oil in a big skillet and slowly bake the onion, tomato and garlic on a low fire for about 10 minutes.

Cut the beetroot in little cubes and add them to the onion. Mix it well, add the balsamico vinegar, thyme and the honey, generous pepper and salt and turn the fire a little higher.

To make the dressing. Mix the yogurt with a crushed garlic clove, sumac, cider vinegar, mint, honey pepper and salt.

When the beet is warm and caramelized, mix it with the peas, crumble the fettah and add the spinach and the pear.

Serve the salad with a dot of the yogurt dressing on top.

And what a fool I was for not trying it before.

I’m not sure what to eat it with yet. I added it to the wild rabbit I prepared the other day but since wild rabbit is not on the menu every week I’m looking for more possibilities. I’ll add them to this post when I find them and please let me know when you have one or two yourself.

I’m definitely not going to give a course on how to prepare a wild rabbit here because I struggled with the animal quiet a lot myself. I can’t say I found the fastest or best way to take the meat of the bones by far. A lot of time is also consumed by studying the autonomy of the animal and feeling the meat and the bones. It’s such a fascinating thing and next to chicken, or fish I never have whole animals at home (not counting the cat because she’s not on the menu).

The entire house smelled like a cow shed? after cooking the meat. The taste was quiet strong but good. I liked the full flavor of the meat but half of the joy is gone when the smell is off. I cooked the rabbit in a mixture of white wine, cider vinegar, wild stock, quince and herbs and served it with homemade gnocchi.

But this is all beside the point; I started to write this post to share a recipe on quince puree so here it is.

Quince Puree

One big quince

Sugar

1 Star anise

3 cardamom pods

Water

Lemon peels

Peel and cut the quince. Place the pieces in a small pan, add water half way up, add the star anise, cardamom and lemon peels, two table spoons of sugar and let it simmer. When the pieces are entirely soft, remove the cardamom, lemon and cardamom and puree until smooth. Taste if the mixture needs more sugar. It will be silky soft and very delicate in flavor, can’t wait to find more recipes to use it in.

The oil will have a warm and soft garlic taste and is great served with some bread, pepper and salt. You can spread the cloves out onto a toast. I also use it in dressings or to bake with.

Garlic oil

1 or two garlic heads

Olive oil

Herbs like thyme or a green pepper

Peel all the garlic cloves and gather them in a pan. Cover the cloves with oil, add the herbs or a pepper and bring the oil to a soft boil. Take the pan from the fire and put it back on it when the bubbles went away. Do this three times and after the third time, leave the pan on your smallest fire. You cook the cloves in the oil until they are entirely soft and slightly browned.

Keep the oil in a clean jar.