Christmas Dinner 2017

Home-made pâté de campagne to start.



Followed by butternut squash soup.



By the time of the main course, we were already quite satisfied. But we managed to still find a bit of room in our stomachs for sirloin steak with a red wine reduction.

Christmas dinner accomplished. Time to go back to grading.

Day 1: To Edmund-Graf Hütte

So, after arriving by train...



... eating the usual Austrian breakfast with Semmeln...



... and a Kochei...



... we finally started hiking...



... ending the day with the usual Kuchen and beer.

In numbers: 3:42h, 7.6 km, 1247 m ascent, 117 m descent.

Dano's

Life in Ithaca is so familiar! It is weird to have been away for seven years, lived in three different continents, and to find the same restaurants with the same menus as when we left. We've been to Aroma's which has not painted their interior or changed their pizzas (hmmm, black bean pizza!), to Just a Taste which still has the best cod fritters and the same staff, and Dano's, which was wonderful as always!

Only one more day together, and then we will be living apart for a whole academic year... :(

München Is Weißwürste mit Brezeln

Yum-o!

Breakfast of Hikers

And so it begins... in a beautiful pension in Neustift, where we ate Semmeln to gain strength for the next couple of days.

Pulled Pork

We used the residual heat of the barbecue to smoke some pork. Wonderful for dinner and lunch!

Abrupt End of Pasta Week

We were planning to do soup and pasta, but we ate too much bread with this pumpkin soup.

Almost up to Date

A quick post of some foodz we ate in the last weeks, but that I hardly remember. Pictured above is James Oseland's amazing laksa, where we again used barbecued chicken for extra smokiness.

This is the mayonnaise we bought in Belgium, thanks to Ellen's great advice. We wonder whether it will last more than a month.



Some potatoes to eat with the mayo.

Some eggs and bread to eat with the mayo.



Disgusting delivered pizza.

Bread, Chicken, Dessert and Baby

Yesterday we had guests for dinner, so we tried to impress them with homemade bread with olives and sun dried tomatoes, together with chicken in yoghurt marinade (no pic). And we went all out by even making dessert: dried apricots filled with almond paste with orange flower water in puff pastry, sprinkled with a little of Christiaan's awesome honey.



Easy to make, goes great with espresso, highly recommended.

But the most interesting thing about the evening was the way Mr. Bojangles reacted to the 6 month old baby: he came out of his usual hiding place under the couch, and studied the baby with intense interest. It was very cute.

No More Ms. Holiday Gal

Getting rid of the back log, and getting ready for research of the cutting edge kind.



Apologies for the rather awful picture quality, but these amuses-bouche were too good to not post them. We had an amazing 4 course meal at De Moerbei in Warmond with Liesbeth. Excellent food! Even though Liesbeth treated us, we had a peak at the bill, and I think it will be very hard to find a better deal than this in the Netherlands. Highly recommended!



We then went to Amsterdam, where we stayed in Wim & Rietje's house. They actually weren't there for most of the time we were there, so we had the opportunity to see whether we were still able to cook. We made this Normandy Chicken for Willem.



And the next day we had veal liver with potatoes and spinach. Mission "Cooking with the Oars that We Have" accomplished.



Next up: saying "Auf Wiedersehen" to Ellen and Christiaan by preparing this lime marinated chicken with Mediterranean bread for them (third Cordon Bleu recipes in a row!). I think they did not really expect our bread to rise, so it was a pleasant surprise that this did not come out too badly.



And then the moment was really there: we said goodbye to the Netherlands, picked up our rental car and drove to our new homeland, Germany. As soon as we entered Belgium we stopped to have a local specialty: patatje stoofvlees (fries with stew). The "frietkot" that we visited turned out to be a little on the raunchy side (smelly, the stew had way too much cloves and the serving lady was a little bitchy --- but that is kind of normal in Belgium for Dutch people I think), so we were happy to drive on to Germany.

Dinner!

Ellen took us to the Internationale SmulPapen Centrum, where we bought ingredients for dinner:

Oysters!

Or, as alternative, shrimp!

And, easy and oh so tasty: Saumon a l'oseille!

Then came the deserts. First of all, cheeses and wonderful breads:

Fresh figs (sadly not from Turkey, but from Bazil):

Conclusion: We did not forget how to cook!

Salt

We ended the day in a Western Restaurant, Salt. The photo above shows the different kind of salts that we had on our table: Bolivian salt in front, Greek salt in the middle, and finally Hawaiian salt in the back.



After the obligatory bread (the cheese ones of which were very tasty), we got to the good stuff:



quail saltimbocca



a nice juicy lamb rack, with vegetables and mashed potatoes that needed salt (the Bolivian salt worked best)



and finally the piece de resistance: goat cheese pannacotta. It was served with a basil foam that A really liked (a little too chlorophylly for me) and pear confit with cloves. It was also served with a grappa, but that was somehow not standard.

All the food was very well and lovingly prepared. I can understand why they are very popular with the expat community in Beijing.

Muslim restaurant in BLCU

We managed to get out of yet-another-dinner with the distinguished guest yesterday (although today we're on again). So it was just the two of us at the muslim restaurant at the Beijing Language and Culture University.

Being Dutch

Being Dutch means that you sometimes say "Kunnen we niet gewoon een broodje eten voor lunch?" ("Can't we just have a (ordinary) sandwich for lunch?") God knows why. Sandwiches are boring, especially those from Oliver's.


Being a little bit of an American too now means that when we see molten chocolate (20 mins preparation time) on the menu, it makes our mouth water. Unfortunately, America does these better than Hong Kong, although it was not too bad not too bad...

Guess where we spent Saturday morning/afternoon

If you don't know me by now...

We're live blogging from Cafe Konstanz!





Been here for a while now. Anke is working on her lecture and Frans is reading Shogun. With the Simply Red cd that is on infinite repeat, we are ready to commit seppuku.

Fortunately, help has just arrived in the form of 圣诞红酒.