Almost everything in the pumpkin and squash family in Holland is called pumpkin. The only exception I know of is zucchini. So tonight we ate pumpkin, also known as butternut squash.
Some types of ‘pumpkin’ are hard to come by in Holland. Spaghetti squash, for instance, is something I’ve never ever seen in a grocery store here. Last week I browsed around online and found that there is a ‘pumpkin farm’ in the eastern part of Holland that does sell them while supplies last for a maximum of 2 months out of the year. I’m hoping that some time this summer we’ll have time and be willing to drive an hour and a half or two both ways to get me one!
Last week the grocery store had a big pile of butternut squash laying around though. Since squash keeps very well for fairly long, I decided to pick one up despite the fact that I wouldn’t have time to cook it until tonight. Add a couple of steaks and you’ve got yourself a meal. Since the thing was fairly big for 2 people, I omitted the carb dish that I would usually include. There’s rarely a dinner without carbs for me, I detest Atkins with a passion! Fortunately L agrees on that!
I got home fairly late and tired from a very busy week. Fortunately my favorite way of preparing pumpkin is easy. It took about 3 minutes preparing, after which I just popped it in the oven, finished my book and when it was soft, we had dinner. What a wonderful way to spend a Friday night!
Tomato and garlic pumpkin
- 1 pumpkin (butternut squash, or any kind)
- 1 large tomato
- 1 bulb of chinese garlic, or 2 or 3 cloves regular garlic
- parsley (or any dried green herb you like with squash)
- pepper
- salt
- butter
- olive oil
- water
Cut the top off the pumpkin, then cut it in half (lengthwise if applicable for the kind of pumpkin you’re using). Scoop out the seeds and place in an oven dish. Dice a tomato and the garlic, put tomato and garlic in the now empty seed cavity. Sprinkle salt, pepper and parsley over pumpkin and tomato/garlic mixture. Pour a little water in the dish, add a couple small pats of butter to the dish and to the pumpkin (really just a little pat), drizzle some olive oil over the tomato/garlic mixture and place the dish in a hot oven (about 200 degrees celsius). After about 30 – 45 minutes when the pumplin isn’t soft yet, pour a little more water in the dish and cover with aluminum foil. Set the oven a little higher (225-240) and leave it, covered for another half hour or so. When the pumpkin is soft, remove the aluminum foil and if possible, change the oven setting to grill. Leave it to grill and darken a slight bit for another 5 minutes.
You can also add onions, peppers, nuts or mushrooms to the tomato and garlic mixture. Whatever veggies you have will work. Definitely use tomato and garlic though, for flavor and moisture!
As mentioned yesterday, I had a full day of meetings today. We went to a beautiful estate, Duin en Kruidberg, to talk about our work and possibilities for the future. The subject matter was very interesting, but more importantly (for here), the food was amazing.
We had a full meeting arrangement, which included snacks and refreshments, as well as lunch and dinner.
We started the day with coffee and some traditional Dutch cookies.
About an hour and a half into our meeting, they served us a sweet snack of a nut cake/cookie with caramel mousse and a piece of chocolate. Yumm!
Lunch was our next food-stop, which was a cream of zucchini soup followed by a buffet off all kinds of breads, cheeses, jams, jellies, fruit, salads, tortellini, fish, and a selection of water or juices. We were seated in a semi-private lunch area, which was nice.
After our lunch break we talked for about another hour and 15 minutes, until they brought our afternoon snack. I skipped it, as it had seafood, which I don’t eat. But it was a gazpacho with Dutch (tiny) shrimps.
Just before 4 the Ombudsman handed out our annual report, which I’d asked him to do. I’d gotten it fresh from the printer and thought it suitable to be presented there. After some nice words we we parted ways for about an hour. In small groups we went outside to walk around the National park. The sun was shining, so it was good to be outside.
Back from our walk we sat down for some drinks and around 6 we were called in for dinner.
Seated in a beautiful private dining room, we had our dinner. We were first served some fresh, warm bread and butter while the servers inquired who was vegetarian or had other special wishes regarding dinner.
The started was scallops with a mustard mayo and a couple drops of pesto and a miniature flan. As I’d stated my non-seafood-eating-ways, I was presented with rabbit 2 scallop sized slices of rabbit wrapped in bacon. I’d never eaten rabbit before (always had something against it), but tried it anyways and was delighted to find out it tastes just like chicken!
Before the main course we got some more of the wonderful warm bread.
The main course was lamb, beautifully cooked with a side of fennel, carrot cream and polenta, with a star anise based sauce. It was delicious!
Desert was a fairly large slice of dark chocolate brownie with pecans, covered with caramel mousse and caramel sauce and vanilla sherbet. The sherbet wasn’t my favorite, but the brownie was awesome. So were the chocolates that came with the coffee.
I’d heard wonderful things about this estate and restaurant, but it surpassed all my expectations. I would definitely love to go there again!!
I was looking for some kitchen stuff at ‘de Bijenkorf’, a large high-end Dutch department store. Hoping to find a good deal on ceramics, specifically the new series of ramekins by Le Creuset, I ran into this cute oil set. Sure, it’s not that much oil for your money (about 5 times the price of grocery store oil), especially since I wouldn’t know what to do with the stand after I’ve finished the oils, but still, I couldn’t resist.
It’s high grade, extra virgin olive oil, cold pressed. That alone is tasty! But the great thing about this set is that all six bottles have different flavors. There’s porcini mushroom, juniper and rosemary, garlic, chili, lemon parsley and tomato and garlic flavored oil in the set. The vials are equipped with a spray cap, so you can distribute little bits of oil to flavor things. I used it on my salad tonight, made a simple olive oil and himalayan salt dressing, though used less regular oil than usual. L and I both sprayed our own preferred flavor over the salad after. Nifty! And tasty too!
In regards to cooking tonight, it wasn’t much to write about. I had a meeting ’til 9pm and by the time I got home I just wanted something quick. Fortunately I still had some pesto, dried pasta and tuscan sausages. Add a VERY basic salad with the nifty olive oil spray, and a tasty meal was done in less than 15 minutes. Tomorrow I’ll have all day meetings in this crazy fancy conference center which has a 1 Michelin star restaurant. I’m guessing that’ll keep me with more to talk about than tonight’s food!
First off, Italian lesson. Lasagne, the spell checker keeps trying to correct it to lasagna. The spell-checker is wrong. Lasagna is 1 sheet of the pasta you use to make lasagne. Lasagne is a dish with multiple sheets of lasagna with sauce in between.
So I don’t want to call my lasagne ‘alla Bolognese’, because that’s actually a very specific recipe. Even though you can buy it anywhere, it’s often not the real deal. Many cooks give their own twist to this very basic, yet very tasty sauce.
We were debating what to make for dinner. I knew I had to make pasta, as we hadn’t had that in too long. Pasta really is a staple food in this household, we usually eat fresh pasta at least twice a week. L’s Italian roots make me a happy cook! But it’d been a week, so pasta was much needed!
The next question was which pasta, and what else. When I make pasta, 9 out of 10 times we’ll eat it like the Italians, in a small amount before the meat and side-dish course. The same goes for risotto.
I suggested lasagne or canneloni and L’s face lit up. He then suggested to not eat it the Italian way, but add something extra, so it could be a meal. I figured a Bolognese-style sauce would work, plus a spinach-ricotta mix as an extra layer. Obviously you’ll have the beschiamella as well, which means all in all you can have a full meal in one dish.
Lasagne alla Valerie (recipe for 6)
- 1 onion
- 1 carrot
- 1 stick of celery
- 2 cloves of regular or 1 bulb of chinese garlic
- about 250-300 grams of beef (ground)
- 100 ml white wine
- 500 grams passata di pomodori
- salt, pepper, italian seasoning
- butter and olive oil
- a batch of fresh pasta dough (200 grams flour)
- 1 tub of ricotta
- about 250 grams of frozen spinach
- 1 batch of beschiamella (50 grams butter and flour, 500 ml milk, salt, nutmeg)
- parmesan cheese
Start off by taking the spinach out of the freezer and putting it into a bowl to thaw!
The actual cooking process starts with the meat sauce. I grind my own meat, so I started off grinding the beef on a coarse setting. Chop the onion, garlic, celery and carrot in small pieces. Add some butter and olive oil to a pan and when the butter has melted, add the chopped vegetables. Cook the vegetables in the butter and oil for about 5 minutes, until they slightly start to soften. Add the ground beef. When the beef is about cooked, add the white wine. When the liquid has almost completely evaporated add about half the passata di pomodori, a pinch of salt, some fresh ground pepper and a pinch of Italian seasoning. Cover and let it simmer for 15 minutes or so.Now, for the extra-extra tastyness, grab your food grinder, still on the course setting, and put the sauce through the grinder. It will then become a very fine grind of meat, with all the veggies mixed in. (You can’t even see the vegetables anymore, so if you have picky non-veg-eaters, this is the way to give them their vitamins!)
Move the ground sauce back to the pan and let it simmer. Whenever it gets too dry, add a little more of the passata. In the meantime make your pasta dough, don’t roll it out too thin (I use setting 5) and cut it into 10 by 10 cm pieces. The pasta will actually grow a little bit in the pan, so make sure you don’t make ‘em too big for your oven dish!!Put the pasta aside on a tea towel.
While my dough was kneading, I started on the beschiamella. Way easy to make, and it needs little attention. Melt 50 grams of butter in a pan, add 50 grams of flour and stir ferociously. Cook the flour/butter mixture on low heat for a minute or 2 before adding the milk. Stir or whisk the milk in (whisking prevents lumps, but you can always do that at a later stage too, beschiamella is very forgiving) and let it simmer to thicken up. Add a little salt and nutmeg and stir occasionally. Use low heat! When it gets too thick add a little bit more milk.
Boil salted water to cook the pasta. Use a BIG pot. Cook the lasagna sheets for about a minute and a half. It doesn’t matter if they’re not fully cooked, after all they’ll still cook in the oven as well. Drain the pasta and lay the sheets out on a wet tea towel.
By now you can add any of the passata you haven’t added to your pan yet, which will finalize the sauce. The sauce should be be very very thick!
Add the ricotta to your (by now) thawed spinach and stir them together.
In a buttered, fairly large casserole dish align the first layer of lasagna sheets. Scoop some meat sauce over them, add some beschiamella and a little bit of parmesan cheese. Add another layer of pasta, add half of the ricotta-spinach mixture, another layer of pasta, some more meat sauce, beschiamella and parmesan. Keep going until you run out of everything except for the beschiamella. Just use little bits of beschiamella after each meat layer and when everything is done cover the entire dish with the leftover sauce. Sprinkle with a some parmigiano and a couple of thin slices of butter.
Place the lasagne in a pre-heated oven (about 180 to 200 degrees celsius) for 30 minutes or until the top is nice and brown. Serve piping hot with a glass of the same wine you cooked with.
So obviously this is my version of the Silver Spoon version. If you have your own version of Bolognese sauce, give my method of grinding the sauce after it’s cooked for a bit a chance. It drastically enhances the flavor. Not necessarily changing it, just making sure that every single bite has all the amazing flavors fully incorporated. It’s amazing! Plus it really thickens the sauce very evenly, which is nice for ‘pasta al forno’, pasta from the oven.
Last night, instead of cooking, we checked out de Hartentuin. My dad and I have always been crazy about cheese fondue. As a little kid I loved the stuff, which is – to the least – unusual. My brother grew in to it later, when he realized that melted cheese and wine weren’t such a bad combo. L loves it too.
When you think cheese fondue in Amsterdam, you automatically think ‘Bern’ on the Nieuwmarkt. Granted, their food has always been excellent, but that means it’s always full. They actually add different parties to the same table, which isn’t always wonderful. Also, parking in that area is terrible! Besides the fact that it’s insanely expensive, you’ll be searching for a spot for hours.
Searching on the web for other fondue places in Amsterdam, I stumbled upon de Hartentuin. It’s a restaurant fairly close to our home (3 tram stops apart) and advertises being Swiss, which is a big plus when it comes to fondue! I’d tried to make reservations twice before (but on days they were closed unfortunately) and discovered the 2 people who answer the phone, both held a thick accent. That’s great! They’re the real deal.
This week, finally, de Hartentuin’s and our schedule matched. And wow, am I glad it did. It’s a clean, straightforward restaurant. White linens, simple bistro chairs, not over-lighted, but not needing a flashlight to read the menu either. As usual in Holland, the tables weren’t large, but then again, it wasn’t too crowded with tables either, so it doesn’t matter that much. When you sit back to back, a small table is terrible, but when there’s room, it’s cozy.
The menu came in 2 parts, the non cheese-fondue menu, with starters, entrees and side dishes. Then there was the cheese fondue menu. Besides the standard fondue, they sported a bunch of less traditional fondues. Some of them seemed completely plausible, others a little far fetched. I don’t get how you should eat pineapple and curry fondue, having the pineapple stick to your bread, seriously, don’t get it! But I assume that caters to the same crowd that likes pineapple on pizza’s and burgers. Yes, you understand correctly, you will never read a review for something like that here!
We opted for two different fondues. A classic, no frills fondue and one with Gorgonzola. They were both very good. Thick with cheese, flavorful with wine. Not like some places that fly the cheese by and then thicken it up with corn starch. The bread seemed less classic, but was tasty nontheless. We also ordered a salad, which was nothing special, but hey, you need some green too (and the flecks of green in the Gorgonzola don’t count towards that), the Bundnerfleisch (air cured beef-ham) was wonderful.
All in all a very nice dinner. Depending on you choice of drinks and side dishes, this can be a very reasonably priced meal. If you go all out with all the possible side dishes, it could get a little expensive, plus you wouldn’t be able to eat it all. While walking out we read a sign that said ‘all fondues half off on Mondays and Tuesdays. We will definitely be back!
Recipe for a standard fondue (my own style, serves 2 easily!)
- 150 grams of Gruyere (grated)
- 150 grams of Emmenthaler (grated)
- 50 grams of Appenzeller (grated)
- 50 grams of Abondance or Fontina (grated)
- 200 ml of a dry white wine
- 1 clove of garlic
- a little bit of corn starch
- a little bit of kirsch (clear liqueur)
- nutmeg
- fresh ground (white) pepper
Rub the inside of your pan (preferably a caquelon) with crushed garlic. Throw out the garlic after the pan has been rubbed completely. Pour the wine in the pan, put it on medium heat, until it gets hot/starts to simmer. Add the grated cheeses by the handful. Stir and when it’s melted add another handful. When all the cheese is in and melted combine a little bit of cornstarch with a little bit of kirsch, to make a fairly liquid mix. Add to the fondue and stir. The cornstarch will make sure the cheese, oil from the cheese and wine mix well and don’t stay separated in the pan. Add a tiny little bit of nutmeg and some fresh ground pepper to taste. White pepper works best, but any other will taste nice too!
Serve with bread, for dipping, the same wine you used to cook (I highly recommend Fendant!) and possibly some salad. Some people serve cherry tomatoes, broccoli or other veggies cut small to dip in the cheese. I don’t mind that, but it’s not my first choice as those veggies don’t soak up the cheese like bread does.
De Hartentuin is located at Amstelveenseweg 89 in Amsterdam, they’re closed on Wednesdays, making reservations is recommended, though not always necessary.
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