Garlic, Chilli and Lime Prawns with French Fries

Prawns are sometimes eaten on their own, perhaps with one dip or a variety of dips; tossed into salads; or cooked as part of Asian dishes, for instance with noodles, or as key components of curries or dumplings. Think of this recipe then as a decidedly less adventurous way to prepare prawns: sans dips, greenery, and Asian influences, but instead as a lower calorie variation on fish and chips, or simply as an unbreaded and unbattered version of prawns/shrimp/scampi and fries. Think of this easy recipe, in short, anyway which will allow you to best enjoy it.

The differences between prawns and shrimp are confused and mildly contested. The two terms are not scientific, and where a distinction is made, it is that prawns are larger species – with longer legs and more sets of claws – while shrimp are smaller. However, ‘shrimp’ is the commonplace term for all varieties sold and served in the United States, while in the United Kingdom and many other Commonwealth countries ‘prawn’ is much more common, with ‘shrimp’ reserved only for very small species.

The situation in the UK is the case in Australia too – despite the popular saying ‘throw another shrimp on the barbie’, which in fact originates from a series of Australian Tourism Commission advertisements aired in America in the 1980s, starring the actor Paul Hogan. To promote the country in America, ‘shrimp’ was used instead of ‘prawn’, despite ‘shrimp’ rarely appearing as such within Australia. The first advert in the series was launched during the National Football Conference Championship Game in January 1984, and soon helped take Australia from 78th to 1st on the list of the most desired vacation destinations for Americans.

The point is that you can use prawns or shrimp to make this dish: whatever differences there are should matter little. My recipe simply requires that you stir fry or pan fry the seafood, with garlic and other spices and flavourings, for a few brief minutes. Meanwhile, for the fries I used frozen fries rather than cutting and cooking potato from scratch. I have had some success using a mandoline on potatoes and making french fries, crinkle cut fries, and crinkle cut chips; but I’ve never managed the level of crispness which I achieve by simply throwing frozen fries into hot oil. It is worth taking frozen fries out of the freezer a while before cooking, to allow them to defrost.

I spiced the fries with a Swedish ‘pommes frites krydda’. This is a combination of ordinary salt, onion salt, celery salt, paprika, and sugar. You might use a combination of these ingredients; you may opt for just paprika; and I am aware that some people enjoy elaborating their fries with supplements such as Parmesan cheese. For this dish, Parmesan may prove too much – but I am not about to circumscribe your preferences, and warmly afford you the opportunity to spice your fries however you wish.

Ingredients (for two people)

• 200g peeled prawns
• 400-500g frozen french fries
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 small red chilli
• Garlic powder
• Lime juice
• Soy sauce
• Salt
• Pepper
• French fry seasoning (salt/’pommes frites krydda’/paprika/etc.)

I reckon that I used about 400-500 grams of frozen french fries for two people, which produced a not-insurmountable surfeit of fries. I know that I used 200 grams of peeled prawns, from frozen, which proved about right.

Method

• Heat enough sunflower oil in a deep pan or wok to cook the french fries.The oil will need to largely – but not necessarily entirely – cover the fries.
• Cook the fries, in a couple of batches if necessary, until they are golden in colour and crisp on the outside.
• Once cooked, set the fries aside and spice.
• In a frying pan or wok, heat a little sunflower oil.
• Dice the garlic cloves and the chilli, and add to the pan.
• Throw in the prawns.
• Season the prawns with salt, pepper, and garlic powder and some chilli flakes if desired, and fry them lightly in the oil, tossing for three or four minutes.
• Add a splash of lime juice during cooking, and a dash of soy sauce as you’re about to turn off the heat.

I used the same large wok for all of the cooking: frying the fries first, then getting rid of the excess oil before cooking the prawns. The prawns do not need much cooking time. Serve the prawns atop or beside the fries; and with some sort of side salad, beans, bread, or whatever.

Lavender and Yoghurt Scones after Rachel Khoo

It was Sunday, already afternoon, and my partner was still asleep having earlier that morning driven her mother and brother from York to London Stansted. Earlier this year, Ryanair began flying twice weekly between Stansted and Skellefteå airport in the north of Sweden. My partner’s brother lives in that city; while her mother lives in nearby Umeå, the capital of Västerbotten, and where my partner and I spent three and a half years. Quite remarkably – given that, although perfectly pleasant, it is an admittedly small city; and that Umeå, less than a couple of hours’ drive away, has a more overtly international character, with its university, culture houses, jazz festival, and Bildmuseet – Skellefteå’s airport appears to be winning a significant degree of success positioning itself as the gateway to Sweden’s north.

Where air traffic services across airports in Sweden were previously controlled by the state-owned operator LFV, in 2010, following a new Civil Aviation Act, the market was rent asunder. LFV relinquished control of Skellefteå airport, and its air traffic was taken over by the private contractor Aviation Capacity Resources. Under this new operator, the airport seems to be succeeding in building surprising partnerships: the route to and from Stansted is the second international offering at the airport from Ryanair, which opened last year a pathway between Skellefteå and Girona-Barcelona.

But as planes came and went from Skellefteå and from other airports comprising the known world, my partner remained in the unknown, sound asleep, and I determined to make some scones which I had seen a day or two before via the Instagram feed of Rachel Khoo. I knew that the scones were of lavender, which I possessed; and I returned to their image and found their recipe via the website of the London Evening Standard.

At which I fell upon a difficulty. I was in a quandary; I was without some of the ingredients which Khoo’s recipe asked of me; I had neither low-fat yoghurt, nor the raspberries recommended for these ‘lavender, yoghurt and raspberry’ scones; and more I lacked the required means of access by which to make surreptitious egress from and thence return to my property. In short, I was not inclined to go outside, desiring neither to get dressed nor to talk to any people. I knew that the culinary lavender in my cupboard was of a high grade; and I had plenty of butter and flour; and I felt that this would prove enough.

And then to my delight I found in the back of the fridge: a raspberry yoghurt! True, it contained scanty or no raspberry pieces, and was just short of the 130 ml the recipe pleaded, but not wanting to look such a serendipitous gift horse in its gaping mouth, I determined to use this yoghurt regardless, to which I added a small quantity of milk. I made the scones and they turned out just fine, so fresh and fine, just off divine.

Ingredients

Rachel Khoo‘s delicious recipe reads:

• 40g caster sugar
• 1 tsp dried culinary lavender
• 130 ml low-fat yoghurt
• 250g self-raising flour
• Pinch of sea salt
• 1 heaped tsp baking powder
• 50g cold salted butter, cut into small cubes
• 75g raspberries
• 1 egg

This is to make approximately six scones. My recipe reads differently, and I cannot fairly claim that it produces better results. And yet what is any action, what is any life aside from a testament which says: ‘Something different has happened, and here it is, see how it still works!’. My modified recipe comprised:

• 40g caster sugar
• 2 tsp dried culinary lavender
• 100 ml raspberry yoghurt
• 30 ml milk
• 250g self-raising flour
• Pinch of salt
• 1 heaped tsp baking powder
• 60g cold salted butter, cut into small cubes
• 1 egg

Out of my recipe, I managed five well-sized scones, plus 4 little scone balls, or scone bites.

Method

The method I used broadly followed that provided by Rachel Khoo – by far my favourite famous chef – and the London Evening Standard. Do as follows:

• Pre-heat your oven to 180C.
• Mix the sugar and lavender with the yoghurt in a bowl.
• Combine the remaining dry ingredients – the flour, salt, and baking powder. Rub in the butter.
• Add the yoghurt mixture, and bring together using your hands to form a dough.
• At this point you may gently incorporate into the dough any raspberries you possess (remember that I did not have any raspberries).
• The dough should be sticky; but go ahead and roll it out on a floured surface to a thickness of about 4 cm. Use a cutter of 6-7 cm to cut out approximately six scones.
• Beat the egg and brush the top of each scone with the egg wash. Cook for 15-20 minutes, until the tops of the scones are golden.
• Set aside to cool slightly, then eat with butter, with cream, and with jam.

——————

Cedars Lebanese Restaurant, Heemstedestraat 80, Amsterdam, with Asides

There has been something of a surge of interest in Lebanese cooking over the past several years. Perhaps this would demonstrate itself most profoundly and convincingly in a growing number of people gorging themselves on Lebanese food – however, I possess neither the statistics, nor the conviction, nor sufficient photographic evidence of lips covered in hummus, to assert that this is the case. That there continue to exist numerous Lebanese restaurants in prominent European cities offers little to support the claim of ‘a surge of interest’, even in these ‘difficult economic times’.

One may look to the political situation in Lebanon, to gauge whether any change in the country’s global standing has influenced the global perception towards its food – and yet there is nothing especially noteworthy here either. Bordering Syria and Israel, both of whom were implicated and involved in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, saw the emergence of the March 14 Alliance, which accused Syria of the murder, and the March 8 Alliance, which accused Israel. The Cedar Revolution which followed drove all Syrian troops from Lebanon; and the elections which took place in the country between May and June 2005 were the first for thirty-three years without the Syrian military present.

Today, Lebanese politics – under elected President Michel Suleiman; with a strong regional focus; and with the March 8 Alliance, which includes Hezbollah, one of the three blocs and numerous parties elected to govern in 2009 – continues to be shaped by the conflicts of its neighbours. The Saad Hariri government established after the 2009 elections fell in 2011. His replacement as Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, resigned on 22 March of this year; and his proposed successor, Tammam Salam, has struggled to form a new government. Owing to the political deadlock and the ongoing Syrian civil war – which has led to increased violence in Lebanon, and seen the country receive around 200,000 Syrian refugees – a couple of weeks ago, on 31 May, it was announced that this year’s scheduled elections have been postponed until November 2014. All of which does nothing towards interpreting the world’s interest in Lebanese food.

So instead I reflect on my own growing awareness of Lebanese cuisine; and on the profusion of Lebanese cookery books displayed prominently in popular bookstores. Phaidon published The Lebanese Kitchen, authored by Salma Hage, as part of their encyclopedic cookbook series last October. Its tessellated page-edges and lavish illustrations across five-hundred recipes make it one of the nicest cookbooks I have ever touched. Everyday Lebanese Cooking, by Mona Hamadeh, was published in January. The Jewelled Kitchen: A Stunning Collection of Lebanese, Moroccan and Persian Recipes, by Bethany Kehdy, will be published next month. Then in September will come Man’oushe: Inside the Street Corner Lebanese Bakery, written by Barbara Abdeni Massaad with photgraphs by Raymond Yazbeck, and considering Lebanese bread-making.

I went recently to Cedars Lebanese Restaurant in Amsterdam. The restaurant, which opened in 2007, is in the south-west of the city, just beyond the Oud Zuid, between the Hoofddoorpplein and Amsterdam’s World Fashion Centre. Set back from the Heemstedestraat road and well outside the city’s centre, Cedars sits upon and overlooks the Westlandgracht where the canal broadens out, providing an exceptional view whether you’re inside, looking out of the restaurant’s glass construction, or out on the terrace poised atop the water. The wide terrace and its wooden flooring, the easy movement between inside and outside and the light the building affords gives the restaurant a relaxed atmosphere even in its more formal interior.

Lebanese cuisine includes mezze, an array of small warm and cold dishes which are typically eaten to accompany drinks or main courses, or as a meal in their own right. Prominent ingredients are pickled and stuffed vegetables, aubergines, tomatoes and chickpeas, and there is much use of olive oil, garlic and lemon. Hummus, eaten with a range of flatbreads, is considered so much a national dish that in October 2008, the Association of Lebanese Industrialists petitioned for it to be classified a specifically Lebanese food – in the same way that Parmigiano-Reggiano and Melton Mowbray pork pies have protected geographical status in the EU. Tabbouleh, with bulgur wheat, tomato, parsley and mint, is another traditional Lebanese dish. Chicken and lamb dominate the meat market, frequently cooked with yoghurt; the Lebanese eat seafood; and pistachio nuts are common, in desserts made with white cheese and filo pastry.

Cedars offers two mezze menus, a ‘Royale’ and ‘Petite’, comprising different groupings of warm and cold dishes; and two menus, the ‘Cedars’ and the ‘Lebanon’, comprising mezze, main courses and desserts. There are twenty-six mezze proffered in all; three fish mains; three vegetarian mains; and ten mains from the grill. The wine menu is extensive and eager to soar in price (the glass of red wine I ordered was pleasant but dry together with the food); and the four desserts consist of three pastries with nuts and cream, and one ice cream with chocolate. The group with which I ate forewent all manner of mezze, opting after a drink to order main courses. These were prefaced by a selection of wonderfully baked flatbreads, served with olive oil and mixed spices.

I ordered the ‘Shikaf Garouf’, with lamb, cherry tomatoes, potato, mushroom, onion, and ‘spicy pita’. My partner ordered much the same dish but with chicken instead of lamb; while the third member of our group ordered risotto with lamb and yoghurt. My overall impression was of a well balanced meal replete with subtle but distinct flavours. The lamb had been marinated and charcoal-grilled, and a square of potato and one white mushroom were both sautéed in olive oil to perfection: the mushroom was seasoned with salt and pepper but otherwise unspiced, yet had taken just enough of the oil and was so well cooked that it was the best mushroom I have eaten; while the potato was spiced with what tasted like nutmeg, turmeric, and a little black pepper and ginger, and was equally delicious. The ‘spicy pita’ was in fact a miniature pizza, with a hot tomato sauce. Again, the rice had been cooked expertly with a little oil and spices: it was an appealing yellow-golden colour, suitably fragrant, delicate and light.

Initially calling regarding Saturday night, only to hear it described as ‘fully booked’, my party went to Cedars on Sunday evening, when the restaurant was fairly quiet. We had the terrace to ourselves for drinks on a bright and warm-enough evening; and without being rushed, the waiters were not only helpful and polite, but more, talkative and funny. Mains at Cedars are priced at around €20; mezze at €6.50 each – fairly standard for restaurants in Amsterdam.

Banana Cupcakes with Chocolate Icing

Everything appearing thus far on this site has been a product of me: whether it be a creation of mine, some experience or purchase of mine related, or an article which I have written. Of course, many pieces have concerned works of art or moments in time composed by and of other people; I have drawn variously from books and other sources; and restaurant reviews consider food not made by me, and recipes which I’ve published may derive aspects from recipes I’ve seen elsewhere. Yet this post is the first to centre upon something which I have neither created nor interpreted – namely, banana cupcakes conceived and baked and iced by my partner, Angelica. My role has been limited to taking and uploading the relevant photographs; writing up here her recipe; and eating the cakes.

Ingredients (makes sixteen; refer to this ‘Note on Measurements’ if stumped by the measurement ‘dl’)

• 1 dl butter
• 3 dl sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar
• 2 dl mashed bananas
• ½ dl milk
• 4 dl flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt

Notes pertaining to these ingredients

2 dl of mashed bananas equates to two or three bananas, depending on the size of your banana. If you don’t want to use butter, you can use margarine instead – but woe betide the person who uses margarine and declaims against this recipe, preferring the cupcakes of his butter-utilising neighbour. For vanilla sugar, you may happily substitute vanilla essence or a vanilla pod. It is a peculiar quality of Swedish baking and of Swedish cakes that they do not feature self-raising flour – a quite alien concept for the Swedes – but plain flour plus baking powder as the raising agent.

Method

• Pre-heat your oven to 175C.
• Melt the butter in a pan over a low heat.
• Pour the melted butter into a mixing bowl, and stir in the sugar.
• Add both eggs, the vanilla sugar, mashed bananas, and milk. It is important that you have mashed the bananas prior to this bullet point.
• In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt.
• Fold these dry ingredients into the wet mixture.
• Spoon the mixture into cupcake liners inside a cupcake pan or mould.  
• Bake in your well-heated oven for around 30 minutes.

When folding the dry and wet ingredients, the operative term is ‘fold’ – there is no need to mix too much, for air pockets will make the cupcakes light and moist. If you simply use cupcake liners without putting these inside a pan or plastic mould, the weight of this mixture, owing to the bananas, tends to make the liners collapse and the mixture spill onto your baking tray. The cupcakes will be done when golden-brown on top and rebounding under gentle pressure.

Leave the cupcakes to cool before icing; and for icing, do as you please. This time, we used a chocolate fudge icing by Betty Crocker – a lady surprisingly slender and agile, according to her company’s promotional materials. Melted chocolate has worked equally well in the past; or you can make an icing out of egg white and icing sugar, or icing sugar and butter, plus an optional flavouring. Slicing a banana thinly and putting these slices in the warm oven for a few minutes provides an apposite decoration, a complementary final-touch.

________

Farfalle Pasta with Chestnut Mushrooms and Pork

Who will this feed and with what haste?

The following ingredients will serve comfortably you plus another; and can be prepared and cooked in around twenty minutes (say, ten minutes for the pasta and mushrooms, five for the pork, and another five for your fiddling).

Ingredients

• 250g farfalle pasta
• 100g chestnut mushrooms
• 225g pork belly
• 1 egg
• 1 clove garlic
• Knob of butter
• Salt
• Black Pepper
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Notes pertaining to these ingredients

The pork pictured above is in fact something called ‘zuurkool spek’, that is, ‘sauerkraut bacon’: a sort of unsliced bacon common in the Netherlands; very cheap (a 225g-275g slab can cost less than $1); better than much of the bacon many shops sell; and also a good alternative to a typical cut of pork belly, which is hard to procure in the country except for in thin and excessively fatty slices. In fact, if you braise this cheap cut slowly over several hours, colouring the outside very briefly then adding water and perhaps a little red wine, it will become wonderfully tender; but simply frying it works well too. I like the fattiness of belly pork, but a leaner cut of pork would be perfectly adequate, and would allow you to cancel your gym membership, or do away with your running shoes, or eat many candies and chocolates without pausing to care.

Chestnut mushrooms possess a slightly stronger flavour than white or button mushrooms, but those would taste pleasant also; and you could even add some porcini mushrooms, fresh or dried. I think this dish is liable to taste similarly well regardless of what pasta you use. If you like, add a little rosemary to the pork.

Method

• Fill a pot or large saucepan with water and bring to the boil; add salt, then throw in the pasta
• Slice the mushrooms, removing the stalks if you desire, and sauté in a pan with the butter
• Finely chop the clove of garlic, and add it to the pan of mushrooms
• Season the mushrooms with salt and a little pepper
• Once the pasta is al dente, drain the water; restore the pasta to the pot, adding olive oil and lightly seasoning
• Add the mushrooms to the pasta, and why don’t you crack an egg, and throw this in too, coating the pasta with the egg
• Slice thickly the pork
• Pan fry – with oil and some rosmary and red wine if you desire – at a high heat for a couple of minutes on each side

A Considerate Tip

Use the same pan for the pork that you already used for the mushrooms! Enjoy your food, but don’t put it all inside your mouth at once! Look out of the window occasionally while you eat – the movements of passers-by will aid the movements of your digestive system.

Chang-i: A Chinese Restaurant with European Influences, and Restaurant Week

A couple of times a year, in March and in September, ‘Restaurant Week’ takes place across the Netherlands. Over 1,000 restaurants throughout the country take part, all offering for one week a three-course prix fixe dinner menu for €27.50. This allows the public what is, in theory, a bargain, a very good deal indeed; for the restaurants involved are all supposed to be of a high quality, and thereby relatively expensive when going about their usual affairs. In truth, with many restaurants typically offering main courses at around €20, a €27.50 prix fixe tasting menu does not afford a great saving on, say, a starter and a main course, or a main course and dessert. Still, Restaurant Week is hugely popular, and does provide an impulse towards going out and trying new places to eat. More, there are some genuinely good deals to be had; some restaurants whose normal prices are especially high, yet retreat to the same €27.50 for the week’s duration. Those Michelin starred restaurants which take part ask a pretty reasonable €10 surcharge.

Around two hundred restaurants in Amsterdam get involved in Restaurant Week, which ran recently from Monday, 4 to Sunday, 10 March. My partner and I ate on the Sunday evening at Chang-i, a Chinese restaurant with the tagline ‘Innovative Chinese Cuisine’, for it endeavours to serve modern Chinese food drawing upon a range of European influences. Chang-i was voted the second best Chinese restaurant in the Netherlands, and the very best in Amsterdam, in 2011; and has received acclaim from a variety of Dutch newspapers and food publications.

The restaurant sits along Jan Willem Brouwersstraat, a quiet, predominantly residential street, just down from the Concertgebouw. The decor inside itself works to integrate a variety of influences and themes, with oriental lamps, busts and graphics alongside hung paintings of nudes, a marble floor, rustic wooden doors, and a palette of dark browns and black offset by copper and red highlights. I liked the dark colours, and they along with a comfortable and spacious seating plan gave the restaurant a pleasant atmosphere, an upright but fairly relaxed and secluded feel.

The tasting menu comprised three small dishes for each of the three courses. Two additional courses were proffered, for between the starters and the mains, for an additional €7.50 each. My partner and I determined to take the first of these two additional options, largely because I wanted to try its vegetable dim sum.

Several minutes after arriving, we were presented an appetiser, a sushi with rice and radish which my partner appreciated, I less so. The first course consisted of sashimi with salmon roe; gamba, a large shrimp, stir fried on a lemongrass stick; and a pork dumpling. The gamba was my favourite of the three dishes, the crunchiness and the flavour of the lemongrass through its middle really complementing the meat; and the fish and salmon roe was also very good. The pork in the dumpling was a little soft, almost gelatinous, and too rich for my taste. The course that we had chosen to insert followed, and provided, along with the vegetable dim sum, a lobster bisque, and tempura chicken with sweet and sour sauce. This was the only course which I found displeasing overall, for I didn’t like two of its three dishes. The dim sum pastry was lightly fried and tasty, but the filling was loose and hard to distinguish, involving, I think, mushrooms turned to a pulp. Rice noodles with beansprouts were served on the side of the course, and seeing no other role for them, in my hasty inexperience, summoning all the wisdom then in my possession, I took to throwing these in with the bisque, which was otherwise dull and unpleasant. The tempura chicken, on the other hand, was delicious, the tempura batter light and the chicken perfectly steamed inside.

With the main course came fried sea bass with rice and a coconut foam, chicken fillet on a bed of vegetables, and beef in a spicy orange sauce. The dishes were rich and generous, and I thoroughly enjoyed all three. Dessert was a rose cream, chocolate sorbet, and a mango mousse, none absolutely inspiring, but all nice.

I can achieve the calculations: that makes, of thirteen dishes in total including the appetiser, nine which I liked with varying degress of warmth, and four which I did not like. I drank with all this a Cabernet Sauvignon, inappropriate with Chinese food I’m sure, and in truth complementing none of the dishes I ate particularly well; but knowing this beforehand, still I felt like drinking red wine rather than something else. The service at Chang-i was excellent, informative, friendly and polite; our main waitress amusingly and unnecessarily quite dramatically apologetic when she at one point sought to remove our plates before we were quite finished with a course.

From next Monday, 25 March, until Sunday, 7 April, five restaurants in each region of the Netherlands – those five per region which received the best review scores via the Restaurant Week website – will repeat their Restaurant Week prix fixe menus, again at €27.50 for a three-course meal. Information on this and the restaurant’s involved may be obtained here: http://www.restaurantweek.nl/lang/nl/cities.

Carrot and Pea Risotto with Chorizo

Risotto is sometimes conceived a difficult thing to make: a dish which you must observe anxiously and resolutely throughout the course of its cooking, to which you must add precise quantities of liquids, and for which timing is crucial. It is not easy to make anything perfectly; however, I think it is actually fairly easy to make risotto pretty well. In my experience, you do not need to stand over it dictatorially, stirring all the while as it cooks; you can throw in liquid any old how; and whilst it is at its best al dente, with a little bite, it is still tasty if you overcook it a little, and you need feel no irredeemable shame if you do overcook it, and ought not to take this overcooked risotto towards your mouth with a grimace, and observe your diners eating it with a sorrowful frown.

Are carrots and peas good things to put in a risotto? I believe they are a classic combination. Will you like them in a risotto? Let us see!

Ingredients

• 150g – 200g risotto rice
• 1 very large onion, or 2 smaller onions
• 1 large and thick carrot
• 75g – 100g peas
• A glass of white or rosé wine
• 500 ml, approximately, of vegetable stock
• 60g chorizo
• Parmesan cheese
• Salt
• Pepper
• Thyme

Notes pertaining to these ingredients

When I cook rice, I tend to err on the side of much: for this recipe, to serve two people, I’d probably use about 200g of rice, but you may be more than content with less. There are several varieties of risotto rice, and all would suit. I tend to use Arborio rice; alternatively, you may find at your local market or supermarket an otherwise unspecified parcel or package stating simply ‘Risotto Rice’. Red wine would be too much for the vegetables, so white or rosé works best. Vegetable or chicken stock is good; but if you just add water to cook the risotto, it will be okay, and the risotto will still possess a flavour which makes it worth eating. Parmesan cheese or an appropriate substitute, Grana Padano for example, is for grating and adding to the risotto sometime around the end of the cooking process. If you want a higher class of risotto dish, then perhaps you may refer to your parmesan cheese as Parmigiano-Reggiano, and to your peas as petits pois, whether they are or are not. In this way you juxtapose the Italian with the French for an authentically continental meal.

Method

• Dice or slice the onion(s), and sauté in a pan with some olive oil or butter
• Peel, then dice or slice the carrot and add to the pan
• Add the risotto rice, and stir so it becomes covered in the oil or butter. Allow the rice to cook for a couple of minutes on a high heat, to ‘toast’, which really means to become translucent or take a little colour
• Throw in the glass of wine, and reduce
• Add the first third of the stock, and reduce to a medium-high heat. When this first third of stock is absorbed by the rice, add the second third. Allow this to absorb, and add as much of the third third as you think you require to adequately cook the rice
• While the rice is cooking away, slice the chorizo and fry in a separate pan
• Add the peas to the risotto within the last few minutes of cooking
• With the rice cooked, season with salt, pepper and thyme. You can add a knob of butter or a little cream at this point if you wish
• Grate the cheese and either add to the pan and stir in, or use to sprinkle, lightly or heavy-handedly, over the risotto once apportioned to your plate
• Serve the risotto and the chorizo in conjunction, perhaps with bread

Again, the desired result is a risotto with a little bite to it. You may not need all of the liquid, you may feel you need more: take 500 ml as a broad approximation of how much liquid to add. Don’t have the heat so high while the risotto is cooking that the liquid absorbs quickly and the risotto starts to stick to the bottom of a dry pan; but provided the heat isn’t too high, you ought to stir the risotto a little, but not incessantly. It should take twenty-to-thirty minutes to cook. Thyme works well with the other ingredients here, but spice according to your innermost desire.

NeL, Amstelveld 12, Amsterdam – Restaurant Review

According to tripadvisor, Amsterdam is host to 1,793 restaurants. Since my partner and I moved here at the beginning of November, we have visited some but not all of these; NeL, being the only one thus far that we have visited twice, will therefore be the subject of this first Amsterdam restaurant review.

NeL possesses and promulgates – it is the first thing that appears, as a splash page, when you open the restaurant’s website – a brief descriptive motto, saying, ‘Ik wil geen kapsones hebben, maar volgens mij hebben we het mooiste terras van Amsterdam’. This means that, without wanting to be boastful or full of airs in any way,  thinks that they have the most beautiful terrace in all of Amsterdam. This may in fact be so. NeL is situated on the Amstelveld, a picturesque square within the canal belt, between Reguliersgracht and Utrechtsestraat, Kerkstraat and Prinsengracht, near to much yet just outside some of Amsterdam’s main tourist areas. The square boasts a boules terrain (that is, a sand pit in which boules may be played); a five-a-side football pitch; a children’s play area; and the restaurant itself is housed adjoining a beautiful 17th Century wooden church, the Amstelkerk. There are trees by the restaurant and along the canals; some of the city’s more curvaceous bridges; and NeL’s terrace sits amidst all of this, within a white wooden fence, with wooden tables and benches, heated, and open all year round.

My partner and I ate at the restaurant first in early October of last year, a month or so before moving to Amsterdam, when visiting the city prior to our move. We hadn’t been to Amsterdam before and were wandering about in the evening, not especially sure where we were or how our location related to the location of our hotel, a little hungry, but nevertheless wandering and quite aimlessly. We came across the square and it looked thoroughly pleasant, and liked NeL’s menu, and it was dry, and so we ate outside on the terrace.

The menu at NeL is international and fairly concise. It seems to change regularly, monthly or bi-monthly, given that I know since early October it has passed through at least three formulations. The dinner menu tends to boast six starters, including a soup and a couple of salads; main courses comprising two fish and two meat options, a vegetarian option, a daily speciality, and always the NeL Burger and NeL Vegaburger (better that than a VegaNeL Burger, which appears cluttered in writing among other flaws); and a standard range of desserts, with crème brûlées and chocolate fondants. The menu is relatively simple, but with some nice combinations and subtle touches, and in my experience very capably cooked. Sandwiches, or ‘broodjes’, along with several salads and pastas, are served until 4pm; there is a bar menu with a charcuterie, and nachos and Indonesian spring rolls alongside typical Dutch snacks like bitterballen and vlammetjes; a kid’s menu; an extensive drink menu; and a smoking menu on top. The prices are reasonable, quite typical for Amsterdam at around €15-20 per main.

The first time we ate there I had orzo pasta with chicken, chorizo and tomatoes, and my partner had a half lobster. My dish was light but entirely satisfying; with the right amount of chorizo so that it was visible in the bowl, present on regular occasions within my mouth, but not domineering; and the orzo pasta, lying as it does between a risotto rice and a larger pasta, was novel, keeping the dish fresh without absorbing all of the other flavours. For dessert, we had a chocolate torte.

Last Saturday evening, we ate at NeL a second time. We had been to the Foam photography museum – whose new exhibitions, following an extensive Diane Arbus retrospective, are mixed; with some interesting and evocative Russian photographs from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, and an engaging room built around the models of Dutch photographer Jan Hoek; but on the other hand a couple of exhibitions very loosely conceptualised and visually mundane – and were heading later to see The Master at the Tuschinski theatre. NeL lies usefully near both.

This time we ate inside. The atmosphere is relaxed, the décor simple and muted even in its plush reds and greys, there are often families about, but the tables aren’t packed together and it is, all in all, a very comfortable place to sit and to be. Accordingly, the service is casual, perhaps not quick, but well paced and genuinely friendly. Music is performed frequently in one section of the restaurant; on Saturday, they were apparently preparing for an Argentinian band, and were playing old Argentinian music, which was occasionally a little loud but otherwise wonderful. The black bread we were served soon after ordering, along with olive oil and a garlic yoghurt, was excellent. I ate steak with a pea purée, mushrooms, courgettes and amandine potatoes in a blueberry sauce; and my partner ate a deer stew with mashed potatoes and pear. Having tasted both, I can recommend both. The mushrooms in particular were delicious, some of the best mushrooms I have eaten, complemented especially well by the blueberry.

Spinach, Bacon and Onion Quiche

A quiche is a pleasant thing to eat. It may even be delicious, according to the nuances of your taste-buds and the particular quality of your hunger. I sometimes thought, when I was younger and didn’t really eat quiche, that a quiche was something quite flavourless and watery. This need not be the case at all. What is more, the remnants of a quiche, those portions left uneaten, will serve you excellently at some date in the not too distant future – for example, for the next day’s lunch. My recipe for a spinach, bacon and onion quiche will produce a tasty quiche indeed – but only if you are capable of following it competently and not just throwing everything about the place and scooping it all up off the floor.

Ingredients

For the pastry:

• 200g plain flour
• 100g butter
• 2 tbsp water

For the filling:

• 150g spinach
• 100g bacon or ham
• 2 mediocre onions
• 6 eggs
• 250 ml cream
• 100g cheese
• Salt
• Pepper

Notes pertaining to these ingredients

You may be surprised that my recipe does not specify a particular cheese. Of course, today there are available countless cheeses. In the 19th Century, Louis Pasteur, famed chemist and microbiologist, whose research would have such a positive effect upon the preservation of milk, was in fact also an ardent lover of cheese. According to an admittedly apocryphal account, he was one day eating a piece of Comté, made in the very region of his birth, when he boldly predicted that in the future there would be available in the markets and cafés local to his town not only Comté, but even up to three-hundred cheeses. Last week, a noted scientific journal revealed, amidst much celebration, the creation of the world’s three-thousandth cheese, surpassing Pasteur’s hypothesis tenfold.

I do not think that this quiche is going to live or die dependent on the type of cheese you use. If you use a cheese you like, you will be okay. I used something called an ‘aktie jong belegen’, which indicates not an ‘actual young Belgian’, as I first supposed, but instead a semi-mature Dutch cheese. Cheddar would be good; there is Gruyère; some quiche recipes call for cream cheese or ricotta; and Parmesan would work just fine too. Likewise, use single or double cream as you wish. If you want to use two small onions, or two excessively large ones, go right ahead – but do not bemoan this recipe if, potentially at a later date, you encounter problems.

Time to make; time to bake

It should go without saying that the time it will take you to make this quiche depends on a variety of factors over which I have little control. It will be affected, for instance, by the layout of your kitchen; the composition of your fridge; your general liveliness and hand-eye coordination; and if you are inclined to only participate towards the recipe every fifth bar, for instance, of a twelve-bar blues – spending the other eleven bars nodding your head, or shaking it with your tongue thrust into your cheek while tapping your feet – then the recipe will take you a more extensive period.

Roughly, preparing everything should take about twenty-five minutes: ten to make and roll the pastry without too much haste; around ten to cook the bacon and the onions, plus the spinach; and a few minutes to put everything together ready for the oven. Cooking the quiche will take thirty-to-forty minutes.

Method

• Heat your oven to 200C, or 180C fan-assisted
• Personally, I’d throw the onions and bacon into a pan on a low heat at this stage, and allow them to cook slowly whilst you are working on the pastry. For clarity, however, I’ll split the method from here into two: one guide for the pastry, one guide for the filling.

For the pastry:

• Put all the flour into a bowl
• Cut the butter into small pieces, and throw these pieces into the flour
• Rub the flour and the butter together with your fingers. You should end with a mixture wherein neither the flour nor the butter is noticeable as an independent ingredient: there should be no flour left on its own at the bottom of your bowl, but the mixture should not be greasy owing to too much butter.
• Add two, or perhaps three tablespoons of water, and use a knife to literally chop at the mixture as a means of drawing it together. After doing this for a few seconds, you should be able to bring the mixture into a ball with your hands. If you can’t, add a little more water – if the dough is too dry, you will not enjoy rolling and inevitably breaking it.
• Now roll the dough to the size of whatever you’re going to cook the quiche in. You may use a quiche or flan tin or a round dish of some sort; in my case, I used a cake tin 26cm across. I tend to roll all of the dough out; I place my tin over it and make a slight impression; then I cut along the lines of the impression and use the cutout as the base for my quiche. I then roll out the sides separately and press them, gently, into the base.

For the filling:

• Slice, cut roughly, or dice your onions, and put them in a pan to sweat over a low heat with a little oil.
• Chop the bacon or ham in your possession into fairly thin slices or cubes, and add these to the pan.
• You should let this go now until the onions are translucent or even begin to take on a little colour; making sure also that the bacon is cooked. Perhaps a little under ten minutes.
• Chop the spinach and add to the pan, cooking for another couple of minutes.
• Put the six eggs, the cream and the cheese into a bowl and mix lightly – you don’t need to whisk the eggs thoroughly if you don’t want. Add the cooked spinach, onions and bacon, and some salt and pepper and any other relevant herbs and spices.
• Pour this mixture into your quiche base.
• Now cook in the oven for thirty or forty minutes. If the top starts to brown quickly, turn the heat down: it is important that the base of the quiche has sufficient time in which to bake.

Here is a sort of flow-diagram, depicting pictorially the above steps:

A Note on Measurements (with Kladdkaka Variation)

Having previously lived in two countries, England and Sweden, moving recently to my third, the Netherlands, I well appreciate that the commonly utilised units of measurement differ between countries and provide, therefore, considerable consternation when it comes to cooking in general, and baking in particular. I recently posted a recipe for a Swedish kladdkaka – a sticky chocolate cake – which asked for ‘dl’s of certain ingredients. I have of course been inundated with messages ever since, some frantic and desperate, some mailed and covered in butter or cocoa powder, thankfully none threatening, all asking me – just what is a dl?

Well, dl stands for decilitre. One decilitre, as the name duly indicates, is equivalent to one tenth of a litre, or one hundred millilitres, ml. So we can already construct a sort of chart:

1 litre = 10 dl = 1000 ml

A litre is a measurement of volume; therefore the units litre, dl and ml ought – so you might think – to indicate quantities of liquids. However, in my kladdkaka recipe, I used dl as a measurement of solids, calling for 3 dl sugar, and 1.5 dl plain flour. In Sweden, the decilitre is the standard by which all ingredients are measured. All recipes use decilitres, and the predominant measuring implement is a stack of spoons or cups, ranging from a teaspoon, through a tablespoon, to a half decilitre and then a full decilitre. Packets of flour and sugar in Sweden indicate on them how much a decilitre of the contained substance translates to in grams.

When I use the measurement ‘dl’ in my recipes, take this for granted:

1 dl flour = 60g flour

1 dl sugar = 80g sugar

Finally, for additional clarification in American:

1 cup = 2.37 dl

and

1 dl = 0.423 of a cup

So therefore:

1 cup flour = 142.2g flour

1 cup sugar = 189.6g sugar

You are to refer to this note whenever you seek to make one of my recipes yet strike upon confusion over the quantities and measurements provided; or else when you simply endeavour to engage in the humane, intellectual act of reading.

By way of a bonus, serving to addend and enhance my previous post, and as an illustrative example of one of the ends to which it can be turned, what follows is a photograph of a cake I have made using the kladdkaka recipe. The photograph contains within it the information by which its object may be reproduced. I simply made the kladdkaka recipe twice, and put mascarpone (Italian, pronounced ‘mar’-‘scar’-‘poh’-‘nay’) and a blueberry and raspberry jam in the middle. On one side there are blueberries, washed, eatable; on the top vanilla sugar, for which you may substitute icing sugar.