A Dutch dairy carnival

Being an ex-pat in the Netherlands, I've heard a lot of stereotypes about the Dutch.  Like all stereotypes, some are completely baseless and others, at least in my experience, are not.  Take dairy.  The Dutch like their dairy more than most.  It may be that not every Dutchman or woman is crazy for the stuff, but it certainly seems more prevalent than I remember it being in China or in Canada.  Conference breaks see glasses laid out with your standard juices, alcohol and buttermilk.  Before my husband was diagnosed as a celiac, clearly wasting away, fragile and in chronic pain, one memorable visit to the doctor had her suggesting that the solution might simply be that he wasn't eating enough dairy.  "Go home and make sure that you drink lots of buttermilk and eat more yogurt." was her advice.

This belief of mine, that the Dutch are enamored with dairy in a way that foreigners can never fully grasp, was even more ingrained a few days ago.  As it was one of the days that my daughter was at the creche, I was busy at the kitchen table my desk, working.  The day was lovely and I had the kitchen door open, the afternoon air was still and heavy - the perfect conditions for being totally immersed in my thoughts.  Slowly, though, music started to penetrate my thoughts.  At first quite quiet, I heard ragtime music, coming from the neighbour.  I found it strange, as our neighbours tend to be strictly top 40, but still, it was pleasant.  Then, the music grew louder and the acoustics shifted.  I realized that it wasn't coming from next door at all.  It was coming from the front of the house.  As it's not unusual for marching bands to go by occasionally for reasons completely unknown to me, I rushed to the front, hoping to watch.  The ringing of the doorbell beat me to it.  Opening the door, I found myself facing a robust and exuberant woman in a large florescent green hat.  She handed me a carton of milk, cheerfully explained that it was in support of local dairy farmers and then she was off.  Across and down the street were several other similarly dressed people, all ringing doorbells. Once the surprise wore off, I found that I couldn't stop laughing, and I was in a great mood for the rest of the day.  I truly believe that this is one experience that could only happen in the Netherlands.

Gluten free quiche

Don't you love when taking what seems to be the harder road turns out to be easier and better than the tried and true, easier, one?

When I first started experimenting with gluten free baking (and cooking) it certainly wasn't a choice. It's just slightly harder than regular baking and somehow those one or two extra steps seem to make a huge mental difference.  Also, balancing the proportions is more difficult and the result is slightly less regular. I like to bake, though, and I like a challenge, so I've persevered.

I also like quiche.  A lot.  Now, pie crust can be a bit tricky, but mostly my reservations have always revolved around the keep-it-in-the-fridge waiting period.  When I want my crust, I want it now!  And this was even before the gluten-free days.  Needless to say, quiche hasn't ever been part of my repertoire.  Rather, it's been something that I save for special occasions.  I'll break it out for a Boxing Day lunch, or a girls day out brunch. 

But then, oooh, but then.... Buried deep into a message board discussing easy gluten free lunches, was a recipe.  An easy recipe.  A fast recipe.  Dare I say it?  It's even a healthy recipe.

The crust is made from chickpea flour and olive oil.  The recipe suggests blending it in a blender, but that's too much mess for me so I simply use my pastry cutter and it works just great.  An even easier alternative, if you don't have a pastry cutter, would be just using a couple of knives to cut it.  Then, you press it into the pan, bake it up for a few minutes and presto!  You've got pie crust.  While I don't think that this would work for sweeter fare, here the savory flavour meshes perfectly with whatever herbs I happen to toss into the filling.

Throw in the fact that, in addition to being delicious for supper, it's filling enough that there's always leftovers for lunch the next day.  It's become one of my favorite go-to quick meals. 

Home but not home

They don't grow wild in the cold, dry landscape of Northern Alberta, where I'm from, so I associated poppies with November. From a very early age, all school children learn "In Flanders Fields". We repeat it, in chorus, while watching slideshows of the horrors of war; we study it in conjunction with the history of our nation at war. Those of us of a certain age associated it strongly with the terrible things that our beloved grandparents suffered through. And in turn, we associate these things with the small plastic red poppy that we wear on our breast in remembrance. I'm not sure, growing up, if it every occurred to me that poppies are a real flower, and if it did occur to me, it was certainly a fleeting thought.

On moving to the Netherlands, I was surprised to find that they grow wild, like a weed. Orange poppies push their way up through the cracks in the sidewalks and along side houses. I find them beautiful and they bring me a sense of peace each time I see one, but it is the red ones that grow wild alongside the train tracks that I can't stop looking at. Each train ride, at the right time of year, finds me staring out into the wild grasses spattered with bright spots of brilliant red, feeling nostalgic for home and proud of my heritage.

Dutch composting

Dutch neighbourhood waste removal is a wonderful thing. Each house is issued a pass, which opens a large metal container that buries deep into the ground and holds all of the garbage for the houses in the area. Each day, to the delight of my small child, a truck comes, attaches to the top of the container, lifts it up and dumps the refuse into it's belly before returning it to the ground.

 It wasn't always this way. Before there was the hole, each house had a standard issue black bin that needed to be wheeled out to the street once week and then retrieved the next day. When the hole was built, the city collected the bins, but somehow, we missed the memo, leaving us with a big black bin in our small backyard. Instead of fessing up and turning the bin in like we should have, J drilled a few holes in it and - just like that - we had a compost bin.

At first, in my enthusiasm, I composted everything. All the time. I saw myself as an urban environmental warrior. Then, as winter set in, I became less enthusiastic until, citing snow and ice, I called a temporary cease. As spring warmed the air, I started feeling more inclined to wander outside without a jacket for the sake of a banana peel and a few egg shells. That is until, in the full heat of summer, the stench, the fruit flies and the spiders claimed the mulch and slowly rotting fruits and vegetables as theirs. And so, this is how I've come to mark the seasons. In the spring and fall, the compost is mine; in the winter and summer it lies fallow.

This summer, though, has been different. Perhaps it's apathy, perhaps it's the unseasonably cold weather, but I haven't been able to find the motivation for it this year. I've been feeling a bit guilty about it though, and as luck would have it, I think I've hit on the solution.

One of D's favorite pastimes is feeding the animals at the local petting zoo. Currently, there is a large mama pig with ten piglets, loads of sheep and goats, and several aggressive peacocks. This being the Netherlands, bread is plentiful and cheap (except for us what with gluten-free bread being almost pricier than gold), meaning that many families show up with an entire bag full of fresh bread. The animals expect this and, with the exception of the lamas and sheep, all go all of which go crazy at the site of a slice of bread. Although the animals are kept behind a fence, the fence isn't locked and people are free to run around inside in order to try and pet the goats and sheep, but normally, the children stand at designated feeding stations. At the site of bread, the mama pig will push her babies out of the way, and it's quite common for the goats to lock horns over a piece of crust.

Up until my brilliant 'aha' moment, we'd been feeding the animals the leftover crusts that D, with her two year old reasoning, finds icky. I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure out, perhaps because I've never seen anyone else offer anything but bread, but one day it occurred to me that if they would eat bread, they surely they would eat other foods too. And so, yesterday, having collected a few scraps, off we headed to our new 'compost' system. Success! The mama piggy fought with her babies of the apple cores and a few slices of lettuce. Not those goats, though. They turned up their noses at the lettuce and the apples. They're good Dutch goats, through and through.

Cupcake crazy

Ever since the big celiac diagnosis, I've been really enjoying experimenting with gluten free baking. For Jason's birthday a little while ago, I went a bit nuts and tried to make chocolate, gluten-free, dairy-free cupcakes. The gluten-free part worked, but the dairy...whooboy. It's just not that great without the butter. For my birthday, I thought I'd give it another try, but this time make vanilla flavoured ones, with all the dairy added. And I do mean 'all' the dairy. This recipe was heavy on the butter-y goodness. Surprise! It worked. Well. I ended up with an absolutely delicious, light, sweet but not too sweet cupcake that was melt in your mouth good. Bonus, I've really been enjoying the process of learning to decorate. For a second try, I'm thinking that this isn't too bad :)

Love it/Hate it

I love the fact that I live in a country where every grocery store has, right along side the full-size grown-up carts, little carts for little people. Do other countries have these? I don't know, but I have trouble picturing my little busy body wandering around in one of the massive box grocery stores that I remember from home. It kills me to watch her put the coin into her little cart and then push it around the store, sometimes getting distracted and wandering off, but most of the time, dutifully and enthusiastically, helping find the bananas, or the tomatoes. She loves the feeling of independence it gives her and it makes life a lot easier than having her squirm in the cart for the entire trip.

What I hate is that the stores have figured out that little shoppers, along with helping put things into the cart, actually like to have a say in what ultimately goes into the cart. Certainly, I've known that what you're expected to buy is at eye level, but it had never occurred to me that this would apply to adults as well as toddlers. Since my eyes have rarely wandered down to those bottom rows unless I'm really searching for something special, I've finding that up until now, I've been oblivious to a whole range of products. I'm looking at you, Bob the Builder Luncheon Meat! And don't think I haven't got a bone to pick with you, too, Disney Princesses Cupcake Mix. Since I don't actually cave to the many, many, many items that somehow find their way into our cart each week, I suppose I should be grateful for the many, many, many 'teaching opportunities' that are presented to me, but mostly, I'm just annoyed.

A different perspective

Life abroad is a strange confluence of states of being. It is at once exotic, confusing, challenging, and mundane. The longer one is away, the more the balance tilts towards the mundane. This is at once good and bad. Trepidation is replaced by confidence, you've navigated most of the red tape and come out the other side stronger for it, the customs and culture are more familiar and so you're less likely to offend, or be offended, you know where to buy your favorite toothpaste, you've made a few friends. Life becomes easier. It's unfortunate, though, that the trade off is that daily life looses a bit of sparkle. Slowly, slowly, bit by bit, so subtly that you barely notice it, the newness of it all wears off and just becomes...life. The houses on your street are no longer quaint, they're just the place where you live (and why can't the city do something about that missing cobblestone, already?), a trip to the grocery store is no longer an adventure, instead it's simply a quick errand to pick up some milk. You try very hard to remember to appreciate what you have, but sometimes, when you're running late, you're trying to herd a cranky toddler, and you realize that you have cereal in your hair and the girl at the check-out is seemingly deliberately misunderstanding you, it's tough to do.

You never fully forget, though. Every once in a while, when you least expect it, the fates hand you a gift and say 'Here! Take a look at this!' and you remember that yes, you have a gift in this incredible foreign life. Such was it yesterday.

The Dutch have a word for their obsession for skating - schaatskoorts, or skating fever. Every year, as the temperature drops, the word is on everyone's lips as they collectively wait anxiously for the ice to thicken. This year was no exception, and was perhaps even more so as it had been unseasonably warm all year and hope was almost lost. When the thermometer finally fell, fast and hard, the conditions were perfect for ice formation.

Saturday afternoon, we were able to get out and enjoy it. Although the entire city seemed to have sold out of skates, we were still able to get down onto the canals and walk around the city, admiring the beautiful bridges, the old buildings and the houseboats. Along with the rest of the city, we slowly made our way around the star-shaped canals that ring Zwolle's centre, enjoying the festive atmosphere as we stopped to chat with neighbours and for a warm Chocomel from one of the impromptu cafes that had popped up on the ice. It was magical. As we walked, I had a feeling that I haven't experienced in quite a while, a feeling that seems to have swelled from my heart, a feeling that said 'Wow!!!! I can't believe how lucky I am to live here!'