I have a serious obsession with apples. I’d argue that as obsessions go, this is a healthy one, but my family who get dragged to at least one apple festival every fall and are regularly required to participate in apple-tasting…
When we bought our garden, there were two mature trees there: one big hazel and an even bigger pear tree. We tried to find out what variety it was, but all the answer we got was ‘probably a cooker’. We…
One of the ‘jobs-in-progress’ in the garden is moving our rhubarb plants to their new location. We have many (25? 30?) rhubarb plants but since our new garden is 5 times bigger, I want to keep them all and possibly…
Today is my daughter’s birthday and this is the tart she has asked for. Which should be all the information you need before running to the kitchen to make it, because when it comes to tarts, Esther is the pickiest…
My mom is a great cook but she’s not much of a baker. She admits she lacks the patience required for dealing with pastry and she only bakes cookies for Christmas. As for cakes, she bakes two: her family’s birthday…
Every year I put a considerable amount of thought into the first rhubarb dish of the season. I usually cover one of our 20+ plants (I’ve been meaning to count) with a big bucket to force and blanch it and…
Even though the way we celebrate Easter and the dishes we serve for our Easter brunch vary a bit from year to year, there are two food related Easter traditions we always keep. On Saturday we will decorate eggs (with…
15 years and 10 days ago, my beautiful star-eyed daughter Esther was born. At that time I was already practically living with my husband in the Netherlands but getting a residence permit turned out to be a very lengthy and…
Last week we went to a fruit exhibition at “Olde Ras”, a conservation orchard and a museum of old varieties in Doesburg, about an hour drive from where we live. Sebastiaan took some convincing because unlike me he thinks…
There is a quince tree in the middle of our street. It is there because I wanted to grow quince really badly, yet had no room left in our garden. So when one of the big raised beds in our…
I baked a wedding cake. Well, no, not the wedding cake which was an amazing two story chocolate-raspberry affair, thankfully without fondant (you can’t go wrong with chocolate and raspberries!) and of which I certainly ate my share. Rather, I…
A couple of weeks ago Sebastiaan started high school. New school, new teachers, new kids, new rules and about ten times as much homework. A big change for him (though he does not seem to worry about anything – not…
Last Monday I celebrated my 39th birthday. Remco teasingly reassured me: “You don’t look a day over 38, honey” but I’m sure I have changed in many small ways since last year and that is exactly as it should be.…
At my parents’ house, when I was growing up, everybody had their task in the kitchen, one that was playing to their strength. My mom would make the soup because she can make a soup out of anything and it…
From the time Esther and Sebastiaan were quite little, as a way of playfully teaching them about food and taste, we used to organize little family tastings. If we grew three different varieties of strawberries, we would have a tasting…