Thanks to my father, I have knife skills. Thanks to him, I also know how to sharpen a kitchen knife. He’s always kept his kitchen knives perfectly sharp and I still remember the first time I encountered a blunt knife…
Quince (Cydonia oblonga) is right at the top of my fruit-trees-I-would-plant-if-I-had-any-room-left list. Right now, I don’t have any space left in my garden to plant one. That, however, does not really stop me. I planted quince “Champion” in my parents’…
Cheers to New Year’s resolutions! Cheers to cabbage salad EVERY SINGLE DAY! Or was this not one of your resolutions? Well, to tell the truth, it wasn’t mine either. But after all the Christmas cookies, something green and crunchy is…
You know what the problem is with eggs? They consist of an egg yolk and an egg white and these two are often used separately. This leads to something of a vicious circle. You bake a birthday cake – it…
Oh, the challenges of parenthood! First you have to learn how to function with a fraction of the sleep you thought you needed. Then, after you think you have recovered, it starts all over again, because your daughter is twelve…
There are many ways to preserve the home grown bounty for the winter. I don’t like canning vegetables as I find that just reduces fresh vegetables into a less desirable version of themselves. Making jellies, chutney‘s and jams on the…
I’ll always be grateful to my parents for teaching me to recognize different kinds of wild mushrooms. In an extreme case, it’s a survival skill – my daughter who is currently obsessed with the Hunger Games series, commented how strange…
Why is it that when the elderberry is flowering, everybody seems to be elbow deep in making elderflower cordial, but later, when the berries are ripe, they get much less attention? It happens here, too. Perhaps it is the overwhelming…
Tomatillos are the ideal plants for the “otherwise-ingaged” vegetable grower. Because I knew we would have to leave our allotment on 1st October, I did not look after my garden as well as I normally do. We mulched very little…
This dish is the culinary form of denial. I know it is cold and raining, and that probably means that the summer really is over. But I refuse to let go just yet. Soon enough it will be on to…
So I baked a tart and was becoming slightly more optimistic about our new allotment and the survival chances of the trees and bushes that were moved to the new plot during the weekend. But then I had a chat…
Much in cooking is about finding the right balance – the elusive point when all the components of a meal are complementing each other while none is overshadowing the others. Only then does a meal taste “just right”. But there…
It seems a long time ago, but at midterm we went to England. The weather was much better than one is justified to hope for at the end of October and the skies were a brilliant blue most of the…
Yesterday I wrote an article about the 2011 season in the vegetable garden. So far, here in the Netherlands, we have experienced the warmest spring with the lowest rainfall in more than 100 years, followed by a cool and gloomy…
As someone born in central Europe and currently residing in the Netherlands, I hardly have a reason to celebrate Thanksgiving. However, that does not stop me from imagining what I would serve on this last Thursday of November, if I…