All posts filed under: Kitchen Stories

apple pie

Dutch apple pie by the book

A warm slice of high apple pie – or, as the natives call it – appeltaart, is one of the first distinctively Dutch things I came to appreciate when I moved to Amsterdam, back in 2012. It’s also the easiest to love about the somewhat austere Dutch cuisine. I must confess I’ll always point guests visiting from abroad in the direction of my favourite appeltaart place, rather than sending them off to nearest herring stall.

potato pancakes

Potato pancakes, a bread recycling recipe.

Sustainability in the kitchen makes for a fantastic excuse to indulge in the crunchy potato pancakes in this Kitchen Story. A classic in many cuisines, potato pancakes recipes often feature flour and eggs as binders. This version, instead, from the family repertoire of our guest cook Carmen, has no flour. Stale bread is one of the main components instead.

matcha cake

Matcha Cake with Yuki. A Student Recipe.

Why accept a piece of (matcha) cake, when you can have (both the cake and) the recipe? When I started giving away my sourdough starter, last winter, I didn’t expect it to become such a surprising way to connect with people of all paths of life. In weeks, I saw my Elvira being kneaded into beautiful breads of all shapes and types by the hands of many friendly strangers. One of those pairs of hands was Yuki’s.

Two Indian Recipes – part II: Rasam.

Being surrounded by coughing people and feeling a tad under the weather myself, I feel in the perfect mood to present you with a flu-busting soup, the second of Nina Subramani’s Indian recipes for As Soup As Possible YouTube channel.  Let her Kitchen Story warm your stomach and entertain you with this spicy and distinctively South-Indian takkali rasam with toor dal. 

Green Ray Spring Salad (or how to get rid of your sprouts)

While the world had certainly more serious issues to deal with, yesterday I woke up scratching my head about the tangled mess of sprouts growing in my kitchen. I tend to recurring enthusiasms for self-made, home-grown stuff. I guess it’s a side effect of my obsession with self-sufficiency: in case I ever find myself in charge of starting a new civilisation from scratch, I like to think that at least I would know how start a fire, build a shelter and bake good bread – I’d stick around if I were you. Ideally, I would get to the point of stitching my own clothes, making my own pelati (peeled tomatoes) and preserves from my own produce, and only use the eggs laid by the three pet-chickens I will have one fine day (I dream of a vegetable garden and free range chickens hiding eggs in the backyard).