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Pretzel time (Or: A tasty lunch)

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Niki

Since Marco had to work today and I didn’t, I decided to treat him to some soft pretzels from a nearby Austrian shop, Wiener Konditorei. They recently expanded their pretzel options to include sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, so Marco asked for a pretzel with sesame seeds on it. In theory I ordered a salted pretzel but as you can see, there wasn’t much salt on it when I got home. (No matter – I broke out the sea salt grinder at home and was good to go.)

My favorite dipping sauce with soft pretzels is yellow mustard, purchased either at the local expat store (Kelly’s) or the local Asian store, Amazing Oriental. It is a bit cheaper at Amazing Oriental however the stock is hit or miss. You might not see it for a few months. Luckily the expat store almost always has it.

Marco’s dipping sauce of choice with his sesame seeds pretzel was Frank’s buffalo wing sauce. Original and buffalo wing Frank’s have been available at Albert Heijn (the local grocery store) for a few years now. They don’t have my favorite extra hot variant anymore, though. I miss that one a lot! It is great on burgers.

Have a great weekend, everybody! Roger, Marco and I will be enjoying gourmetten tomorrow (gourmetten is traditionally done for Christmas, New Year’s and Easter – and any other time of the year you want it, of course).

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Comfort food (Or: Spanish stew from FOAM)

Posted on April 1, 2021 by Niki

Here is a look at a recent meal from FOAM here in The Hague (via the FOAM@home service on Fridays). Spanish stew with butter beans, tomatoes, olive, parsley and lemon, with bread on the side.

The taste was subtle, in a home comfort kind of way where no one thing dominated at the expense of other ingredients. The butter beans (large enough that you can easily see them in the photo above!) provided a great texture to the dish. It definitely reminded me of the chili that we ordered from FOAM earlier in the year; that was also comfort food. I really liked the bread too – I could taste a hint of salt in the background. Good stuff.

Eurovision to be event experiment; Half of audience welcome from nltimes.nl. Back in 2019 the Netherlands won the Eurovision Song Contest with Duncan Lawrence’s “Arcade” (YouTube link), which gave the Netherlands the right to host the competition in 2020. After a long search the Rotterdam Ahoy was chosen as the venue. …and then corona happened and the event was delayed a year. Opps. So here we are, in 2021, hoping to finally hold the event. Should be interesting.

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Spring has been spotted (Or: Sunscreen options at Albert Heijn)

Posted on March 30, 2021 by Niki

You know it is Spring when the sunscreen is on display at the local Albert Heijn. In this case it was on display at the self-service registers, which might make you think that the coming temperatures will be blazing hot, like 36C/100F. Nope. We are looking at around 22C/72 F for today and tomorrow before the temperature drops again. Don’t get me wrong – sunscreen is still needed at those temperatures if you spend enough time outside. I just always find it funny when I see sunscreen on display in the Netherlands.

I also wanted to complain about how expensive sun screen was here in comparison to America, but after quickly checking Walgreens I realized that it is pretty much expensive in both places. Who knew. I don’t go through sunscreen that quickly, that’s for sure!

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The Dutch really like pancakes (Or: Options at Albert Heijn)

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Niki

While shopping at the local Albert Heijn (grocery store) I decided to take a photo of the pancake options. There are a lot after all…

Let’s see… the second row is pancake options from Koopmans. Original, complete, whole wheat, custard (? Opps. Someone put that back in the wrong place – should be 6 grain whole wheat pancakes), “Grandma’s pancakes” with cinnamon, multigrain pancake and biological multigrain pancakes. The second row is mostly the store brand options – original, complete, multigrain pancakes, spelt pancakes, biological pancakes, and pancakes with extra egg whites. The last three options are the liquid pancake options – natural, original and complete pancakes.

That is a lot of pancakes, but where are the boxes of waffle mix? Those are much harder to find, unfortunately!

Categories: Everyday purchases, Food | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Time for some healthiness (Or: Broccoli salad with spectacular cashew dressing)

Posted on March 21, 2021 by Niki

Tonight’s meal was a broccoli salad with smoked almonds, grapes, dates, baby tomatoes and peanuts (to name a few ingredients). The star of the dish was hands down the smoked cashew dressing. Of course it came from FOAM in The Hague. It tasted quite healthy but so delicious at the same time.

It was interesting to have sweet elements like dates and green grapes in a dinner, but everything meshed well together.

I will admit I peeked ahead at the options for this coming Friday – the first option is a sushi bowl and the second option is Spanish stew. Definitely leaning towards the Spanish stew myself… However the sushi bowl sounds intriguing because it includes “watermelon tuna”, aka watermelon that is prepared with Japanese ingredients to make it look and taste like tuna. Here is a recipe for watermelon tuna from bhg.com, Better Homes & Gardens. Quite interesting!

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That’s a big bag of fries (Or: Value bag at Albert Heijn)

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Niki

This evening Marco and I had a hamburger and fries for our Friday meal. Think of things like: burger, jalapeños, onions, lettuce, habanero tabasco sauce… (oh, and cheddar cheese for Marco). It was so good I forgot to take a photo!

While purchasing crinkle cut fries for this dinner–yum, yum, yum–I noticed a large bag of fries at the bottom of the freezer at Albert Heijn, a Dutch grocery store. It was so huge it didn’t even fit on the shelf anymore.

The bag on the right, krokante friet (crispy fries). It is apparently 2.5 kilos of fries. That’s 5.5 pounds. Yikes! It was a “value” bag that only cost €2.

On the other hand, if it had been 2.5 kilos of crinkle cut fries… yum yum yum?

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Voting in the 2021 Dutch elections (Or: City hall)

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Niki

The 2021 Dutch elections (English Wikipedia) were held yesterday. Marco decided to cast his vote at The Hague’s city hall. Marco took a quick photo for me, aiming more at the ground to avoid getting anyone in the photo.

As you can see, everything was set up according to corona guidelines. Marco said later that it was set up rather well – there were volunteers controlling the lines, there was plenty of space between the voting booths and there was a separate entrance and exit. You entered by the library and then exited on the other side of city hall. (Check out a photo I took of city hall back in 2013, right after I moved to the Netherlands – there is a LOT of space.)

Above is random voting “paraphernalia” that Marco received, including a card with corona related questions and instructions about how to make your visit to the voting location as safe as possible, both for yourself and others. Also, special for this year only: most voters were allowed to keep the red pencil that they used to vote. Usually they are chained to the desk. However not all voters were allowed to keep the pencil. The choice was up to the city since they would have to finance the red pencils with their voting budget. Some cities decided it was more cost effective to clean them between each use instead.

Differences in cities also meant there were differences in pencils – some cities provided short, little pencils like above. Others provided longer red pencils with “Jouw stem telt!” or “Your vote counts!” printed on the side.

In COVID-19 election, Dutch voters ask: Can I keep the pencil? from reuters.com.

And of course the red pencils were already appearing on Markplaats (the Dutch eBay) early yesterday morning. Not that anyone should be surprised by that!

Categories: Daily Dutch living, The Hague | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Japanese ramen (Or: Photo from two years ago)

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Niki

Check out this photo of Japanese ramen:

This photo is from March 2019 and it was taken in Tokyo. Not by me, though. Roger and Marco visited Japan for a week and a half. I stayed in the Netherlands because I wasn’t sure what my work situation would be like, and let’s face it – I wanted the boys to have some “guy time”.

I have heard the story many times by now. Marco and Roger were actually looking for a different restaurant which was highly rated by another friend, but they didn’t find it so they went to this one instead. When they entered they needed to use a machine to order their food, which meant they needed help on how to use the machine. It was their first day in Tokyo and all. It was kind of funny considering they were the only two customers at that time of night. Once the worker helped them figure out the machine they ordered and he took the ticket it spit out. Although learning how to use the machine probably proved to be valuable knowledge for other restaurants.

While ordering they were asked how many noodles they wanted. I believe the choices were 300 grams, 400 grams or 500 grams. They ordered 500 grams without realizing just how much that is, which you can see in the photo. But I am told it was worth it! The dish above is Tsukeman (English Wikipedia) or “dipping ramen”. You dip the noodles into the broth and then eat them. Marco tells me the broth was quite spicy and stronger in taste because it is meant for dipping. At the end you ask for water to add to the broth and then eat the leftover broth.

Here is hoping they can return to Japan next year!

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An odd anniversary (Or: A year of working from home)

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Niki

I recently celebrated an odd anniversary. It has been a year since I started working from home full time. My last day in the office was March 13, 2020. See also my blog post from that weekend. (It is crazy to read that at first they were limiting groups to 100 people. Since December we can only have one guest visiting.)

To go into the office I need to have a good reason and have permission from both my department’s manager and the building manager. In the last year I have been there twice – once to pick up my new laptop (August?) and once to return my old laptop (October? It was slightly delayed because corona cases started going up around then). The office is outfitted with directional arrows and there are designated elevators for going up and for going down. I couldn’t quickly find the one that was designated “down” so I ended up taking the stairs.

On the plus side, my employer was fully ready to work from home from day one. We had recently switched over to Teams and we use Sharepoint (group network share) and OneDrive (generally personal network share, but can also be shared with groups). The “funny” thing was that the office was planning on working from home on the afternoon of Monday, March 16 to test the VPN. However the situation changed so fast that our VPN “test” was everyone logging in on Monday and getting to work. Luckily not everyone needs the VPN, however with my line of work my first action when I boot up my computer is to log into the VPN and my last action before turning off my computer is to log off the VPN. So yeah, I need it.

Marco and I live in a tiny apartment that doesn’t quite support two home workers, but we make it work. I think I held out until August or so last year before I finally caved and said we should get at least one proper work desk and chair. We only had to wait a week or two and I splurged on a desk which allows you to change the height electronically. I also splurged on an extra setup fee to have the company do it for us. I’d rather pay €50 than spend hours staring at instructions, thank you very much.

These days the only pain point is when we both have meetings. In that case one of us moves to the bedroom. Luckily I have less meetings than Marco so it doesn’t happen that often. Which is probably good, since the bedroom wifi is less than ideal.

Generally we don’t have any issues with the current working from home solution, but it is still crazy to think we have been at home for over a year now. My company let me know all the way back in December that we would be working from home at least through August 2021. Crazy.

At least we have the upcoming spring and sun to look forward to. Today it just drizzled, raining on and off. Boo!

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The weekend has arrived! (Or: Are you ready to party?)

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Niki

Happy Friday, everyone! We made it. Pat yourself on the back, even if you have to work tomorrow. It is still one day closer to your personal weekend, whenever that is.

Here is a look at Marco and I’s meal from last Friday:

That is Sayur lodeh (English Wikipedia), an Indonesian vegetable soup. In this case vegan, since we ordered it from FOAM Catering here in The Hague. Even my auto spellcheck is having trouble with typing out Sayur lodeh! The homemade sambal (pictured above the dish) was very interesting – it had a slightly sour, pleasant taste. I did find the overall dish a bit “earthy” tasting, although I would not be able to tell you which vegetable caused that. It was pretty good, though.

Who would have thought 10 years ago that I would eat stuff like this? I can say that because I didn’t move to the Netherlands until the end of 2012. It has been one wild culinary ride since then…

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