markemorse

Thanks for the nice words, sharonb...I'll answer your second question first. I don't have a ton of relevant food memories from my pre-adult years other than what we would now probably call junk food...my personal obsession with cooking was sparked in 1992 or so, I was working for the only company that would hire me after college (I was an English major ["ah, yes...say no more"], and they were a big famous software company known for oddball interview questions), and though I was living in Atlanta, I started spending a lot of time in Seattle and New Orleans. My parents had also moved to Phoenix at this point, and it was in these four cities that I learned about what food could be like. And I had an expense account for the first (only, actually) time. In Atlanta I learned about Asian food, we spent a ton of time on Buford Hwy eating as much pho as possible, and scouring the rest of the city looking for new BBQ; in Phoenix I was bitten by the chilehead vampire at one of the restaurants my parents would take me to, I think Richardson's was my first revelatory Southwestern experience, I've never fully recovered: it's my favorite regional American cuisine; Seattle is where I had my first absolutely mindblowing restaurant meals (the first: Tom Douglas' Dahlia Lounge, roasted chicken with polenta and mushrooms, I wanted to box it up and FedEx it to Mara). And I still have a huge soft spot for New Orleans-style cooking. +++ And to partially answer Kent Wang's earlier question, how did that lead to this? By 1998 or so, we had a big ol' house in suburban Atlanta and life seemed pretty good: we really had not a serious care in the world...other than a growing, oppressive feeling of "eh...is this it?" I had been truly devoted to my first "real job" at the outset, it was a fantastic, incredible place to work, but my employer had grown so humongous so quickly that by '98 I felt severely out of touch with the new office culture and the company's behavior in general. And the suburbs were killing us. So, we decided to bolt. The most obvious choice was Seattle: we'd spent a lot of time there, and I'd kind of become an adult there: plus my first microbrews and unfettered carousing happened there. But we eventually decided that if we were really going to actually leave Atlanta (where we had serious roots), then we should do something really drastic. Thus: we headed to Yurp. This could've been more carefully considered. But then maybe we wouldn't have done it, and that's unimaginable. More later on the specifics of "why Amsterdam". +++ So, to answer your original question, sharonb...these are my food roots, and these are the styles of American cooking that I spend the most time with...

Are you sure it's saffron? Isn't it turmeric? ← Hi May, that's what I would've thought, but the menu says (you can almost read it up there at the tippy-top) "gele saffraanrijst". I didn't see the rice 'til I got home so I couldn't ask my helpful server at that point. But yes, turmeric would make much more sense...

I lied! Rijsttafel pics: The menu: nasi kuning (yellow saffron rice with coconut milk and fried onions): ayam goreng kering (grilled chicken): kredok (salad with peanut sauce): saté sapi (beef with ketjap and peanut sauce): sambal goreng telor (eggs in spicy coconut sauce): rendang (spicy beef with coconut): sayur lodeh (vegetables in coconut milk): roejak manis (fruit in sweet/spicy sauce): sambal goreng tempeh (fried tempeh and sambal): atjar: ayam bumbu bali (chicken in gravy spicy sauce [?]): +++ Not pictured: seroendeng, emping. Commentary tomorrow night. ETA: the usual.

Hey there...sorry for the radio silence, got sucked into non-food related social whirlwind. Unfortunately (for you), social whirlwind picks up again bright and early tomorrow morning with birthday picnic, so no time to post today's fotos until some time tomorrow evening. You understand, right? In any case, tomorrow I will be switching out of Indische mode into Turkish/Moroccan mode (of course after we examine my rijsttafel)...should be good. Not to mention a provocative juxtaposition against Amsterdam Gay Pride festivities... +++ Today I did remember to get a birthday present, but basically (I'm whining here) I still need to wake up in the morning and make something to bring to this too too early picnic, not totally sure what it's going to be but I'm leaning towards a chickpea salad I often make with tomatoes, EVOO, pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, mint, cilantro, raw sweet onion, and some sort of nut which I don't yet have in the house. Probably almond, maybe pine nut. Anyway, I know it sucks when foodblogs have big silences, but...mmm, yes we're currently experiencing a big silence. Sorry, hoor! smooches mark

it wasn't just you....

Right, that's why the footprint is small, we're sharing one big resource semi-efficiently. Though frankly I don't get the rooftop dining/footprint size correlation...we've got to have a roof, don't we? We might as well eat on it. In other news, while I was taking a picture of some chicken satays, one of the cats I'm sitting sproinged into the frame and very deftly ran off with one of them. I think we were both equally surprised at her success. I retrieved it, but not without some effort and a psychotic ketjap trail through the apartment. Oh, kitties. ETA: rooftop/footprint shizz.

Yes, right, that's the first thing she said. Where are you getting your Indonesian?

OK, so I'm in the city center, fulfilling some emergency catsitting/housewatching duties, and I just picked up a rijsttafel, to-go, which is a tad strange, but I didn't have the time or the appetite to consume the whole thing there. I won't be able to post pictures until later tonight, but I thought I'd give you a preface now: +++ I told my server what I was trying to do regarding the exploration of the Indische kitchen, and I asked her if there was anything on my rijsttafel menu that you wouldn't find in Indonesia at all, you know that was a mutation specific to the Netherlands (I'm paraphrasing). She said, not here: but if you go somewhere like Kantjil & de Tijger (a popular restaurant), you'll see things that don't exist in Indonesia at all...she called what they serve "Dutch-Indonesian food". She explained that the rijsttafel I ordered is all Indonesian food, but from a mix of different regions. Their chef is "from everywhere" in Indonesia (quite a claim!), and so this rijsttafel is a mix of Sumatran and Javan food, along with some specific dishes from Jakarta. Further, she said that if you tried to order some of these dishes in a restaurant in Indonesia, you'd get a blank stare or a funny look (I'm paraphrasing) b/c some of it is strictly street food (she didn't give examples). Full report after a bunch of running around. +++

Do you mean I might shoot you, maybe....or are you giving me permission? And you do not want to see me in my cheerleader outfit. The skirt barely fits anymore.

Oops, forgot some things. 1) Thanks! She's not feeling much pain right now, which is good...let's hope that continues. On the down side, it looks like she's got a baseball tucked in her cheek. 2) This question assumes that I speak Dutch now. It's a complicated subject. I now completely, fully understand why many immigrants choose to stay semi-isolated within their own immigrant communities: immigration is emotionally and philosophically hard work. Transferring yourself from an environment in which you are thoroughly competent, maybe even exceptionally successful, to a daily life in which you are constantly reminded of a newfound inarticulacy and relative helplessness can be...a challenge. Using your mother tongue expressively reassures you that you are still the same old great person you've always been, especially when the people to whom you're speaking really get everything you're saying. I generally speak Dutch in public, shopping, at restaurants, the post office, the foreign police, when dealing with local customers, etc. I generally do not speak Dutch socially...most of my close friends here are people (Dutch or otherwise) who like speaking English. For me, it was a necessary security blanket during a rocky, thoroughly life-altering few years. I'm a Bad Immigrant (you've seen Bad Lieutenant, right? I'm like that). Mara, on the other hand, speaks Dutch quite well (or so people tell her), and she's worked very hard at it. She can pretty comfortably navigate an evening of dinner conversation in Dutch, for example. I just feel like a Bad Immigrant. I can understand 95% of what people are saying, especially if they're from Amsterdam....but I just don't say much. My reading comprehension is pretty good (it's all about context), but my writing sucks.

Thanks Bruce (and Jamie Lee and Catriona and everyone else) for the encouragement.... Re: yard-long beans...I don't cook with them all that often. I do eat them on a regular basis, they're a common ingredient in Suriname sandwiches, usually served with either shrimp or zoutvlees on a baguette and called a broodje kouseband. In yet another cross-cultural naming snafu, kouseband is the Surinamese name for the long bean pictured above. Googling it turns up articles that describe it as being of West African descent. Are they the same thing as yard-long beans? IDFK.

Well, it is creativity, but not mine: a dear old friend who is an undersung and terrific poet wrote a sarcastic poem in 1979 about fellow poet John Ashberry's willful and incessant indecipherability called “A Still from the Movie Jo3n”. Jo3n the kitty's name didn't originally have the silent 3 in it, but it showed up over time as a tribute to our friend Terrill. I'll see if I can get him to shoot me a copy of the poem.

Don't know when I'll get to post again today, but just wanted to say in brief: this is totally true, Chufi, if we're talking about purely Surinamese dishes like bakkeljauw (a shredded salt cod dish), or telo (fried cassava), these have remained very much in the Surinamese community and you won't find them at Albert Heijn. There are some exceptions, such as pindasoep and roti, which are in fact on AH shelves. But by and large, I think this distinction reflects the integration of Surinamers into Dutch society as a whole: the larger waves of long-term Surinamese migration to the Netherlands happened 20 years or so after the process of Indonesian integration began, and it's been a much more problematic and generally less transparent situation as well. A full discussion of this subject quickly becomes more about the complex and sensitive issues of politics and immigration policies than it does about food, so I'm not sure if this is the right place for it...I'm definitely not qualified to speak on it with any kind of authority. But in a nutshell...you're right. This blip of confusion is my fault...I was trying to steer things in an Indonesian direction in preparation for today's possible rijsttafel. I just didn't really make that clear. ETA: all kinds of things, including finally spelling rijsttafel correctly thanks to Chufi.

It's true, but, I think it's only true for the Indische/Indonesian foods. Everybody knows sate and bami, or at least the not so spicy not so authentic Dutch renditions of these originally Indonesian foods. I mean all the Dutch people know about thhese foods. But I feel that the Surinamese foods have stayed much more within the Surinamese community and did not spread or become as popular among non-Surinamese people. This distinction is interesting. ← I agree, but I also think it's a bit tough to purely separate out the Surinamese stuff (unless we're talking about pom specifically) because so there's so much cross-pollination across cultural divisions. I'm looking at the Long Chie menu right now, they call themselves a Surinamese restaurant that serves Chinese specialties. But the menu has things like babi pangang, nasi goreng, gado-gado, chicken sate, etc. on it, all of which, strictly speaking, is neither. You know? More discussion on this after my morning meetings.

OK, a gallery exhibition devoted to a dish that none of you have ever heard of, and that even someone as culinarily-obsessed (if I may be so bold) as Chufi has never tasted might sound a bit crazy, but... ...if there's one thing about the Indische kitchen that I probably haven't properly conveyed yet, it's that it can be found almost everywhere in Amsterdam. This link from the Pom op het menu website is a tiny (but growing) subset of places in the city where you can enjoy pom. I can easily think of maybe even twice as many places that aren't listed, and I'm no pom expert. When I was at our biggest, boringest grocery store chain Albert Heijn yesterday (I know...I was looking for soft foods), I wandered over to the microwaveable section and I was just blown away by how many pre-made Indische meals are available. Unfortunately they're hardcore about no pictures, but in terms of shelf space, the proportion of Indische microwaveable options (nasi goreng, babi pangang, bami with chicken satay) is comparable to the number of traditional Dutch options here's their online shopping page for microwaveable meals that should give you an idea. As you can see here, every Albert Heijn (and there must be 100 of them in Amsterdam) has ketjap manis, kroepoek, sambal oelek, atjar tjampoer, seroendeng, coconut milk, nasi goreng, bami, peanut sate sauce, dried galangal or laos, and more that I'm sure I'm forgetting. The bigger stores carry more cook-centric ingredients like candlenut paste and trassi, along with a wider selection of sambals. My point is: this food is no longer truly exotic here. For example, it's much more integrated into daily food life here than Mexican food is in America. And I just realized that Albert Heijn probably had a lot to do with this: they started carrying Indonesian products in the 1970s. OK, so they're not (or at some point weren't) all bad. Another factor is that the Netherlands is physically a much smaller and less heterogeneous country than America, so it was easier for the Indische influence to spread everywhere...

Good day, o ye who still follows along. It's Friday, a beautiful morning, I slept through the night, etc. From our outside hallway you can look into the back courtyard and see and hear the kids playing in the daycare/nursery across the way: Ah, summer. Suffused with positivty I am. +++ Thanks to everyone for their pom comments. I will sort out the actual USA names of the pomtajer...I think it's a Googleable problem, but probably a bit too timesinkish for today's schedule. I met someone last Saturday who can probably help...I'll email her now. +++ Last Saturday on my way to Kwakoe, I stopped off at the Imagine IC culture/gallery space to see an exhibit called Pom op het menu (Pom on the menu). Imagine IC describes itself as a "center for the visual representation of migration and cultures", where they try to "highlight the culture and identity of migrants as seen from their own perspective." Perfectly timely, I'd say. Anyway, Pom op het menu is an exhibit entirely devoted to pom, in words, image, and sound...from its history to its current preparations. Immediately upon entering, there were 20 or so pom recipes clipped to a clothesline, serving to highlight the individuality and potential expressiveness of different cooks' preparations. Around the corner there were several displays of ingredients and implements: And a tasting station, sadly not serving when I was there. The text says "you have to try it with tomato ketchup"...which I will in a moment. In the next room, people on TV screens talked about making pom and what it meant to them: and finally I came face to face with the taxonomy-resistant tuber itself: +++

A Sicilian orange salad, maybe?

Yeah, that's a tough one. Nutty? a little buttery? It's hard to say because you can't eat it raw due to the oxalic acid problem, and whenever I've eaten it cooked it's been highly seasoned with assertive ingredients. Taro is probably not a bad reference point, or a mild version of boniato. Either of which would probably be pretty good in this recipe as well. No genus info on the package, just called pomtayer.

1) I've been trying to think of a funny answer to this for awhile...nothing. That's not my answer, that's what I ended up with. 2) All of them? I think there might actually be potatoes involved, but ultimately their provenance is undeterminable. 3) I will at least get some shots of the canal parade, pretty sure this is 100% unique to Amsterdam. I'll also be on the lookout for "festive" street grub.

Thaaaanks. I'm just so proud of myself! And Mara said that yes, it was perfect comfort food, also because you can easily ratchet up the spiciness based on how much birambie or peper/zuur you use. So it's not bland soft food. I think a little clove and a little allspice might both be nice. Don't skimp on the nutmeg, either, though...that's key.

I'm sure there are some sacrilegious moments in this recipe, but this is exactly what I did, and it worked wonderfully. BTW, those are two slices of pickled onion from the birambie jar next to it. Very spicy substitute for the more typical atjar or cukes we tend to see served with pom here, it kind of combines the peper and zuur into one condiment. +++ pom (surinamese chicken and pomtajer casserole). 300g chicken breast, leg, or thigh meat, or a mix of these freshly grated nutmeg salt and pepper 100g zoutvlees 150g butter 3 yellow onions, chopped 3 canned roma tomatoes, chopped 1 cup chicken broth 2 tbsp palm sugar 1 kilo pomtajer/new cocoyam, grated 1/3 cup celery leaves, chopped fine the juice of 2 oranges the juice of 1 lemon freshly grated nutmeg salt pepper Soak the zoutvlees in cold water for 30 minutes or so, then rinse and dice the meat. Rub the chicken pieces thoroughly in a mix of equal parts salt, pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg. Here's my cute little nutmeg grater: Brown the chicken pieces in a sautepan, using a little of the butter to facilitate if necessary. Add the zoutvlees and saute for 5 minutes or so, then add the rest of the butter and the onions, tomatoes, chicken broth and palm sugar, and simmer until the palm sugar melts. Turn off the heat. Grab your defrosted, grated pomtajer. Add the orange and lemon juices and the celery leaves to the pomtajer, then add all of the liquid from the chicken mixture, and stir to integrate everything. Spread half of the pomtajer mixture along the bottom of a buttered baking dish, and then place a layer of the chicken mixture on top. Top with a layer of the pomtajer mixture. Dot the top with butter if you feel like it. Bake for 90 minutes at 175C. After about an hour check to see if the top is drying out. If it is, either dot some more butter on top, or if you think you've already added plenty of butter, you can mix things around in the baking pan to moisten. Serve with birambie (or similar homemade spicy pickles) either by itself or on a baguette for a broodje pom. +++ And to further toot my own horn, here's Swietie Sranang's broodje pom, for comparison: Aw yeah. Mine was just the tiniest tiniest bit less decadently juicy in comparison, but that's because I did skimp on the butter a little, about 50g less than I probably should've used...but my conscience was peering rudely over my shoulder in the kitchen and I just couldn't do it. I'll think I'll stick with my proportions so that my guilt is just ever so slightly less crushing. +++

Oh sure -- it didn't show up well when I tried at first, because I don't have any white plates, but here are a couple on an index card. Frog and folding knife for ... scale, I guess. ← Perfect, Bill, thanks...that answers our question!

Holy moly, the pom came out amazing. Mara and I have just been sitting here in the afterglow of our pom, every minute or two uttering a "wow", "man", "geez", "amazing", etc. In fact, Mara just said "really good pom" again while I was typing that last sentence! I think it's just been such an exotic mystery treat for so long that I didn't even consider making it. But it was totally easy and absolutely yummy. Now we have to find a way for you guys to get some pomtajer and zoutvlees.... New, improved recipe and pictures in a sec.

Finally, ketjap etymology I sort of believe: from the Malay kichap or Indonesian kecap or Chinese koechiap?, it originally referred to a preserved fish sauce. English dictionaries spell it ketchup as early as 1690. English and Dutch seamen brought the sauce back to their respective countries and the mutation began. Mwaahahahahaaha. Lots of other crazy shit was added to the original ketchup, and by 1800 the first tomato ketchup recipes were showing up in American cookbooks (this is the only bit that Wikipedia cites a source for, the rest I got from a mish mash of etymology references, this being the most believeable).

Thanks, Bill! But is there any way you can show us one pepper? Nice frog, BTW....