markemorse

This explains so much.

Hi Pontormo! About vegetarian duck...that actually refers to the oxymoronicness (not a word!) of seitan products like, well..."vegetarian duck". In no way does it mean to imply that I'm a vegetarian. I've dallied with it before, I go through periods of meatlessness, and I cook a lot of vegetarian food, but I'm afraid I just might be a carnivore at heart. The swine community is always especially upset to hear that I'm eating meat again because I do loves me some pork. With maple syrup, natch.

Hmm, I had a wrench thrown into my works by the fact that Long Chie is closed on Mondays, and Golden Dragon (yes, that's really the name) down the street is closed for summer vacation. Boo. So I went back to Swietie Sranang (I really didn't feel like cooking!) and got a Chicken Tjauwmin: Please excuse the general disarray in the background...we were at the beach last week and haven't officially unpacked yet. So this is chicken sauteed in a sweet ketjap manis sauce with long beans, cabbage, and noodles. And a little baggie of spicy Javanese sambal on top. More detail: And a sweetened tamarind juice to drink: +++

Thanks johnnyd, and you're right on...it is absolutely one of the best things about living somewhere with such a rich and twisted history. And as for the shops...yeah, you're not going to find these sandwiches very easily over there. Like you need yet another reason to come to Amsterdam?

Thanks for the kind words, racheld...I'm pretty sure spending too much time in Alabama is how I ended up in this sausage/sweet predicament to begin with...a dipping bowl of sorghum sounds pretty dang tasty right about now. I gotta go find some dinner.

Absolutely. This is one of the key "bridge" ingredients in fact. And tamarind juice is one thing that you can buy at almost all of the tokos, regardless of whether they are more East Indies or West Indies focused. As for these common elements? Curry and tamarind for sure. Ginger is another...coconut as well. Coriander, too.

This is a pomtajer or new cocoyam. And this: is what you would use to grate it if you didn't already buy frozen, grated pomtajer like I did. So here's the pom recipe I'm going to use, just so you get an idea of what it might be like. NOTE: Do not eat uncooked pomtajer, your tummy will hurt. Can't remember why, I'll look it up when I have a chance. +++ pom (creole-style surinamese chicken and cocoyam casserole). 1 chicken, in pieces 1 kilo pomtajer/new cocoyam, grated 200g zoutvlees (highly salted beef preserved in pickling spices, I'll post a recipe for this if I can find one) 150g butter 3 onions, chopped 3 tomatoes, chopped 2 chicken boullion cubes 1 cup water 1/2 cup celery leaves, chopped 1/2 cup parsley, chopped the juice of 2 oranges the juice of 1 lemon 2 tbsp palm sugar 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 salt, pepper, and the nutmeg. Melt the butter in a sautepan, and brown the chicken pieces. Add the onions, tomatoes, zoutvlees, herbs, bouillion, and water. Mix the pomtajer with the sugar, the liquid from the chicken, and the orange and lemon juices. Spread a layer of the pomtajer mixture in a baking dish and then place some of the chicken pieces on top. Keep doing these layers until the chicken and pomtajer mixtures are used up. Bake for 90 minutes at 175C. +++

OK, what did I eat? +++ A bara as it's made here in Amsterdam is a Hindustani deep-fried black lentil fritter with whole cumin seeds and minced celery leaves in the batter. Seems pretty straightforwardly Indian until you taste the relish on top: buck up! you in habanero country now (actually it's adjoema, another variant of the scotch bonnet/habanero strain), and man is it hot. Sometimes I really like punishingly spicy food, and this fits into that category. Obviously, you can choose to have the peper relish on the side, but that sounds pretty wussy to me. +++ Moksi meti literally means "mixed meats", and can be served with up to 4 meats: most typically it's cha siu, fa chong (or fa tsong), fo lam, and sometimes Peking duck. Sounds pretty Chinese. Except it's on a baguette, with pickles. And the sauce that's been slathered on the baguette here is another habanero/adjoema-based Java-style sambal. Not anywhere near as lethal as the bara relish, it's a very subtle, smoky heat that builds slowly but never burns you out. The fresh pickles, lightly dressed with vinegar and allspice, help keep things running cool. +++ And then there's the pom sandwich. Pom is the Surinamese national dish, essentially a baked casserole of chicken and grated pomtajer or cocoyam, flavored with orange and lemon juice; salted, brined beef called zoutvlees; tomato; celery; butter, hababero/adjoema, and nutmeg. Everyone's recipe is a tightly held secret. The passion that surrounds pom and the way that it is discussed, debated, deconstructed, and delivered is comparable to American feelings about...maybe chili is a good comparison? BBQ is too ritualistic and mysterious, it's lighter than that. But still serious. I myself have no illusions about my pom recipe. Mostly because I have never tried my pom recipe, I'll be doing that later this week. But I'll post it in a few so you can see what this is made of and try to do some virtual tasting. +++ The broodjes from Swietie Sranang are nowhere close to my favorite in town: they desperately need to toast their baguettes before they stuff them so that the sandwich can maintain its integrity after you spread a good dash of sambal on there. Also, there's just not enough textural contrast...you just need a bit more crunch. But! It is right downstairs. And these were better-than-their-usual sandwiches today. And cheap, 2 euros-ish per sandwich. The bara was 1 euro.

For lunch I went downstairs and got a few Surinamese snacks. From Toko Hangalampoe, a bara: And from 4 doors down, a place called Swietie Sranang, I got two sandwiches, a broodje moksi meti: and a broodje pom: I'll explain these in a sec.

Pictured: Bara vendor's stand from my Saturday visit to Amsterdam's Kwakoe festival. +++ A quick dossier on Suriname: it's a small country with a complicated history in northern South America, nestled between French Guyana to the east and Guyana to the west. Brazil is on its southern border (you can't see me, but I'm pointing it out on a map right now). It was a Dutch colony for 300 years or so, and like many plantation cultures, the workers initially consisted of imported slaves and later cheap contract labor. It's the sources of these migrant workers that makes this an culinarily interesting development. Slavery was abolished in 1863, and thereafter Hindustani laborers were brought in to replace the slaves, primarily from areas around Calcutta and the Indian states of Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Chinese migrant laborers began showing up as well around this time, and Javanese were also brought in from Indonesia to fill the labor demand. Today (well, as of 2005) Suriname's population breaks down ethnically like this: 37% Hindustani/East Indian; 31% Creole (ethnically mixed descendants of West African slaves); 15% Javanese; 10% Maroons (descendants of escaped West African slaves)...and the rest are made up of Amerindians, Chinese, Dutch, and Jewish groups (Source: Wikipedia). So you can see that this is an exciting bunch of influences that have to somehow jockey for position in the Tastebud Derby of the Indische kitchen. Add these to the existing Chinese and Indonesian elements, and there you have it. OK, OK, enough academic shenanigans. let's eat!

Yes! I'll elaborate in a bit. Keuken is a noun that translates as "kitchen", so it would really only translate as "cooking" in the same way you can use "the Dutch kitchen" to refer to Dutch cooking. Sorry for the confusion... And I will definitely try to find online sources for any extremely rare ingredients...Sandy, do you have stores nearby where you can buy Caribbean tubers? I seem to remember my local Mexican or Cuban places doing a pretty good job of covering this territory back in the States. +++

Thanks for all the support, guys...really! +++ So, right...the Indische kitchen. Around 1900, the first significant groups of migrant Chinese seamen began showing up in Amsterdam, and their numbers steadily increased despite the unstable environment of the first half of the century, largely due to the tendency of Dutch shipping companies to hire Chinese sailors as strikebreakers. After the wars, in the late 40s as society was putting itself back together, the Chinese population in the Netherlands began to do what they've done in so many other places: open restaurants. For many Dutch people, Chinese food was the first non-Dutch food they'd ever tasted. Where this story gets especially interesting for our purposes is that, just about this same time, the former Dutch colony of Indonesia had been granted independence (in 1949). Almost 300,000 Dutch-Indonesians entered the Netherlands in the 30 years after World War II. As you would, the existing Chinese restaurants immediately began adapting their cuisine to suit the waves of Indonesian immigrants and Dutch workers returning from Indonesia, by subtlely modifying their spices and adding dishes like nasi goreng and sates to their largely Cantonese menus. This period is also when the first tokos began cropping up (a toko is an Indonesian food shop), and really this is where the "Chinees-Indische" kitchen begins. In the 70s, when Suriname was granted independence, a similiar migration wave occurred, and the Indische kitchen expanded to include this cuisine as well. More on this in a bit. +++ Pictured above: Long Chie, the Chinese-Surinamese place that's next door to Toko Hangalampoe. I will probably get takeout from here tonight, it's not circuitblowingly awesome, but it's 20 meters from my front door and frankly...we just had two weeks of houseguests: good times were had, but also we had not enough sleep, too much booze, etc. I need a bit of downtime. +++

Hey Jamie Lee, you should be able to find most of the raw materials for these dishes at Asian grocers who focus on Indonesian or Malaysian ingredients, and Mexican grocers are good sources for the more South American ingredients like cassava, boniato, plantain, calalloo, etc. There's not too much here that I couldn't have found when I lived in Atlanta for example....I'll keep my eyes out for a relevant website though...

Hey Klary, I'll be doing some in-depth shopping trips tomorrow I hope, but for now I can say that I get all of my "exotic" shopping done at the three places on my block. Just now I went to go take pictures of these joints, but my dangblasted camera battery died almost immediately. So, I'll go back and take real pictures next time... +++ This is Bario Market, or "the Turkish guys" as we tend to refer to it. They are a trio (or more) of superfriendly brothers just down the block, and they've got almost everything we need on a weekly basis: great vegetables, high-quality canned bonito in olive oil, good sardines, great fresh mint and coriander, fresh bread, pasta, semolina, beans, etc. etc. etc. I love these guys, and we try to shop here as much as we can (vs. shopping at a chain grocery store). +++ This is Toko Hangalampoe, a Surinamese/Hindustani toko right across the street from the Turkish guys, and this is where I get my tropical ingredients: sambals, chiles, limes, boniatos, plantains, coconut, besan, long beans, etc. But also general Asian stuff: for example, you can see the rows of oyster sauce bottles just under the word "toko" in the pic above. I picked up a snack here just now that I'll show you in a minute. +++

Apparently sleep is not in the cards for me at the moment. So let me start to talk about Suriname cooking, because I know I'll run out of time or energy or both this week and this is to me one of the most distinctive areas of Amsterdam eating, and there's almost no good information about it in English on the web, etc....... The unifying force behind much of the food I'll be eating this week is something called the Indische keuken. "Indische" is a word that you will see on hundreds of restaurant signs in Amsterdam, and the concept is essentially the "Indies' kitchen"...referencing the cooking of the Dutch colonies of the East and West Indies. This is worth lingering over for a sec: the idea of a single, ubiquitous hybrid kitchen that combines the tastes of Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. What are the unifying ingredients here? Anyone? In the spirit of interactivity, I'll let some people try to hazard some guesses b4 I just plow didacticly (and split infinitively) onward. +++ In other news, I've just had some breakfast: Fa Chong, a Chinese/Surinamese chicken sausage glazed with a bit of maple syrup. I am a big huge sucker for sausage and maple syrup together. In fact, I think I can offically declare maple syrup my Favorite Food Ever, but only when it's served with something salty. I'm complex like that, what can I say.

There's not really a grand master plan for the week because I didn't know who would be in town, what would be open, etc. I had hoped to visit one of Amsterdam's most lauded restaurants during this blogweek, but I instead had to go on Saturday (two days ago), because my partner/wife/best bud Mara has to have jaw surgery on Thursday, and we don't know what her chomping capabilities are going to be after that....but you know, I remember that meal as if it was just yesterday (cue swirly harp flashback music).... +++ We'd been hearing great things about Marius for many months, and I finally decided that if I didn't make a special effort to go there, it wasn't going to happen, so we invited Chufi and Dennis and booked a reservation for Saturday night. The following pictures are quite obviously Chufi's. The chef is Kees Elfring, a Chez Panisse alum. The menu changes based on what's in the markets, and there's a 4-course menu option with optional wine pairings. If you don't like something on the 4-course menu, you can choose a substitute from a handful of regular specialities. We all went with the 4-course menu and wine pairings because, well...it just looked great. We started with a deconstructed sort of ratatouille: with seared tuna, octopus, eggplant, tomato, and artichoke hearts. Very clean, fresh flavors, perfectly seasoned with a hint of cumin seed. Nice. Then, risotto with monkfish and mint: I think this was my favorite dish of the evening...you forget how light a risotto can be in the right hands. Next up was duck with chanterelles: Also delicious, the duck was done perfectly, the jus was totally soakupable with Marius' great house bread. It was at this point in the meal that the wine pairings began to impair my critical faculties and, frankly, I can't tell you much about the cheese plate: But I know Chufi can. The highlight for me was a raw cow's cheese at the 5 o'clock position that I can't remember the name of, but the homemade panforte-like fig bread was very good as well. And we finished with a flourless chocolate cake with creme anglaise and a Reine Claude and cherry clafouti/tart: It was a very enjoyable meal, we definitely had fun, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with any aspect of the service or the food, it was unobtrusively excellent. I do think that this particular menu was the tiniest bit boring for me...I like food that makes me say wow, and while this was all very well-executed, I never had a wow moment. Maybe my first bite of duck. Or the desserts. Anyway, I'd go back in a second because there was every indication that the chef was totally in control of what he was doing, and the restaurant itself is completely comfortable and relaxed. I'd just hope for a bit more zing! pow! zap! next time. After dinner we returned to the monkey sculpture we'd stumbled across before dinner (and how often can you say that?): And then we 4 monkeys went our separate ways...

About my teaser pic: the immigrant kitchen in which I'm currently most interested is that of Suriname. The item pictured is called pomtajer in Dutch, the most common English name is new cocoyam. Scientifically speaking, it's a member of the genus Xanthosoma. Pomtajer is a tuber that provides the basis of the Surinamese national dish, pom, which I am in love with. This week I will 1) eat pom 2) make pom 3) try to convey what pom tastes like, because it's not really like any other one thing 4) try to convey what pom means to the Surinamese.

How-do. I'm Mark, I've just grown a very big moustache, and I'll be your blogger for the next week or so. I live in Amsterdam, The Netherlands....yes, the very same Amsterdam that is home to one of eG's more revered foodbloggers, the lovely and talented Chufi. When snowangel asked me to do this here foodblog thing, of course my first concern (understandably) was that my blog would do nothing more than serve up a healthy slice of relative suckitude. ...but then I thought about it a little....and as many common tastes as The Chufe and I seem to have, we come from quite obviously different perspectives: I'm an immigrant here (5 years in March), and an American, and that immediately plunks she and I down at two distinctly different reference points: I think the Dutch Cooking thread (the reason I joined eGullet, BTW) and her foodblogs beautifully articulate where she's coming from. I think I may be coming from an almost opposite direction. What i eat here in Amsterdam happens to consist primarily of other immigrating cultures' food...Indonesian, Surinamese, Antillean, Turkish, and Moroccan foods show up in our apartment on a daily basis. And what fascinates me about the Amsterdam versions of these kitchens is that they reflect all of the compromises and constant adaptation that immigration requires, and what we ultimately end up with is a set of multicultural cuisines that you can't really find anywhere else in the world. So, in showing you a normal* week for us, I hope I can show you some of the interesting hybrid grub that makes up our daily eating life. * Actually, there is nothing normal about this week. It is the dead of summer holiday here: all of the music venues are closed, most of our friends and neighbors are out of the country, and a good number of our normal eateries are on on vacation as well. I just realized how strange this sounds: "all of the music venues are closed". This directly affects our life because we are closely tied to one of the, eh..."alternative" music scenes here in Amsterdam. I'll probably elaborate on that eventually, but what it means is that most of our friends are musicians, producers, label owners, etc...and going out and seeing or playing music is the cornerstone of our social life. But every July and August the citywide music scene shuts down and almost everyone we know leaves town, either to play in festivals around Europe or to just get away until the season restarts in September. We have not yet mastered this "getting out of town" bit. +++ I'm a bit of an insomniac, and summertime is especially tough because of all the daylight hours. So, I'm off to (hopefully) sleep for awhile, but I'll put my nose to the grindstone here as soon as it wakes up.

Maple syrup and salt.

Purist: Heinz, Guldens, Dutch mayo, tomato, onion. Nostalgic: A1, Swiss cheese, and sauteed onion on an English muffin...my dad used to make these. I would get the hiccups every time. 1990s burger: blue cheese, bacon, Heinz, Vidalia onion. And a Sierra Nevada.

Awesome, amazing thread...I've been hoping for some full-on SheenaGreena for awhile now....thanks! mark

Heineken. Nice blog, thanks!

Should also mention that there are a handful of restaurants in the actual Westergasfabriek itself: Proef, De Bakkerswinkel, and Pacific Parc. Of these, I'd say that De Bakkerswinkel is worth getting a bite to eat at; Pacific Parc is only worth having an outside drink at...and the lower your expectations of the service, the better. There's also something called the Flexbar that good friends have had good things to say about, but I'm not sure they serve food. mem

Great. I've never had a 2-year-old (but I've heard they're delicious! ha ha), so this could be off base, but.... Based on where you're situated you've got two obvious food neighborhoods to prowl through: Chinatown/Red Light, and Haarlemmerstraat (well, 3 if you count the Jordaan as a whole, but I'd save that for a more energy-filled day). I've lived in both of the above neighborhoods, and if it's a sunny day, I'd choose the latter track and head directly west from your hotel on the Haarlemmerstraat, towards the Westerpark and Westergasfabriek for a picnic and some duck harassment. There's a wading pool, playground, etc. and lots of ducks, swans, etc. for chasing. If you walk west along the Haarlemmerstraat to get to the park, it's probably a 15 minute walk with a stroller. Some more photos here. I should highlight that this is basically a low-pressure day of doing nothing but hanging out and chillin' in the park with your family and good food...there's nothing to see here except lots of locals doing the same thing you are. except you're also getting lots of daylight in your system to alleviate jet lag... Most of this is upthread somewhere, but....For food, i'd stop and get sandwiches at either Vlaamsch Broodhuys (Haarlemmerstraat 108), or Hollandaluz, (Haarlemmerstraat 71). Or some seafood snacks (and sandwiches) at Volendammer Vishandel 't Centrum, Haarlemmerdijk 4. I know, seafood on a picnic sounds like a food safety disaster, but it's fresh, you'll be fine. There's also a decent (but still a bit close to the center and thus touristy and expensive) cheese shop across the street from it as well as a full-service AH grocery store for anything else you need. Just remembered, there's also a cash machine across the canal from all of this (grocery stores here don't take credit or non-Dutch debit cards). For chilled wine to take to the park, stop at Grapedistrict (Haarlemmerstraat 112)... And then after the little one takes a nap at the park, you guys could stop in at The Movies and see the new Shrek, but there's not an English version, oops... Anyway, this is really just a suggestion for your "one easy day to get through", obviously once we factor in public transportation and a good night's sleep for everyone, the possibilities open up dramatically. hope this helps, it sounds like many of our summer days from last year, actually.... ETA: apparently the walk from Central Station to the Westerpark is about a mile total. If you're stopping for picnic supplies though, it'll fly by. And I promise you won't be the only stroller on the sidewalk...it's Mommy (and Daddy) Central out there these days. mem

hi lois! central station itself (+ its current construction footprint) is actually pretty darn big....if you can give us a street name where you'll be staying the first night we can probably reduce your foraging time significantly...(and maybe tell us if you'll be here before 6pm or not, when many food shops close)... mark