markemorse

Goodness, the Blind Eye Organ looks like a great idea...how's it sound? We should get these guys to come over to STEIM in Amsterdam. Keep the geekery coming! mem

Hey Margo, Great to have another Amsterdam voice here, welcome! Please do find out the name of the Kashmiri place...I'm always looking for good Indian here. The two best I've had thus far were really good (AND, they both deliver!), but I haven't been to either of them in more than a year. Vijaya is a couple blocks from Nieuwmarkt and was my local Indian when I lived over there, very good atjar/achar dishes. And Neetu da Dhaba (Overtoom 482) is down the street from one of the places I work, and their food was very very good the last time I tried it, but that was a while back. Recent reports from iens.nl are mixed. +++ In other take-out/delivery news, Top Thai has really done something good to their kitchen: I stopped in on Friday, and picked up the best Thai I've had in years. It was so good, I had to try it again last night to see if Friday was a fluke or not, and...well it wasn't quite as awesome as Friday, but definitely very above-average and quite a bit better than they used to be. +++ mem

Hey Klary, it's called "Dutch Cookery: Savouring a century", by Janny de Moor, Nico de Rooij, and Albert Tielemans. The publisher is the Dutch Culinary Art Foundation in cooperation with Kosmos Z & K, Utrecht. This is not necessarily a bad book, but the translation really steals the show from the recipes for me. It's flamboyantly confident while frequently being almost completely nonsensical. I'll lend you my copy. mem

I'll also join the cheering section: put it in a book already! I just bought a hilariously badly-written cookbook called Dutch Cookery. It was cheap, and the concept is interesting...trying to review the last century of Dutch cuisine, a decade at a time, illustrated with recipes, cookbooks, menus, etc. from those years. The recipes are mostly fine...at least interesting, not totally practical... But OMG, the English translation is fascinatingly bad for such a professional-looking production. "The sherry years! Do not hesitate to call them that." "Tepid salads are the showpiece of this decade." "In restaurants clear broth is winning from turtle soup." +++ Go Klary, go!!! I'll help proofread (and taste!).... mem

Try scrubbing your hands with a freshly cut tomato. I don't use this to relieve burning hands, but to remove chili oils from my hands so I don't inadvertently incinerate another body part later. It's a new trick, can't remember where I heard about it (maybe here?), but it has seemed to work the last couple of times I've habaneroed. Weird that the milk didn't stop the burning....was it any help at all? mark

I'm not talking about judgments. And I'm not talking about functionality--of course food is ultimately meant to be eaten as well as appreciated visually. I'm saying that food, especially at the highest levels (finest restaurants) can convey a message, and that message is non-representational, non-verbal, and as difficult to articulate as a "philosophy of art" or a "philosophy of sculpture" would be. More so, because the gustatory descriptives are more subjective. ← Please give one or a few examples. (And I'm not convinced that taste in food is more subjective than, say, a listener's interpretation of a Beethoven sonata. But perhaps this thread is no longer about which art is "most abstract," but about how cooking and dining can be abstract.) ← I continue to agree with Pan on this point...my only problem with this thread is the "most abstract" characterization...for example, I think it's pretty easy to prove that music can be and has been taken to further degrees of meaningful abstraction than is possible with food, and that "gustatory descriptives" are not any more subjective than those involved in appreciating and describing music. But: I'm also not feeling like dragging this thread down into meta-geekery (unless that was the original intent in which case...I'm there!).... mem ETA: removed questionably relevant link.

Right on, Pan...I had typed a post in this vein when the thread started but I didn't post it because I thought I was geeking out...thanks for doing it for me! mem

Versions of this salad are ubiquitous in Amsterdam as well....though I'm reluctant to trace the lineage back to Alice Waters....might we maybe blame the French instead? Not sure, but this looks like their work. (I'm kidding about the word "blame", I actually love this salad if the nuts are fresh, there's at least one fresh herb [tarragon, dill, chives], the dressing has a little serious mustard and the whole production isn't very sweet at all...I think people run into trouble when they start emphasizing the sweet element in the dressing: a tsp of honey is all you need, there's already plenty of sweetness in the salad itself). mem

I almost tried making a coconut-based jackfruit soup this week....I'd love to know what you did (Abra) and why you didn't serve it (other than overspicyness)..... thx mark

Hey Janet.... I think you'll have to go up to Buford Highway for the real deal....intown, Hong Kong Harbor on Cheshire Bridge was my local for a long time and it's better than average (and open late)...but still not anything like somewhere like Little Szechwan on Bu. hiway.... good luck, please post any great finds here! mark

Has anyone tried using the Foco juices for this kind of stuff? I really love their roasted coconut juice and would love to see this in a cocktail...aloe vera would be nice too (if you haven't tasted it, you should...very uniquely sweet and fresh), but not sure how Indian that is.... mem

Is this the Sala in Camille's old location? Their Humo de Oaxaca app is one of the best things I've ever eaten.... mem

What if they haven't shown up after three hours??? ← Then it's time to switch to water... No, I'd call it a night after two hours or so. But I would wait considerably longer than an hour...logistics, traffic, navigation, 6 people...that's tough even without international considerations. And I did pick the place. mem

Two hours. At the bar.

Hey Jack, welcome to our neck of the woods... I can't really speak to the "is it eaten here" aspect, but in terms of where to get it: it's true that you'll rarely see duck at the supermarket (though some of the bigger Albert Heijns carry sliced, cooked duck breast for typical AH prices)... You have to go instead to your local poelier, like a butcher but for poultry. I haven't seen many slagerij (general-purpose butcher) that carry duck or other non-chicken fowl, but the poeliers do. I'm enjoying my local one, Jonk, on the Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam. Hope that helps.... mark

over here they call it "e621"....dunno if you guys see that at all. mem

hey yunnermeier, sorry i missed a couple days, but catching up now....thanks for going nuts on the buah keras! it all looks totally great...could you maybe share your Chilli Garam chicken recipe? what eez it? thx mem

hey yunnermeier, great to see you at the helm again! do you take requests? i'd love to see some cooking with candlenuts/kemirienoten this week....(and some nutritional info on them if you can find it, saturated fat in particular).... mem

Um...I have a hard time believing that you ever forget to bring lunch to work! And which organic butcher is this: the one at the market, or your usual?

Glad you took the goat sausage plunge! Those weren't even the ones I was talking about (they were a coarser grind, more like the stereotypical chorizo we see everywhere here)...but those look really good! mem

Oh, no! I love coffee! I'm really bad at making it though. I usually have coffee elsewhere. My favorite way to start the day is get to a coffeehouse early, drink coffee, read the papers and think about all the little projects I have going on Coffee at the office is so bad though, that I try not to drink it except the first cup I really need to get going. ← Sorry that this question is a bit late, but....what do you do when you have dinner guests, in terms of making them a decent cup of coffee (I ask because I have exactly the same problem)? mem P.S. Your sugar cookies are finally crisp again!

Great jenever article, Pan...thanks. I now realize that I must try some corenwijn...I had no idea it was so different from jonge and oude jenevers. mem

I think i've finally un-repressed my contribution to this thread. unfortunately, it was served by that most dangerous of creatures: the very good friend who loves to eat good food but possesses absolutely no kitchen skills and can somehow not taste their own cooking. and will hopefully never read this post. let's see: the starter was asparagus with homemade aioli. the asparagus was presented on a serving plate in an interesting cylinder-on-its-side formation, almost as if you'd emptied a can of asparagus onto a serving dish...no, wait: you had! the idea was for us to dip the asparagus spears into the aioli, but you couldn't actually pick up an individual spear, it was like trying to pick up a spear of, say...whipped cream. we resorted to spreading it on bread with a knife. the aioli was an equally challenging preparation: the consistency of buttermilk and the taste of cheap sunflower oil. i avoided this. next course was a garlic soup, i think it came from a Gilroy cookbook. this was a huge, piping-hot serving of old oil...possibly olive oil, but it was so far past its prime that all you could taste was past-its-prime-ness. this was considerably less edible than the asparagus. and, that was the worst of it: by the time i snuck my soup bowl into the kitchen to empty it into the sink, we'd had enough beer that i can't really remember too much about the 40 Clove of Garlic Chicken that followed. but the first two courses are burned into my taste memory FOREVER.

Those mangoritas really were perfect drinks... I'm bummed that in the rush to get an appetizer into people's mouths we kind of forgot all about the homemade Ethiopian honeywine (tej) that IlCuoco brought with him...I only remembered it again after midnight. Refreshing and just strange enough...but it would've been yet another adventure in exoticism for the Chufipalate... and how strange is this? the apartment down the hall in which the pork was being roasted also had a bottle of completely unrelated homemade tej in the fridge...is this an amsterdam thing, or does everyone know someone with access to homemade honeywine? good stuff! mem

By the way, this Queen's Day I went back to Japanese Pancake World for their mini-okonomiyaki: Bigger than last year, but still tasty!