Claudia Roden signing in Amsterdam

Claudia Roden signing in Amsterdam
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

The Kookboekhandel in Amsterdam moved to a new location in the Haarlemmerdijk, and invited Claudia Roden to sign her new book, Arabesque, there to commemmorate the opening (thank you Ronald from Zestz for the tip!).

I have been a fan of Claudia Roden for a long time, since buying her Book on Jewish Cooking. Her cookbooks are all very well researched and beautifully written. They have such depths; you get a glimse of myriad culinary worlds by reading them, and this makes you feel there is so much to explore, and so much to taste and cook! She was granted one of the Prince Claus Awards in 1999 in for all her work, which was kind of a wake-up call for me: so thinking about food and cooking CAN be a serious affair...

So here I was, queueing in the seriously crowded bookstore, excited to see so many fans together, and spotting Johannes van Dam (how could anyone miss his imposing figure, hat and all?) in one go. "To Alice, with best wishes , Claudia Roden" she wrote, and I told her I greatly admire her work. She just smiled and thanked me. Such a charming and dignified lady! I was truly happy to have gone to see her, and I walked away proudly with my signed volume of Arabesque, which I started reading on the train back home.

Char-Xiu rice flour roll

chashao changfen ????- char siu rice flour roll
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

Had a lovely dinner in Cheung Wing in The Hague. This restaurant is kind of tucked away and only accessible from the street by an elevator going upstairs, which is quite a funny way to enter a restaurant. We were celebrating a friend's birthday and made a large order of all kinds of dimsum, and some stir-fry dishes, too. The restaurant's style is Cantonese, so no hot flavours or spicy Szechuan cooking, but tasty Southern Chinese food. The restaurant had a large Chinese clientele, which is always a good sign for a Chinese restaurant. We had a selection of steamed small xiaolong bao in bamboo steamers, those shiny little dumplings with shrimp filling with small neats pleat in the centre, and very flavourful greenish jiaozi-shaped dimsum - showing their true style once bitten into, when again you could taste the Southern style shrimp filling, instead of the hearty Northern style pork and chives. The picture here shows a southern specialty: a roll made of rice flour with a charsiu [Mandarin: chashao] filling. Charsiu or charxiu is the name of barbecued pork, which is served sliced, usually on rice or noodle dishes, or as a dish on its own. But you can also cut it into small pieces and stuff it into a dimsum like this, or inside baozi or bapaos. This roll is very tasty: the outside very soft and slippery, a perfect opportunity to test your chopsticks skills; and inside the roasted BBQ flavoured pork with vegetables and a hint of star anise, soy sauce, and just a little bit of sugar. It was finished in no time - we should have ordered many more! The duck they served was very good, too; succulent meat and crispy skin. Unfortunately, Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands have started to put Cantonese roast duck on the menu under the name of "Peking duck", adding to the already quite large Chinese food confusion.

zucchini cakes with feta and... thyme

grating courgettes
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

I came home with some zucchini (courgette) from the Turkish shop and decided to make Nigel Slater's "zucchini cakes" from his Kitchen Diaries book. Start off with grating 2 smallish light green zucchini in a colander, add some salt and let drain for 15 minutes or so. Chop a small onion very finely and saute in a little bit of olive oil until translucent, but not coloured. Drain the zucchini and pat dry with kitchen towels, or squeeze them between your hands to get rid of the excess juices. I thought I did a good job there (more on this later...) . Add the zucchini to the pan with the onions and add one clove of minced garlic, and stir around. Add 3 tablespoons of flour and cook for a little while. Then, take off the heat and add one egg, 100 grams of crumbled feta cheese and some dill. I didn't have any dill around, so I switched to thyme, which goes well with zucchini, too. However, the mixture turned out to be a little too runny, so when I fried them in the pan, they took on a much flatter and wider shape then they should have. To rescue things, I added some more flour to the zucchini and even some dried bread crumbs to make the mixture more compact, but still, they didn't turn out quite as well as I expected (Nigel only says they are 'fragile', but my zucchini cakes almost collapsed when being turned.) Even so, their taste was excellent. The zucchini didn't have the raw taste I get sometimes when making zucchini cakes- because you kind of precook the mixture before frying the cakes. A very good tip. Will try again, but with more flour... Had this with fried chicken and a mustard green salad. You can view my whole cooking process of zucchini cakes on Flickr.

Dry-fried string beans, Sichuan style

dried string beans, Sichuan style.

When looking at this picture, you might easily think this is one of my culinary mistakes; and the post is going to be a long lament on the failure of this dish. But no! These are fried string beans Sichuan style, simmered until they reach this crispy and dry texture, with an amazing palette of flavours. First, get yourself some ingredients from the Asian supermarket: dried shrimps; tinned Sichuan preserved vegetable; a piece of ginger, garlic, sugar, soy sauce and sesame oil.

Start with putting a handful of dried shrimps in a bowl with water that you have just boiled, and soak for about 30 minutes. Take about 300 grams of spring beans and clean them, snap them in two when they are too long. Put 2 tablespoons of oil in a wok on quite a high fire and stir-fry the beans for about 2 minutes until browning in places and shriveling a little bit. Turn down the fire and keep frying and stirring them on a lower heat for 6 minutes or so. Take out. Drain the shrimps and cut them very finely. Take about a ping pong ball of zhacai or Sichuan preserved vegetable and cut as fine as the shrimp. Take 2 cms of ginger and 2 cloves of garlic and mash very fine, too. Then, in some new oil, fry shrimp with ginger, then add preserved vegetable and garlic; then add 1 or 2 tablespoons of sugar and a splash of sesame oil, add some soy too.

Return the beans to the pan and let dry-cook for at least 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. The fishy sweet gingery flavors will be absorbed in the beans and their texture is very interesting! I truly loved this dish and will make it often! By the way, I tried to cook the twice-cooked pork I blogged about a week ago, and the result was great! This was mainly because I finally just asked the butcher for a different cut of pork then they usually sell, and this turned out the be the key to the right look and feel (and taste!) of the dish.

sauerkraut ( zuurkool

sauerkraut / zuurkool
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

This is typical Dutch winter food: mashed potatoes with some kind of boiled and mashed vegetable and a large smoky sausage besides. Take a packet of sauerkraut (in white wine, or just plain) and put it in a small pan with a couple of tablespoons of wine or apple juice (or plain water), cook until done - this takes around 30 minutes. Meanwhile, peel about 3 large potatoes a person. You need more potatoes because, when mashed, they will somehow look less : you always end up eating more than you think you will. Cook potatoes, cut in chunks, in boiling water for around 15 minutes until you can easily pierce through them when pricking them with a fork. Drain off cooking liquid and put the pan back on a slow heat. Add a large chunk of butter and hot milk and mash them with a potato masher (or ricer). Add salt and pepper and grated nutmeg. When sauerkraut is cooked, add it to the mashed potatoes and mix it all together. In a skillet, fry some bacon strips until crispy and prepare your sausage. Usually this is a microwave affair, but you can choose other meats... Also, prepare some meat gravy. Stir it all over the sauerkraut-and-potato mash and enjoy your meal!