Tongue's a-bub-bubblin'

Someone had to babysit the tongue. It is, as I write, a-bubblin’ and bouncin’ in the that there pot. It’s raining out. My instructions are to wait for the white stuff to flake off: if you’ve ever looked at your own tongue in the mirror after burning it, you’ll know what I’m looking for. Takes about two hours for a tongue this big and by ‘big’ I mean a forearm’s worth of muscle tuned to plucking blades of grass. Big enough for it not to be ready in time for dinner last night by 9 o’clock so we had Italian instead and more than one aperitif.

Tongue’s great, though I never thought I’d say it. But then, I’ve had to back down from higher mountains I’ve talked my way up. For years (3) I’ve maintained zero interest in the more internal of internal meats; not that I constantly had to defend myself but the suggestion has, on more than one occasion, come up. Turns out most of these things (minus kidneys) are delicious. The cow version of them anyway. Once I was tasked to make an extra sheep’s liver into something riffed from Ottolenghi’s Plenty. I managed to make it green but it was gross.

Deli sandwiches aren’t civil

Deli sandwiches aren’t civil. They’re not cut into triangles, you don’t nibble them. You hold it with both hands as its unburdened over the counter, smell through. Nothing through the wrapper unless you asked for cheese and sauerkraut or meatballs or brisket or peppers or pastrami and you asked for it warm, which I recommend. On Rye. Take extra napkins.

Deli sandwiches make wonderful cross sections full of falling-out cold cuts and I like it best when they’re wrapped in plastic (loud florists' plastic that snaps and crackles). Second best in brown paper bags that get greasy if you leave it for too long but it's best if you don't. They can take some good minutes to make and should also take enough time to eat because if you eat too quickly, you'll think you're too full to eat the other half. You could always share but I always forget to, preoccupied with being starving, which is advice I wish I had when, in New York, I spent $19,00 on one, which is to say something for the amount of meat in it, not that the city is expensive which we all know already. I ate the rest for a second lunch and even dinner the next day.

'Fou du roi' 2013, Le Temps des Cerises

“Fou du roi" 2013 is the kind of wine I want to make and the kind of wine my Romanian friend says her grandfather used to make and the sort of wine mom says my opa also used to make which is, I think, us all saying the same sort of thing which is, to say it another way, the kind of wine to drink from a cup dancing to Italo disco in the dark.

Tasting notes:

Not original but for real ruby red. Smells a like cherries rolled in undergrowth funk and eucalyptus bark strips. Carbonic macerated poppy sour cherries and other red berries that zap, crackle and POP with a dark edged sugar fizz sparkle that tastes, and makes you feel, alive. This shit is highly drinkable or as those less self-conscious say, ‘smashable’ ok you can kill me now. Juice for juice’s sake and I like to think, also for mine big merci to you, Axel. I love this wine.

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"Foi du roi" 2013

Le Temps des Cerises, Axel Prüfer

Grenache Noir + Cinsault + Carignan

Languedoc-Roussillon

The microbes are my friends

My search for the perfect pickle has been a long one, full of disappointment, small Polish shops and lots of E numbers. And then, one day, Alex brought home a small packet of Armenian meats (you know, something strung from the back of a saddle to dry as the horse runs), a bottle of something I didn’t know what but it was alive, and a small plastic pot of pickles. I feel like I can still get some mileage out of my pickle story so I won’t say more about them here; but when I found myself drinking all the brine from all the pots, I thought I’d better go see the source* for myself. And sure enough, I came home with a (different) pack of Armenian smoked meats, having tried a pickled tomato (from Russia, delicious) and a little jar of water kefir grains. With no clue as to what they were.

All I knew is that they were responsible for that lovely fizzy stuff we were making pilgrimages to drink. And, I thought, as I’d already managed to turn pineapple skins into alcohol, the beginning of what I’ve recognised to be a certain attraction to big jars of lightly fizzing yellow liquids, why not make my own? So I did and I’m on my second batch, hoping the third will actually be drinkable.

So, if you too are thinking about making these little guys your friends, and I warn you now: it is a friendship that solidifies pretty quickly if not only because once you have them, you'll do anything to keep them from dying on you, here’s what you should know, limited to what I know on the subject (which still isn't much).

Show mercy to pineapples, make tepache

For all the times I’ve thought to myself ,“I could do that”, this was for then.

It was, I admit, also a measure taken in desperation; desperate to counter the rain and the way it was flattening our spirits. My sister had come to spend 10 days of engineering picnic baskets to bikes and jumping off boats. Instead, she spent 8 of them trapped indoors on a roll mat.

What to do? Finally do what I said I could if everyone else was: put something in a jar and ferment it.

So we made tepache, Mexican moonshine made of the skins and hearts of a pineapples, water, cinnamon and brown sugar. We put it in a big pickle jar (what else?), sealed it, put a cute sticker on it and waited for the wild yeasts to come. Then we poured it over ice, sat back on the roll mat and watched the rains.

Note on the taste: 

Tepache turns out to be pretty damn sweet and after a few days of experimenting, we figured out the following:

1. It’s best mixed with a Mexican beer
2. Unless you like the sweet thing and then you can add rum or tequila
3. The longer you leave it, the more effervescent it becomes, buzzy, malty. I never read the last step of the instructions below until I wrote them out now, 7 days later and mine’s still not strained, not in the fridge, definitely still fermenting and I’m still alive. So go for it.

Egyptians put bread in the tombs

Bread was once nourishing. Jesus was a fan, Thoreau too. Sandwiches were invented and families were brought up on the stuff. During the war, flour was bulked out with sawdust. Then we got Wonder Bread, which, for anyone not familiar with the concept of artificial bread, is artificial bread. It doesn’t mould. It doesn’t live, practically sawdust. Bread is chemically leavened, chemically preserved, “more the product of the embalmer’s art than the baker’s”. All of a sudden gluten was bad for us and everyone knew that it was especially bad for them, personally. You can find recipes for making pancakes… with cauliflower… Dieticians tell us to eat fat and protein. Others, only to eat things that are green. They tell us to go back to the forager’s diet, to a beginning full of nuts and seeds. They tell us to look over a major step in our evolution; that it’s no big deal that finally, with things like the bread made from our first experiments in farming grains 10,000 years ago, we had a constant source of calories, something we could store throughout the winter. No big deal that with bread, we evolved from hoping we’d find a deer to kill to masters of our own dinners.

Then I found the breads made by restaurant As. Great bread, alive, organic, hearty, chewy. Something you can keep using for a month. Add a bit of water, put it in the oven and it’s back to fluffy. Back to crusty. And the baguettes of Le Fournil deserve poems but for the fact they'll be old by lunch time. 

But these breads are exceptions. Much of the rest you find in Amsterdam will go un-reversibly stale within days. It’ll likely only be ¾ baked too, and flavourless. What to do with all those lemons in life? Make lemonade.

Two recipes for your leftover bread and a special mention.

India Yellow and fregola with green peas, mint and ricotta

Green Ground, Cooking Apple Green, Olive, Card Room Green, Breakfast Room Green, Green Smoke, Vert De Terre…  All the shades of nature available in a pot of paint. Armed only with a 2x2 cm square of colour, one must have nerves of steel to choose the right one. I should know: We're currently in the process of deciding between three different shades of yellow, one of which is positively mustard (India Yellow) versus the golden Print Room Yellow or Citron. I’m discovering what sort of stomach I have. 

The little Kickstarter stove that kicked it

“What can’t it burn?” was the first thing I asked when he’d finished reading me the shortest user manual in the world.

Two hours later and hungry, we knew the answer.

It was the first day of summer after a grey longest day and we’d put all our eggs of expectation in one basket after dedicating the best part of the last two weeks of a damp June to moving. We’d survived a variety of homelessness; finding shelter within boxes and cooking by candlelight, and it wasn’t the adventure we’d marked it out to be. But today was marked to be different. We were going to have fun. And so, also in our basket, we’d packed Surinamese blood sausage, bread, garlic, a faro salad, ¾ a bottle of wine, a skillet and Alex’s new Kickstarter stove; solar powered, clean burning and all chrome. 'Cus that's fun.

We have a new table

I’d never done the math. That’s the first thing I thought when I saw all those pastries piled high, like lobsters crowding a fish tank. Danishes are, of course, from Denmark. All those miles of dough I’ve unravelled. Dunked. And never once with a thought to the genius nation from whence they came. But now, there they were. Threatening to roll over the cinnamon rolls, which, now I thought about it, I did know were Danish.

I had a fresh-off-a-5-a.m.-flight flash of reasoning. Denmark, responsible for at least two of the world’s best-known pastries must, therefore, be a land of many many pastries. I had four hours before my connection. I had four hours to try all I could.

I woke up over Greenland, another moment of discovery. Greenland, according to the dimension of airplane window 23C, is black rock jetting up from the ocean. The ocean seems to run within and through it and is sometimes ice, very blue or black. When I looked it up, I read that the ice sheet covering the island has pushed the land down 300m below sea-level to form a basin. 

Newark, New Jersey is a swamp. A swamp sunk with industry. I was welcomed to the United States of America by a party of 50 cranes and a facefull of air conditioning.

I spent the next two days on the 38^th floor of the World Trade Centre, cooking. Cooking in Bon Appetit's test kitchen. More marble than you could shake a stick at and when you got a fork from where the forks are kept, you faced skyscrapers.

We were shooting spring food and when I arrived in Connecticut it felt like high summer. I’ve had my first corn of the season, gone barefoot and battled mosquitoes in bare legs. 

Back to New York and up other magazine towers. This time a day at Good Housekeeping learning the properties of dry ice. Next was one day out of 10 watching the experts make ready meals ready to be shot looking like a meal. In between there were loaded pizzas, a face-sized pastrami sandwich, my first knish, cheddar cheese flavoured ice cream and dinners with the people that got me there.

Three weeks later and I have a new postcode. I live on a boarder in a big room with a table that fills half of it. The fridge is a yellow-striped smeg which, when it was delivered, made me a little afraid because it made the corner glow. Now it looks like it's on permanent vacation. 

We're drinking drip-coffee out of pickle jars and eating pickles off my prop plates. The relic filter drips out coffee at record speeds next to a huge grinder from the restaurant worth a 1000 euros in blades but the mortar's pestle is now only a 3/4 of what it used to be pre-move. We're so used to cooking by candlelight that ever since we put a light in the kitchen, I've not seen it on; whereas there's been a fire on every day of the last two weeks of June. A vacation of sorts. 

Abandon all hope ye who enter here

Don’t go hungry.

I thought that after last year, this, at least, would have been obvious. Looking back, I had no reason to try again. It was hell; how Armageddon would look if it started in the Westergasfabriek. Smoke, chaos and writhing bodies surrounded by debris. It could only be worse this time, I thought. I could write about how bad it all was, I thought. I went —

— hungry —

— the state in which you’d think would be appropriate, freshly arrived at a food festival, ready to try all the things you ordinarily wouldn’t because they’re not ordinarily available to you; and here they all are, cheap, interesting and tasty. There you’d go, weaving in and out of all the nicely spaced trucks, couple euros here, a bite there. Just like in winter time when you wonder where all the couples who run the oliebollen (a type of Dutch doughnut) stalls go the rest of the year, you’d wonder where all these people – the people that run the food trucks – go. Maybe they’re the ones that run the Christmas markets. You’d wonder because you only ever see them at festivals, and each time in different combinations. And you just wished one of them would have the peace of soul to open up in bricks and mortar, maybe in noord somewhere, somewhere offbeat. It would just be a small place, somewhere they could keep experimenting with interesting dishes. Because they’d always be cooking different stuff, they’d always be attracting different people. The mix would mean our restaurant friends wouldn’t miss the road too much, they’d have the variety they crave right at home. In a way though, you’d understand if they chose a truck over their own place: it means less infrastructure, more freedom to try what you like, to tweak and change. You only have to buy as much stock as you can fit in your truck so you can try different things until you get it right. And you’ve only got the counter standing in front of you and your customer so, with their feedback, you’d get it right pretty soon. And if you don’t, you can change. No stock, see?

Still hungry.

Who's afraid of natural wine?

Indie lives on but has traded its skinny jeans for an organic vineyard, its Pete Doherty for a lack of sulphates and its guitars for a handpicked harvest. And how refreshing. I’m talking about natural wines being the indie kids of wines: dressed down and talking back.

Where there was pomp and circumstance in the wine world, there’s now humour (just look at their labels: from Quentin Tarintino-esque gore-core, Brutal to Sauvé de la Cisterne with two men cleaning cisterns). Where there was full-bodied, meal-in-a-glass wines, we’re getting acquainted with a bit of bubble and spice. A nose of fruit is being substituted for the smell of something wild: earth, animals and last week’s turning leftovers. We’re learning to drink red wine in the sun on a hot day and we’re beginning to accept red wines that look like rosé and rosé’s that reminds us of lemonade. We’re sucking down minerals instead of butter and wondering how, despite it tasting bubbly, we can’t for the life of us see any bubbles nor, for that matter, see through to the other side of glass.

God would drive a Citroën

It’s a sound owned by the action movies: that of cars screeching around a bend in a covered garage. Not necessarily a sound you’d associate with a night out, much less a great night at a restaurant. But this is the sound, and it was so convincingly out of a movie, that I'm finding I start my stories with.

I found out about Citroën via Rijsel and so considered the place already blessed by the cooking gods that so often seem to look beyond Amsterdam. Another blessing was the lack of PR, website and Facebook page and the rumour that this was the golden child of Hotel de Goudfazant. Fast forward to the night itself and did I mention the screeching cars?