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?

We have nitro brew coffee in Amsterdam, too

The whole of Instagram is talking about spring; so I’m going to start with summer, of jumping off boats, dinners outside and nitro brew coffee. Just another coffee name to show off to your friends? Well, yes if you think a coolly cascading, velvety, Guinness-like drink is not your thing.

Thanks to Adam, co-owner of Lot Sixty One Coffee Roasters, Amsterdam will be able to get in on what the rest of the world’s probably already drinking if they want to look cool. And this summer, it’s nitro brew, coffee beans soaked for 16 hours, the keg, injected with nitrous oxide (70% nitrogen and 30% CO2) and forced out of a tap under a helluva lot of pressure to get that foamy head and creamy taste Guinness has its name all over.

Taste wise, Adam tells me that we can expect the viscosity of an espresso, but no acidity, and smooth, smooth, smooth. The Internet tells me that it’s so creamy, you’d be forgiven for thinking milk was added. So far so good.

And it gets better: Adam has also teamed up with Alphabet Brewing Company, a start-up microbrewery from Manchester, UK for a collaboration – Lot Sixty One Coffee, their beer, name: Crate Digger, a ‘coffee stout’, at 8.3% alcohol. Equally cold. Equally summer.

Lot Sixty One is on the Kinkerstraat 112, Amsterdam. I recommend it. 

Pasta with anchovy and (lots) of garlic

Even my grandparents were taking leftovers home from Anthony’s. It’s the kind of Italian with the eternally grated Parmesan on the table next to the chilli flakes that could only have been chillies a very long time ago. “Cheap and cheery” the English say. Roll-out American-Italian.

The menus are laminated and everything has that ‘home-made red sauce’ taste. Except for a dish I have since developed cravings for – no room for marinara there. No room for anything, in fact, other than lots of garlic, olive oil and anchovies.

I always order (and make) it with linguini but my mom swears by angel hair. Since I've been making my own, or, more accurately, since I started adding lemon zest to anything I can, I've been adding lemon zest to lend the dish a little elegance (read: cut through some of the oil). But that’s ‘elegance’ in a narrow sense – in terms of stand-out, all encompassing elegance, this bowl of pasta has heaps of it in its simplest form.

• 1 tin of anchovies packed in olive oil
• 7-8 pieces of garlic
• Pasta
• Good extra virgin olive oil
• Parmesan 
• Salt and pepper

Bring a pan of well-salted water to the boil for your pasta. Heat a little oil in a heavy-based pan whilst you finely chop the garlic and anchovy fillets and then add to the oil. Take off heat once the garlic starts to brown.

Reserve a little of the pasta's cooking water and add a few tablespoons of this, along with the cooked pasta, to the pan with your garlic and anchovy. Divide between bowls and top with black pepper and parmesan. Try before you add any salt! 

Sir Hummus

They tell me they didn’t even announce the opening – just tore down the paper covering the windows, a gesture to their neighbourhood that they were open, that everyone was welcome. Six months later and you can still tune in to those local vibes: you’re sat on a corner, at the window, looking out whilst you scoop up your hummus. And you must look as charming as you feel because the people passing are smiling back.

And you’re smiling too because you have wonderful hummus in front of you, and where, really, can you just go somewhere for a bowl of hummus? And you enjoy the feeling that this is a place to eat really slowly, that it doesn’t matter that you’re alone, no one’s making a gimmick of it, that you’re not alone anyway; not really, because you’re at a neighbourhood place.

Slow roast harissa chicken

There wasn’t enough room on a postcard for the harissa stories of Tunisia. Everywhere you went there would be harissa, homemade and slightly different to the one last night or that which caused the stain on your shirt at lunch. Some were hot, most bright red, others only barely to be glimpsed under fathoms of olive oil. All were to be soaked up by toasted bread.

At home we make our own version to accompany almost anything we eat with blackened lemons: from steak to lamb, bulgur wheat to dark greens. It can be made as spicy as you like, thick spoonfuls of red or, the more olive oil you add, more of a marinade. Or do what the postcards say: serve with hot garlic bread and dip.

Butcher's Tears

The location couldn’t be more unlikely: an old garage in Oud Zuid a few doors down from an ambulance depot. Inside, the place is clinical; bare and tiled white like a butchers. A good time to introduce one of the butchers then (amongst his friends): the brewer at Butcher’s Tears.