by Ellen Bannink -

Pepernoten – tiny Dutch spiced cookies

Pepernoten-1-inmyredkitchen

Yummy, pepernoten!
While we in the US are busy preparing for Thanksgiving my fellow Dutchies in the Netherlands are also preparing for a national holiday: Sinterklaas’ Birthday. Sinterklaas is a very old man, a very very old man. I mean like, hundreds of years old! Sinterklaas has a long white beard, wears a red robe and has a large golden walking stick. He also rides a white horse called ‘Amerigo’ and Amerigo likes to eat carrots. Every year at the end of November Sinterklaas arrives by boat in the Netherlands from Spain, where he lives. On board are also his hundreds of helpers, they are called Piet. Each Piet has his own task, like navigation, baking pepernoten, carrying around the Big Book of Sinterklaas or wrapping the gifts for all the children in the Netherlands.

Yay! Gifts and presents for all children in the Netherlands!

by Ellen Bannink -

French toast

Growing up in the Netherlands meant an open sandwich for breakfast. And for lunch. My mom made us eat a whole wheat sandwich first, with something ‘healthy’ on top. Healthy was slices of cheese or meat. After the ‘brown’ sandwich we could have a ‘white’ one, topped with something sweet.

Peanut butter, jam, ‘hagelslag’ (the famous Dutch chocolate sprinkles), hazelnut spread or ‘appelstroop’. We all had our own favorites. One of my sisters still can’t live without appelstroop. You can compare it with molasses, only slightly firmer and it’s made of apples so it tastes sweet and sour.

Wentelteefjes p

After the white sandwich we had to have a brown one again and so on. If we could decides ourselves what to eat we would only eat white sandwiches with sweet toppings.
We could also be creative with combining the toppings.