by Ellen Bannink -

Slow cooker Pumpkin butter

Pumpkin-Butter-inmyredkitchen-1

So even though I live 5,555 miles (!!) apart from my family and friends we’re still in almost daily contact. Without outrageous phone costs for calling overseas or getting RSI of typing long emails. That’s because we use Whatsapp, a free mobile texting service.

With my mom, brother and sisters we have a group chat and also my 82-year old granddad is on Whatsapp! How great is that?
This way it doesn’t take much effort to say hi to each other, send pictures or share locations to let each other know where you are or what you’re doing. You can even send voice memos, wow I laughed my ass off when introducing these voice memos to my granddad! He was like:

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.