I didn’t had to think about it when I read about the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap. Of course I’m participating in this! Who doesn’t like cookies? I love every part of it: baking them, eating them (still warm out of the oven? yes please!) and handing them out to friends to surprise them.
And of course I’m participating in this cookie swap with some typical Dutch cookies!
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!
Can you believe it’s already November? And that means that Thanksgiving is coming up!
In the Netherlands we don’t do Thanksgiving. But of course we do Christmas! So when Readers.com asked me to create a holiday recipe for their Holiday Cookbook I instantly thought of the ‘Rollade’ my mom served during many Christmasses. (is that a word? Well, it is now!)
The most popular Christmas tradition in the Netherlands is ‘gourmetten’.
I’m not sure we will celebrate Halloween now we are living in LA. I don’t know why, maybe because we’re not used to dressing up with costumes for a holiday. Okay, I exactly know why: to be honest I don’t like dressing up in costumes… Sorry… 😉
But what I DO like is to see everybody excited for this typical American holiday. I DO like to see the excitement of the girl at the craft store when her mother told her she could choose a new trick or treat container this year. And I like
– Click here for this recipe in Dutch -> Heerlijke luchtiger eierkoeken –
Those egg cakes (“eierkoeken“) are very popular in the Netherlands. Especially since a famous weight loss guru prescribed them in her menu’s. This woman is also known as Sonja Bakker, she is blond and always smiling (of course, she has to sell her diet!) and she is from West-Friesland, an area North of Amsterdam known for its huge greenhouses. So she also has an accent which I find very annoying.
I’ve never followed her diet, I mean… it is a crash diet! I don’t believe in that! Sonja wrote books with weekly menus and she sold a lot of those books. For some reason these Dutch egg cakes where part of the diet.
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting on the balcony, with my laptop working on a blogpost. Suddenly I heard somebody calling:
“Hello!”
“Hello!”
“Heeelllooooohooo!”
I sat still and looked around. There was nobody I could see from where I sat. So it sure wasn’t for me. I wasn’t expecting visitors and nobody could see me from down the street because we have an enclosed balcony.
So I ignored it.
But then, a week later it was the same voice:
“Hello!”
“Helloooohooo!”
“You, on the balcony!”
From where I sat I couldn’t see any other neighbors on their balconies, so maybe this person wás calling me after all? But how could he see me? Strange!
So I got up and looked down.
Next week I will experience my first ever 4th of July, how exciting is that! Of course, in Europe we know about the fireworks, the picnics, the barbecues and spending time with your family on Independence Day. But to actually be here on the 4th of July is different.
In the Netherlands we also celebrate some national holidays but they don’t include fireworks or parades. The biggest national holiday would be Queens Day where everybody gets a day off and people go out on the streets, dressed in anything that they can find in orange, to sell their old junk and drink beer. And eat orange ‘tompoucen‘, normally the tompoucen have a pink icing but for Queens Day they get an orange icing.
I’m not really into the real Dutch cooking. We call it the ‘Hollandse pot’ and it includes all the old fashioned Dutch cooking like stamppot (potatoes and vegetables mashed together) and cooked potatoes, vegetables and meat. Not really exciting and new.
But a ‘couple’ of years ago there was a Dutch colony in Indonesia.