Two weeks (and a little bit) until Christmas! Waaaah, time flies! This will be my first Christmas in LA and -even though it’s cold lately- the weather will never be as bad as in the Netherlands. Christmas and sun, that sounds like the perfect combination to me 😉
This week I’m going to give you a full Christmas menu, first course, main course and dessert.
A while ago I promised myself to start cooking with ingredients I’ve never cooked before, like parsnip,
Every weekday morning our alarm goes off at 8am. Some times I’m already awake but most times I’m still in a deep sleep. Between 8 and 8.30am I’m trying to wake up by reading the news, checking my Facebook time line, liking a lot of photos at my Instragram feed and reading my email, all on my iPhone.
At 8.30am I kick P out of bed; he will take a shower and I will also get out of bed and put on my bathrobe and slippers. I walk to the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast for P. Breakfast is a bowl of yogurt with fruit (at this moment pomegranate, oranges and grapefruit) and home made granola. I make it easy for myself because
I published this recipe for home made chili oil yesterday on my Dutch blog but I also wanted to share this recipe with my non-Dutch readers.
Because be honest, wouldn’t this make a great holiday gift? Everybody likes food right?
This home made chili oil can be used to add some spice to dishes before serving but also for cooking.
Last week we celebrated our first real Thanksgiving in the US. The first of many to follow 🙂 It was great, we spent the day with friends and I made the turkey, the gravy and some delicious pumpkin pies.
I did a lot of reading to prep for this holiday, I bought some magazines and checked this BuzzFeed over and over again 😉 ‘Cause c’mon, this was my first turkey day!
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!
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:
Los Angeles is such a great city, it has so much to offer and is really really big. So big that we haven’t seen everything yet so in the weekends we try to explore the city. I say try because we also have to go out for brunch on Sundays and go on hikes on Saturdays 😉
A few months ago we went to Silverlake on a sunny Saturday. We walked around, had some drinks and visited the cute boutiques.
And in one of those cute stores I saw it: the cookbook I wanted to buy for a long time but still hadn’t done it because of our move.
Last Tuesday I had an amazing evening with my LA Food Bloggers friends of the Meetup group. We where invited to a 8 Course Prix-Fixe Dinner at the Barbershop Pop-Up in Venice.
And boy, this was fancy! Chef Walter el Nagar served us delicious food, including the amuse it was 9 courses! I had foie gras for the first time in my life, ate some wild Scottish wood pigeon and fell in love with the candied eggplant.
It’s nice to have a dinner like this once in a while, but deep inside I’m more of a rustic food kinda gal 😉
I try to eat fish twice a week so last week I was looking for some new recipes for salmon. I couldn’t decide which one to chose and suddenly I remembered I hadn’t made my own recipe for Ginger crusted salmon in a while.
So I stopped looking for new recipes and went to the store to buy some fresh ginger and made this delicious salmon recipe. This one is so good and I wonder why I don’t make it more often 😉
This Asian-style coleslaw salad is one of my favorites at this moment. I eat this at least once a week for lunch.
Just mix some coleswla coleslaw with romaine and add bean sprouts for an Asian touch.
But the best of this coleswla coleslaw (argh! I keep typing it wrong!) salad is the dressing.