Efteling

To celebrate my moms 65th birthday, we went with the whole family to the Efteling last Sunday. The Efteling started as a playground with a fairy tale "forest" and it is now a amusement park with rollercoasters and other exciting attractions.
But the fairy tales are still there and they are still very nice to visit. Especially for the boys, who are too young to enjoy the excitement. What they liked most were the little toadstools where very friendly and (for us) recognisable music comes out.

Typical Dutch (2)

A bit more about Dutch food Today.....
For lunch see breakfast, maybe a bit more odd combinations on the sandwiches like peanut butter with hagelslag, cheese with apple syrup, cheese with marmelade, ham with tomato ketchup and of course with the glass of milk I mentioned before.
The rest of the day we like to eat liquorice, mmmm, my favorite!

In the evenings, 6 o'clock straight, it is dinner time. Typical Dutch foods (in the winter) are hutspot and stamppot, served with rookworst. Those "pots" are mashed potatoes mixed with carrots and onion (hutspot) or a whole variety of cabbages (stamppot). Rookworst is a smoked sausage (a bit fatty and salty).


My kids like to eat poffertjes (small pancakes) for dinner (and I guess that all Dutch kids like them). These are served with butter and sugar.

So much more to tell about the Dutch food, but I end with these two "delicacies", the kroket and frikadel. Both are consumed as a snack (or together with fries for lunch/dinner).
A kroket is filled with ragout, is deep fried and has a crusty outside.

The frikadel is a kind of sausage, also deep fried and is often filled (after frying) with a combination of raw onions, mayonaise and ketchup.


Now I'll tag Puk from Ballee, Naomi from Odd&Wooly and Lisette from Little-Z.
I hope that you do not mind ladies? Something nice to do when it rains.....

Typical Dutch (1)

I've been tagged by Kristel from Vlijtig.
This means that you should write a meme with a Dutch twist. As I am a food technologist, I thought it would be nice to write about typical Dutch foods.
I'll cut this post in two and write a bit more later this week.
Let's start in the moring, where lots of Dutchies begin their day with a glass of milk and a wholemeal sandwich with Dutch cheese (sliced with a very thin slicing thing called "kaasschaaf").
Looks something like this:

Another favorite item to put on our sandwiches is called "Hagelslag", which are tiny pieces of chocolate to sprinkle on a buttered sandwich (in other countries they use it to decorate cakes with).

When it is time for a coffee break in the morning, a cookie is served to accompany the coffee (in bars and restaurants it is often individually wrapped).

The cookie can be a delicious "stroopwafel",

or in case of a birthday or something else to celebrate, a HEMA tompouce,

and when you live in 's-Hertogenbosch like I do, a "Bossche bol" (filled with whipped cream and covered with chocolate).

Enough for now, I'll write more later this week and then I'll tag some other people as well.