A friend of ours moved to Germany, just across the border. He can still come to church and sing in the choir: there are people in the parish who live in the Netherlands but are farther away.

His house has an orchard. Last year he had a glut of plums and brought bags full to choir practice to give to whoever wanted them (and I had a lot of yummy plum jam!) and this year it was apples.

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They were so good that we ran out almost immediately, and I had some strawberries left (the other ingredients are what I’m always stocked up on, anyway) so I made another lot.

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I was going to bake cupcakes. I had a lot of fresh strawberries.

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I don’t know whether there’s more Roggen or Weizen in this loaf, so I’ll call it a plain Mischbrot; German-style sourdough nevertheless. I figured out how to get the spectacular white crust: slicked it down with a wet hand, sifted ordinary white wheat flour over it (with a mesh tea ball, couldn’t find the little sieve, perhaps I threw it away because it was too worn) and pressed that well into the surface.

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This cost me one euro in the market. Small price for an educational experience.

I asked “what is it?” and the woman behind the stall said “well, a sort of pumpkin, only it’s Asian, they use it for soup.” Curious, I bought it, and as I was making leftover-rabbit soup anyway I thought I’d try it.

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And it’s not nearly finished yet, but I’m satisfied (for now) with how it looks: my new web site section, the Purplish Cooking Pages. There’s a grand total of seven recipes there, and I’m slowly adding more links to interesting sites, but it’s ready to face the world. Bon appétit (no, not this one).

The first-years volunteered to show the prospective first-years around on the school Open Day, so they had to be at school at 4:30 having already eaten. And what’s the proper meal to have in the afternoon? Tea.

All that and a huge pot of Darjeeling.

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I intended to make a Ginger Cake of Extraordinary Sharpness, but it turned out as a pleasant ordinary ginger cake, even though I used eight times as much powdered ginger as it said in the recipe, as well as a whole (albeit small) jar of very finely chopped stem ginger that wasn’t in the recipe. Next time I’ll use twelve times as much, probably three ounces, and chop my own stem ginger, coarsely.

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16 bananas, 5 kiwifruit, 5 mangoes, 32 satsumas, 1 orange, 14 apples and 2 persimmons (not counting the persimmon that was being eaten as we took the picture).

Estimated time until so much is eaten that we’ll have to buy more: 4 days. Number of people in the household: 5 (one of whom is absent until Saturday night).

The mangoes, the bananas and the persimmons are very ripe. The rest is just normally ripe. I intend to make banana muffins and possibly mango sherbet ice.

…you make lemonade. When life hands you crumbs…

Eleven years ago today, two of my three daughters were born. Yesterday I endeavoured to bake them a cake each. They’re not of an age to want themed cakes any more, but they still get to choose.

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Nothing tastes as good as home-made strawberry jam. Well, no jam does, at least.

We bought a kilo of ripe strawberries and a kilo of geleisuiker (with added pectin and citric acid) and followed the instructions. It’s phenomenally easy. Cleaning the strawberries is most of the work.

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I habitually use two supermarkets: the fairly expensive but quality (but see below) one that I’ll call ‘A’ because its name starts with A, and the cheap and barely adequate one that I’ll call ‘B’ because there’s a B in its name. And I buy flour from the organic shop, but not all the time because it’s expensive and the stuff they’ve got is not always what I want. Also, I used to go to the windmill in Twello a lot until they changed grain providers and the quality fell like a stone, but I might try them again if I ever have time on a Saturday; they’re only open on Saturdays, and it takes an hour to go there and back, more if the weather’s bad enough to go by bus because I tend to miss the bus back and they only go once an hour.

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Or, how this

turned into this.

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While cleaning the kitchen cupboard I found something I’d had for ages: a package of dried sourdough. I used to have a perfect sourdough culture, imported from Denmark where the mother of a friend gave it to me, but one summer I went away and didn’t bake and it died. I’ve tried to start another one a few times, but it never took properly. Now it’s Lent I want more interesting bread, because we don’t have as many interesting things to put on the bread, so I thought I’d try the stuff.

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The Guardian, which I know from my time in England as a respectable paper though that may have changed, reported on February 8 that making pancakes can be bad for your health. The warning came from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, which actually exists. I had to look at the date to be sure it wasn’t the first of April; when I translated it for the kids they couldn’t stop giggling.

This didn’t keep me from making pancakes today. With bacon in honour of the week of the Publican and the Pharisee, pointedly not fasting because we’re not Pharisees who boast of fasting twice a week. Interesting tidbit: the Pharisees fasted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Of course, they didn’t have the Crucifixion to commemorate and fast for on Wednesdays and Fridays. The pancakes weren’t as good as usual, probably because I had only two eggs and used a bottle of beer in the batter which makes it less suitable for bacon pancakes, but a good time was had by all anyway.

We were in Haarlem, having seen the Pieter Claesz exhibition and bought a few kilos of books at De Slegte, and getting hungry. We’d planned to go and eat at Ma Brown’s Restaurant —proper English cooking— and dressed up for it, but it was closed. It’s always closed when we want to eat there, most of the time because it’s Tuesday. This happened to be a Wednesday, but they were closed between Christmas and the New Year, “we’ll welcome you back on January 5th”.

Sorry, Ma Brown, we’re hungry now, we can hardly wait until January 5th! They seem to be closed during all school holidays, and that Boudewijn and Naomi managed to eat there in the autumn holidays is probably because the west of the country has a different holiday schedule from the east.

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Advent is upon us: we ate fish, one step up from the normal Tuesday wine-and-oil, in honour of St.Matthew the Evangelist on Tuesday the 16th. Squid, to be exact, the kilo of it that I had in the freezer to eat on a Sunday. I used my own adaptation of a recipe by Jane Grigson and stewed it in red wine with onions and tomatoes as I’ve written up on my recipes page.

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