Fight!

Where I live, there is a C1000, Coop, several tokos, a greengrocer, and an Albert Heijn XL within easy walking distance. Within easy biking distance is a Lidl, an EMTE, and the Dunya. If I feel really indulgent, the farmers' market comes to Nijmegen every Saturday, and two competing Turkish supermarkets duel for customers on my way back (the best feta I've ever had--and I don't even like feta--was Turkish). I've heard rumors that there's a Jumbo somewhere in the neighborhood as well, but I haven't encountered it in my five years of wandering.

Price-wise, the best deals are to be found at the C1000, hands-down, but as penny-savvy as the Dutch are, they all seem to prefer the Albert Heijn. The vast acreage of available parking probably has something to do with this (most of the immediate neighborhood walks to the C1000), as does the inclusion of a Blokker and a C&A (clothing superstore) in the same complex. But most people prefer the Albert Heijn because, I think, it's done the best job at fulfilling the needs of the Dutch consumer. And though they may not want to admit it, that need goes beyond merely having the lowest price.

Other supermarkets may have better-quality items, or lower-priced ones, and in fact, the Lidl-- bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of pricing--has the best produce at the lowest prices. But the Albert Heijn has escaped oblivion by consistently shooting for mid-range in both quality and price, and craftily pitching itself as quintessentially Dutch in a way that no other supermarket has succeeded in. That, and the free Allerhande and Wat handig (showcasing new kitchen gadgets and 1001 ways to simplify your life) are carefully written to make cooking easy and success virtually guaranteed.

I admit that, when I first moved here, I hated the Albert Heijn commercials, with Harry's slightly doltish pitch or the cartoon hamsters. They were annoying, and sometimes a tad bit racist in that awkward you-know-they're-not-trying-to-be-racist-but-oh-boy way. But after having lived here for what's now five years, I've come to appreciate, the cunning, non-threatening way that the Albert Heijn continually adapts new tactics and methods, while simultaneously positioning itself as a bastion of Dutch-ness. It makes me wish I could market half as well as they can..

Mad Thrift

It's no secret that I love thrift stores. Even in the US, my preferred supplier of things like coats and hats were secondhand, though that was mostly because I like men's hat--at least, unusually-styled hats--and thrift stores were the only places I could find such things at prices that I liked. In Maastricht, Tuesday nights would find me more often than not at Mattie's Kringloopwinkel, where I procured my furniture. Nijmegen, though, hid her thrift stores well, and it took me a while before I learned enough about the city to find all of them:

By far my favorite is the Ideële Kringloopwinkel. It's well-hidden, but it has by far the most interesting--and most buyable--stuff. I've bought something almost every time I've gone there, which says a lot considering how far out of the way it is from everything, and how small the shop is. Despite its small size, it boasts a good selection of stuff, and I've managed to find such diverse objects as laundry baskets (matching style and color with the one we already had, even!), a wine rack, a trenchcoat--and all at reasonable secondhand prices, too. You cannot pay with a PIN pass, alas, so make sure you have cash before you walk in.

Het Goed is a chain of thrift stores, and as such it has by far the most stuff and the biggest selection, arranged across four floors. It is actually pretty spacious, unlike most thrift stores, and you can look around and poke into stuff without incurring the wrath of a grumbly clerk. I like to buy books there--they have an ever-changing selection of English-language books, and most of them are gently-used. I usually pick up small household items in Het Goed, things like baskets or spray bottles. They have an impressive selection of electronics, which is how we came by our speakers. However, Het Goed almost never has anything truly wonderful, which is why, as useful as it is, it's not my favorite.

Amaretto is a little tiny shop that bills itself as an antique store, though in reality it's another thrift shop. It's where I purchased our Galileo thermometer, and I'm still considering buying a ye-olde otoscope kit that's been sitting in a display case for ages, as a gift for Karel. However, the shop is impossibly tiny, and incredibly cramped--it's a bit evocative of Olivander's Wand Shop, wehere every last nook and cranny is occupied by something or other, to the point where the proprietor has taken to sitting in a chair by the window rather than at the cash register so he can read his newspaper. The prices are a bit higher than you'd expect, but on the other hand, many of the goods are one-of-a-kind, or at least very difficult to come by anywhere else in the city.

The Habbekrats is better known as "the place you get your fireworks from", as every December half the store is cleared of all its stuff to make room for a massive display of explosive projectiles. They have a bit of everything--I bought my binoculars there, a massive set of 8 x 50 lenses with coated glass, and of a surprisingly high quality glass, too. Most of the time, the stuff there is crap, but every now and then you find something good. We bought our coffee table there--their delivery policy is similar to that of Het Goed, in that you arrange with the store owner when you can be there, and he shows up within those times with a truck and your furniture. Unlike most kringloopwinkels, the Habbekrats does not carry clothing, although just across the street is a consignment shop in case you really need a clothing fix.

It's important to remember this cardinal rule if you're thrifting: if you don't absolutely love it, don't buy it. You don't save money if you spend it on something you'll never use/never wear. Happy hunting!

Fancy-Pants Dinner: Cheat

This week has been kind of unusual for me: I stopped by the Albert Heijn on my way home on Thursday to get food.

But not just any food, oh no: a friend of ours had been invited to dinner on Friday, which meant that after a long day of doing lab stuff, I would have to come home and make a dinner. Karel, having just come off a night shift, would hardly be in any condition to handle getting food to his mouth, much less the sharp pointy objects that tend to be involved in making food.

So...I cheated.

Here are two things I've come to realize about making nice dinners: 1) Risotto is always impressive, and doubly so if you pony up for the fancy mushrooms, and 2) any sins of the meal can be repented for with a chocolate fondant cake.

Risotto is relatively easy to throw together: chop an onion, and fry in olive oil until translucent. Add the raw rice, and stir constantly for a few minutes, until the grains become translucent. The only real secret to risotto is the next step, which is to add hot broth to the rice until it's covered. If you use cold broth, then the temperature difference "shocks" the gelatinous outer coating of the rice that had been cooked, and it falls apart and you get more of a congee mix than a real risotto. Check on it every 5-10 minutes or so, and add more liquid as needed, but stir it as little as possible. Cook until the rice is tender (~30 minutes). For this reason alone, it's the perfect fancy-pants cheat if there ever was one.

I make risotto with mushrooms, and you're supposed to fry the mushrooms with the onions, take them out, and add them back to the risotto at the end. So far, nobody has complained when I add the mushrooms at the 15-minute mark. Don't slice the mushrooms too thin, and you'll end up with a creamy risotto with chunks of decadently tender mushrooms.

As for the chocolate fondant cake: supposedly a notoriously fickle dessert, one that chefs always screw up on shows like MasterChef and TopChef, the truth of the matter is that once you've gotten used to your oven, it's REALLY simple to make. Recipes abound all over the place, but it doesn't matter which one you use as long as you remember to set the timer when you slide the cakes into the oven. It is simply a matter of knowing your oven: 11 minutes at 200° C in our oven works great, and produces a cake with a thin layer of cake and as much gooey middle as feasible. Dorie Greenspan's recipe says 13 minutes at 400° F. And no, I don't use ramekins: we have silicon muffin cups, which are so much easier to handle.

I always set aside the ingredients mis-en-place before I sit down for dinner (when we have guests--the recipe I use serves 6). Then it's merely a matter of taking fifteen minutes to melt the chocolate, beat up the eggs, stir it together with the flour and cocoa powder, and bake. For truly fancy-pants dinners, Karel likes to make his own ice cream to accompany it, but most people are so agog by the fact that you can make a chocolate fondant cake at home that the ice cream, as tasty as it is, tends to be an afterthought. A bit of fruit syrup (from a jamming episode gone dreadfully wrong) elevates the fancy-factor by ten.

I even cheated on the main course, which was a roasted chicken: I used one of those pre-seasonedbradzakken chickens, which is a plastic bag which the chicken is baked in. The plastic bag traps the steam, and the end result is a juicy, tender bird with as much effort as it takes to turn on the oven.

There are, of course, times when anything less than real cooking will simply not do. But there are also times when spending time with a dear friend is more important, and the veneer of good food is good enough.

Golden Days

The Dutch word for "old-fashioned" is ouderwets, a word that is laced with connotations of being stuck-in-the-mud and unwilling to change, rather than being antiquated with dignity. If there is such a word for that (in either English or Dutch) I can't think of it right now, but then again, I've also just spent the last 15 minutes baby-talking the Tweeb, so that's not saying much.

In the Netherlands, ouderwets is sometimes used to describe the cheap/tacky blue-and-white decorations you can find sometimes in places like the Blokker or Xenos: items meant to invoke the Delft blauw of ye-olde-Holland. I think most of these items end up being sent overseas to Dutch expats or given to tourists--but only because I've never seen anybody buy such a thing. We were given a cushion decorated in the blue-and-white tile motif, which the Tweeb promptly appropriated. Even if the word is used in a positive sense, it's not entirely rid of the extreme industriousness, thriftiness, and Reformed-ness of times as recent as fifty years ago.

So it probably isn't exactly correct to describe jamming as ouderwets. Even if it has its origins in the need to preserve fruit against the rot, with the herbs/spices/liquor that Karel adds to his jams, they become too decadent to be simple preserves. I don't think it even saves us that much money: what I spend for the fruit (besides the berries, which I get from the woods) and gelei suiker--or regular sugar adds up to the cost of two pots of jelly/jam from the store, one pot if it's the fancy stuff, as Karel is oft wont to make. Whatever we do save from the extra pots that Karel makes gets detracted from the cost of Karel's time--though he considers it entertainment, much the way I consider sewing.

All I know for sure is that a row of translucent golden jars in the window is a lovely sight, especially since this summer has been cold and rainy--autumn practically started in July this year. Nothing quite like that to remind you of a summer you never had.

Summer mackerel

I joke that the Chinese and the Dutch get along so well because they both love good deals. Of course, we don't have the storage space to stockpile things the way extreme couponers do (seriously, most of these people are sick in the head), and besides, I like to think that the key to happiness is moderation in all things. Including moderation, which explains why there's a dead fish in our fridge.

A few days back I came upon a smoked mackerel at a substantially lower price than normal. I'm normally pretty good about sticking to my list of things to get, but in a moment of weakness (I must've been hungry) I put it in my basket, thinking, "Well, there's got to be some recipe online somewhere. And it's cheap and healthy and not on the list of overfished-fish, so yay!" I've been meaning to wean Karel off of salmon, which comes mostly from Norwegian fish farms, but that's only possible if I can create a MasterChef-worthy dish to introduce mackerel with. He's like Anton Ego: "If I don't love it, I don't swallow." When it comes to trying new things, it's double-or-nothing: either he'll love it and want me to make it over and over and over again, or he'll hate it and it'll be years before I can reintroduce him to it.

However, it turned out that finding good recipes for smoked mackerel is a sight more diffcult than I would have thought. Aside from variations on the paté theme, there doesn't seem to be much that you can do with a smoked fish. There are a few decent recipes floating around for fresh mackeral, but fresh mackeral is not smoked mackeral, and in any case they all amounted to the same thing: cook something up and put the fish on top. Mackeral isn't that pretty to look at to begin with--and, given how my mom used to prepare it (chopped into hunks and boiled in soup), it only gets worse.

Fortunately, being a smoked fish, it will last a little longer in our fridge while I dredge through gazillions of recipes for promising eats and not too many weird things. In the mean time, well...I try not to look in our fridge.

Virtue, explained

The quick 'n dirty translation of the Dutch word zuinig is "frugal". As with many Dutch words, though, the quick 'n dirty version is incomplete. There is, in addition to the "maximizing value" component of zuinigheid, an element of virtuousness that the word "frugality" doesn't quite cover. In the US, you can still get slammed for being frugal, as it has the connotation of being cheap. In the Netherlands, you will only get nods of approval for being zuinig.

This extra dimension explains, I think, the popularity of the Saturday markt (in all cities except, I am told, Maastricht). There are market days throughout the week--in Nijmegen, for instance, you have the fabric and produce markt on Mondays, and the secondhand markt on Wednesdays. But the Saturday markt is where all of the action is--it's when all of the vendors and their kramen line the main shopping streets, when the booksellers set up shop outside the library, when anybody with any bit of Dutch in their blood crowds onto the 10 a.m. bus or busts out their fietskar in the hopes of landing good deals.

Anybody can be thrifty by reading the flyers at the supermarket and shopping accordingly, but it takes serious dedication and price-matching to find the best deals at the Saturday markt. Not to mention that many places are cash-only, so you can't say, "What the hell," and let yourself overdraw. There are some things you can help yourself with, and others that you can't--generally speaking the rule is "arm's length", but the Dutch have very long arms. During the busiest times, you might have to wait up to 15-20 minutes before you can pay, and then only after you've shoved a little old lady out of the way. You don't have carts you can load up, unless you have a shopper (which nobody under the age of 85 uses, lest they seem old), so you have to carry an increasingly heavy bag with you. Price-wise, it helps to know what other sales are going on, because while there are a few great items, others only seem that way until you do the math.

There is, as far as I can tell, only one major benefit for going produce-hunting at the markt, and that is the eco-stands. Fresh herbs that are genuinely fresh, and amazing mushrooms and cheeses--will still cost you an arm and a leg, but the scent of fresh basil following you around for the rest of the day is obnoxiously decadent, screaming, "Hey, I'm food snob!"

By the time you make it home from the markt, in other words, you'll feel like you've done something--that goes double if you've managed to hold a few brief conversations in Dutch with the vendors. Yeah, the euro you might have saved probably doesn't cover the cost of parking. But it's the thought that counts.

Jar Hoarders

If you were to come to our apartment, you'd notice that we have a ton of glass jars in all shapes and sizes, from the miniscule ones that capers come in, to the valu-sized peanut-butter jars. Especially prized are jars with the push-button lids, because when Karel makes jelly, he needs to have lids that can withstand boiling and baking. A few years ago, he decided to try brewing mead, and bought a ton of el-cheapo supermarket-brand honey. The mead was good, if young, and the jars now make up our incredibly-f*cking-awesome spice/herb rack.

There are two rather disturbing things about this: one is that we did actually consume that much peanut butter. Granted, it was over the course of two years, but it's still a TON of peanut butter. The second is that we do actually use the jars over and over and over again. We use them to store food, mostly--nuts, raisins, yeast, leftovers, pesto, stocks, etc. When Karel decides to make jam, he picks through our collection of glassware. When there's a spider that needs to be disposed of, it goes in a jar. Pens and pencils and matches--in a jar. Hardly a week goes by when we don't have a jar getting its label soaked off in the Perpetual Bucket.

In spite of the obviously frugal nature of the exercise, hoarding jars is not a particularly Dutch thing to do. It really just comes down to the fact that we find them so incredibly handy--as long as you don't fill it up all the way, leftovers can be frozen and instantly reheated in the microwave--and since they're practically free, why not?

I think this year we'll be starting up some summer plants again--I want to try planting courgettes and tomatoes again. A couple years ago I started getting lazy with the fertilizer, which wasn't good, and I've learned a few tricks or three about pH. Take a guess as to what I'll be starting the plants in... :-)