Allerhande Everywhere

Every two months or thereabouts, the Albert Heijn publishes another edition of its in store magazine, the Allerhande. Like most free publications, it has more ads than content, and, as expected, is geared to "help" you make budget-conscious and nutritious meal choices for your family--by shamelessly plugging Albert Heijn products whenever and wherever they can. Nevertheless, it is one of the few things that suits my Dutch reading level--hindered more by my lack of patience than my lack of understanding--as the articles in it are short and brief and there are lots of excellent pictures of food. Though stamppot never did manage to look sexy.

The Allerhande is stuffed with recipes: 10 ways to make soup! 15 ways to make stamppot! A week's worth of dinner ideas! Special (but easy) recipes for the holidays! These recipes are not especially complicated, and they actually produce quite a decent meal--what I like to think of as "in-law" level food; as in, something you'd serve your in-laws to show that you can cook, but not something so delicious that they'll want to invite themselves over every day. Much though I love my almost-in-laws, our apartment is small, and stressing about food is something I hate doing.

I am a rather lazy cook, to tell the truth. I'll cheat whenever I can, and there have been days (mostly when Karel's working) that I've taken a can of something from our pantry, and a fork, and called it a meal. It's not that I don't enjoy the process of cooking. It's more that it takes me a while to get into my little groove, and most days I just don't have the time to settle into a rhythm. Karel, on the other hand, loves cooking, but his work schedule is so erratic that we might manage to have dinner together once a month.

But next week, Karel is at home. And that means lots of good eats...based entirely on stuff out of the Allerhande. Even the stamppot that we'd decided to make came out of the Allerhande, and with the sole exception of our weekly spaghetti, there isn't a single recipe on it that we've thought of ourselves. It'll be a strange week, full of food that we wouldn't normally eat--zuurkool and pompoen and spitskool and paddenstoelen fond (actually, the recipe called for a bouillon, but I couldn't find it). That I am actually looking forward to eating these very Dutch things is a bit scary. But not nearly as scary as the thought that, if we like the things, and if they aren't too terribly complicated to make, we might actually start depending on the Allerhande for future meal suggestions.

All Hung Up

Our washer gave us a bit of a scare earlier this year, when it spontaneously decided it wasn't going to drain the wash water any more. After it got tweaked by the mechanic, it drained the washer--but then it started forgetting to go to the spin cycle unless we reminded it. In spite of these quirks, it's a good little washer, and Karel and I haven't seriously considered replacing it.

Nor have we seriously considered getting a dryer. First of all, there simply isn't any room in our apartment for one. But secondly, it is amazing how much laundry can be accommodated on two drying racks, two indoor clotheslines, and the balony rail. Since we "only" do up to five loads a week (like I said, a "good little washer")--what with sheets, towels, and all the rags that get used in cleaning the place--everything fits and everything gets dry within a day or two.

The downside, of course, is that we're almost constantly doing laundry. This is especially an issue when I HATE DOING LAUNDRY. It's not the washing or the hanging or even the taking down--it's the specific task of sorting and making sure my socks don't end up in his bin. Yes, we steal each other's socks anyway, but it's the principle of the matter that counts. Not even craptastic TV like Hart tegen Hard can ease the pain.

And the weirdest thing is, it doesn't even take all that long to do. Fifteen minutes, twenty if I'm having a hard time scrounging up stray hangers--tops. It's over so quickly that I swear I spend more time resisting the laundry than doing it. Kinda like I am now.

So, Internet, what are the jobs you have to do all the time, that shouldn't bother you as much as it does?

"And then a hero comes along"

A few months ago I snarked about a show Hoe schoon is jouw huis? which was about as useful as nipples on a breastplate. I didn't realize at that time that it was a Dutch spin-off of the British show How Clean is Your House? And as strange as it may seem, I've become Kim and Aggie's self-declared biggest fan. Ever. I mean, come on--cleaning uncleanable windows is infinitely more useful than making sure your electric sockets are germ-free.

I've never been a fan of harsh chemical cleaners. Not only are they terrible for you--nothing like aerosolized SDS to destroy your lungs--but it's known that phenols are toxic for cats. Much more pleasant, to me, anyway, to slice open a lemon. Vinegar is a little strong, admittedly, but it's merely unpleasant, rather than toxic. We still keep a single bottle of Uber-Strong-Like-Bull cleaner in our cupboard, for the truly irremedial spots, but overall it's amazing what vinegar and baking soda ("By our powers, combined!") will do. Therefore, any show that shows you clever new ways to use things like cornstarch and ketchup is awesome by me.

There's been a slight paradigm shift in the content and marketing of cleaning product adverts recently: Stuff-That-Puts-Sarin-Gas-To-Shame is being marketed as "something so simple even a man can think of it, and so easy he might even help you clean!" And indeed, whether it's hot 'n hunky men, goofy guys, or procrastinating dads (I cannot find that particular advertisement anywhere, sorry), men are taking a front-and-center role in cleaning. At least, as the advertisers would have you think. I wouldn't know whether to be charmed at the thoughtfulness if Karel ever bought a bottle of Toxic-Purple-Stuff, or offended on his behalf...

The simplicity of "one-bottle-everything-cleaner (while the fumes melt your face)" is, I must confess, an appealing one. And it's a whole lot less intricate than figuring out when to use a lemon, or how much salt to sprinkle on a red wine stain (note, this only works with the cheaper reds). I have to wonder, though, whether guys--who are presumably the ones buying stuff like that--actually like using them, or if they just don't know about homemade fixes. I mean, when was the last time you saw any advice on how to clean your bachelor pad in Men's Health?

Cleansed

It's commonly said that the Dutch have no fashion sense. This isn't true. Most people do have an idea that mayhaps the yellow rain boots will clash with the hot-pink feather boa, and to be fair, I like the whole leggings-and-boots look during the winter (practical, and sexy!). However, it only takes one person to perpetuate the stereotype, and that one person belongs to a peculiar class of women who inhabit the C1000 and Witte Reus commercials. Thankfully their real-life counterparts are a smidge less tacky--they are the women who are likely to show up on your doorstep if you hire a housekeeper.

So explains Karel, anyway. I was skeptical at first--after all, who cleans a house wearing a pencil skirt and a full face of make-up? But then I caught an episode of Hoe Schoon is Jouw Huis?. Like most Dutch realtiy TV, HSIJH is less about horror and ridicule and more about empowering the hapless victim/clueless kid. Marja and Liny travel the Netherlands spreading their cleaning magic on downtrodden domiciles, teaching the inhabitants such life-enhancing skills as...wiping electric sockets clean, sterilizing door frames, and scrubbing walls.

Up until now, I thought we did a pretty good job at keeping our place neat and clean, since I'm not sneezing every other minute. Our floors are pretty clean, our litter boxes don't stink, and the closets are reasonably tidy. I dust the furniture and clean the windows as needed, and the colony of dust bunnies under the bed has retreated to the far corner that I can't reach with our vaccuum. But apparently our apartment is still filthy. God forbid that we should have bacteria on our electric sockets.

Art of Persuasion

There's a hilarious little post on the Expat Blogs forum about how insane the Dutch are about cleanliness. And I, for one, will attest to the fact that this assessment of the Dutch is absolutely-100%-perfectly true. They may not have a sense of interior design or fashion, but they know damn well how to keep everything neat.

Left to my own devices, I will gravitate towards a happy medium of cleanliness and laziness, depending on how many other things need to get done and how often Karel is home (his shiftwork is highly irregular). But Karel likes our apartment Clean, by which I mean eat-off-the-floor clean, which can be just a tiny bit of a hassle if you have three fuzzbutts and two litter boxes. Over the past three years we've sort of reached an equilibrium between our two standards of cleanliness: alone, we'll both do the minimum that's required to keep our apartment Clean, but only when we're together does the place get a thorough cleansing.

For the longest time I resented this need for clean, mostly because it took time away from things I'd rather be doing, like going to see movies and birdwatching and what-not. Lately, though, I've become resigned to the daily rigamarole of keeping house, and all of the cleaning that entails. All thanks to our little FatBoy.

We adopted him in 2009, but it wasn't until the winter came and our apartment had to be sealed shut before we realized that I am pretty allergic to him (and just him, to--I can snuggle both Shadow and the Tweeb without problems). I started taking antihistamines, but it turned out that my degree of suffering wasn't consistent. There would be days when I had nary a sniffle, and days when I was literally too exhausted from sneezing to get out of bed. Eventually, we correlated my allergies to how clean the apartment is.

So really, the amount of housework that I do has absolutely no bearing on my personality. It's just a side effect of wanting to keep our cat.