Amsterdam Foodie

Well, they weren’t really. Victoria’s, that is. They were Esther’s plums. Esther is my colleague who has this crazy thing called a garden (she doesn’t live in Amsterdam) and in that garden is a plum tree. Once upon a time, she brought her own body weight in plums to the office and said, ‘Vicky – [...]

Cherries are rather special as fruit goes because they crop up in so many different places: ‘popping one’s cherry’, ‘with a cherry on top’, ‘cherry picking’, ‘[loving you is] cherry pie’, and  – surely the best known? – ‘feelings take up shelter in the base of my spine, sweet like a chica cherry cola’. N’est-ce [...]

We’ve started growing vegetables on our office balcony this spring. Or, more accurately, my colleagues have started growing them since I have an amazing ability to kill plants just by looking at them (perhaps they have a sixth sense that I’m going to eat them, so they commit suicide in anticipation). So far, we’ve got [...]

When I was a kid, I remember eating rhubarb and apple crumbles that made my mouth shiver. You know what I mean? Sort of dry like red wine and spinach (they probably all have the same tannins, although a quick Google search of ‘rhubarb tannins’ is inconclusive). I think my appreciation of rhubarb stopped right [...]

Ok, so I screwed up. My Aussie friend and I had this genius plan to sell sangria and tortilla on Queen’s Day whilst dancing around to Latino music. It wasn’t very Dutch, admittedly, but who likes orange clothes and Heineken anyway? The plan was going – well – according to plan, until I actually told [...]

The word for salsify in Dutch is a real tongue twister – the sort of word they’d have tested on soldiers during the war to check which side they were on. Schorseneren. It sounds nearly as ugly as it looks. It’s a muddy black tubular root, with wormy little shoots poking out of one end. [...]