Amsterdam Foodie

I’m not sure if there’s even a season for ostrich eggs, and if there is it probably isn’t in May. And besides, I got the egg for Easter, which was in April anyway. But I thought it was so damn cool that I’d come into possession of this enormous, white, dinosaur-esque ostrich egg that I [...]

On Friday, when I was gathering together the ingredients for this post, I had two very different experiences of service that I wanted to share with you. I’d decided to make crabcakes with watercress mayonnaise and watercress salad. So, first things first, I headed to a fishmonger’s in Chinatown on my way home from work. [...]

There’s a school of thought that says the amount of time people spend watching cookery programs is inversely proportional to the time they spend cooking. In other words, the more TV we watch, the less we cook. In a general sense, they probably have a point. But cookery programmes are one of the few genuinely [...]

Back in September of last year I wrote about two A-words that were taking up most of my head-space. Over the past few weeks, one of the A-words has had me working long days and late nights to meet my reporting deadlines; the other broke up with me. Frankly, January was a bastard of a [...]

On 14th January, 2006, I turned up at Heathrow airport with one suitcase, a small rucksack and a one-way ticket from London to Amsterdam. On arrival, I had no job, no home and just one friend who I still knew from our student days. I still remember the hard grip of fear and opportunity as [...]

I’m continuing my Dutch theme for December (November was Zuurvlees, if you recall), this time with a funny shaped cabbage known as spitskool. It’s sort of conical, but in all other respects looks and behaves like a regular white cabbage. I bought it purely because it was whole, and I resented the fact that my [...]