Pasta Puttanesca

Pasta is something I just could eat every single day. Especially spaghetti. And if the sauce is good, you definitely do not need a lot of it to make your dish delicious. I always like the puttanesca pasta so much for it is so simply to make, yet it is very tastful with a nice salty bite to it.

A good plate of pasta with a tomato sauce.

Dinner for 2

1 shallot, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

4 filets of anchovies, chopped

40 gr of black olives, chopped (green ones also will do just fine)

1 tbsp. capers

1 can of tomatoes

250 gr spaghetti

20 gr parmesan, grated

50 gr fresh goats cheese, moldered

A handful of fresh basil

Fry the shallot, garlic and anchovies until it softens. Add the olives and capers. Fry for a minute before adding a can of tomatoes, 50 ml water and salt and pepper. Bring to a boiling point, turn the heat low and let it simmer for about half an hour.

Pangasius with Broad Beans

My grandmother and grandfather-in-law are coming over for dinner and I want to make them something special, but also easy to digest. My choice for tonight is some nice oven baked pangasius.

Unfortunately I slipped on the bathroom floor two hours before their arrival – keeping my balance is really hard with this belly that is due in 12 days – so  it was a bit of a race against the clock and I had to skip the planned soup as a starter

Oven baked pangasuis 
Dinner for 4

½ a liter of fish stock

300 gr broad beans

25 ml white wine

A bit saffron

125 ml cream

4 pangasius filets

100 ml white wine

2 shallots, halved

Big knob of butter

Preheat the oven at 180C. Boil the stock down to about half. When the fish stock is boiled down add the white wine, saffron and cream. Bring to a boiling point, add the beans and lower the heat to simmer until the fish is done.

Pasta with mushrooms and green beans

After a very busy day I am craving a big plate of pasta, for which I used leftovers from the fridge combined in cream sauce.

Pasta with greens beans and mushrooms

Meal for 2

150 gr of green beans
2 chopped up shallots
1 tsp. olive oil
1 tsp. of fresh thyme

250 gr mushrooms, sliced

Juice of ½ a lemon

150 ml cream

150 gr pasta

1 tbsp. capers

Cook the beans in 3 cm of boiling water for about five minutes, set aside. 

Pumpkin soup and a potato salad

We have lots of packing to do for the upcoming move, but I have the rest of the day off and the cabinets need to be emptied so there is plenty opportunity and enough ingredients to cook. It’s a soup and salad again tonight.

Pumpkin Soup with a potato salad 
Lunch or light meal for 2

For the soup:

1 tsp. olive oil

2 shallots, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 tbsp. of red curry

1 small pumpkin, peeled, deseeded and cut into chunks

1 liter vegetable stock

3 bay leafs

Mullets and a salad

I had a day off, so there’s time to try out a new recipe. Not that this recipe takes that much time to make, but today I have time to visit the Albert Cuijp market and buy some different fish than the usual trout. Today it’s mullets and this is how I made them tonight for the two of us:

Oven baked Mullets 
Dinner for 2

For the mullets

2 mullets

2 tbsp. olive oil

½ a tbsp. sea salt

1 tbsp. fresh thyme leaves

1 lemon

2 bay leaves

Vlaamsch Broodhuys

After strolling through a thawing, but still ice cold, Vondelpark, we head over to Vlaamsch Broodhuys at the Constantijn Huygenstraat

Unfortunately they're out of quiche. We both order a mackerel sandwich instead, which are so very good we decide to also share one of their salmon sandwiches. Normally we just go here to purchase bread from their bakery; I had no idea their sandwiches were this delicious. We will definitely return to their lunchroom as well!

Garlic chicken

This honestly is the very first time I have prepared a whole chicken! Shameful to admit I have been more of a chicken breast person. Until now!

This recipe is very simple, but also very tasteful! How? Like this:

Garlic chicken with mushrooms

Dinner for 3/4

The chicken

3 bulbs of garlic

Handful fresh thyme leaves

1 organic chicken (around 1.5 kilo’s)

1 tbsp. olive oil

100 gr mushrooms, halved

Savory Pancakes

I do like pancakes a lot, best of all with some good old fashioned Dutch syrup. As a breakfast that is, or lunch, not so much for dinner. With my dinner I definitely need to have my veg, as much as possible. I now have found a perfect recipe to have pancakes as a dinner every once in a while, but also not having to miss out on my veg

Savory Pancakes

Lunch or light meal for 2

For the pancakes (about 6)

100 gr flour

1 egg

200 ml milk

Sunflower oil

Spicy Shrimp Pasta

Blue Mondays. The start of the week, the end of a perfect weekend. The days are getting shorter and shorter.  We really are longing for a sunny, but easy to prepare dish so a light Shrimp pasta it is!

Shrimp Spaghetti 
Light meal for 2

250 gr of spaghetti

250 gr of shrimp

1 tsp. sunflower oil

2 cloves of garlic, sliced

1 chili pepper, grinded

1 cm fresh ginger, chopped

1 tbsp. butter

½ lime

Rocket

Cook the spaghetti in plenty of salted water. Fry the shrimp a couple of minutes in sunflower oil, add the garlic, chili pepper and ginger. Add the butter, stir till melted, press the lime above and then stir in the spaghetti so it’s nicely covered in butter. Add a few hands of rocket and ready you are.

Spring Onion Soup

After a long day of work, especially at the end of the week we are mostly chosing some easy meal to cook. Let me refrase, we mainly like to take away or order in on those days, but it's still hard to find take out dinners containing enough fresh vegetables to my likings. So tonight we choose the easy cooking:  soup and a salad.

A spring onion soup with a smoked chicken salad 
Lunch or light meal for 2

The salad:
1/2 a cabbage lettuce
10 cherry tomatoes, halved
1 chicken breast, sliced

Meatball Spaghetti

A real classic. My husband loves this recipe very, very much and when I want to surprise him once in a while I can most definitely make him very happy with this recipe. It does take some serious time though: the longer the tomato sauce is cooked, the better it tastes. Rolling the meatballs also isn't a two minute job either.

What also is important with the tomatoe sauce - as I learned from Jamie Oliver - is to try not to bust the tomatoes in the cooking process, but to wait until the cooking is done. This way the sauce will be more sweet . Breaking the tomatos in an earlier stage tend to make the sauce a bit more souer.

Spaghetti with meatballs in a tomato sauce

Dinner for 4

For the tomato sauce:
1 clove of Garlic, chopped 
1 dries chili pepper, chopped
1 tsp. oregano
2 cans of peeled tomatoes
1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
a hand of fresh basil, chopped

Nicoise Salad with Herring

A Simple salad made around the wonderful herring we bought at the specialist Jewish sour shop De Leeuw. If you like souer stuff as much as I do, please go and visit this sweet little shop on a thursday, friday or sunday and get yourself some fish, pickles, onions or even some souer horseradish.

This salad is a mix of boiled green beens, tomatoes and sliced red onion, mixed up with some vinegar and olive oil. Herring, hard boiled eggs and some fresh dill on top.

Forest Theater

In the middle of “het Amsterdamse Bos” (The Forest of Amsterdam) there is an open air theater: Het Bostheater. Every summer there is a play on this stage. This year they play Don Q, A wonderful play although a bit confusing.

One of the best parts of the theater also is the time before the play starts, when people have their picnic on the benches. Eating the food they brought, having wine and mainly having a good time. The atmosphere during these warm summer nights is very special and even though you might not speak Dutch it would be worth visiting a performance when in Amsterdam

Finland

A weekend break to Finland is one of the most relaxing things I have ever done. They do not only all have saunas, they also seem to have their vacation cabins located next to lakes or on private islands in their archipelago. We fly to Turku to have a real Finnish dinner – fresh mushroom soup, Finnish cheese, Home baked buns, real Finnish meatballs and mash potato – with the parents of our friend the Viking, before driving up to his little house on an island. An Island without electricity or running water but with a sauna and hammocks.

Nightly sauna sessions, cooling down in the lake, having sausages, beer and potato salad at 2 at night. Picking blueberries, searching chanterelles and even go spear fishing to catch some fresh cod. Strolling a nearby year market in search of a coffee at 10am, only find out the only beverage that can be bought is beer. Deciding to than have beers instead, accompanied by one of the very best smoked salmon I have ever had.

Wish we could do this once every year!