Tomato sauce, in plain English. I bought an old-school food mill. Passe-vite, if you will, or passeerzeef for those in the Netherlands. Whatever name you want to give it, I’m so happy with the darn thing. It improved the quality of my tomato sauces by, oh well, something like 200%. Time saver, since you don’t have to remove skin or seeds anymore, you can let the mill do that for…
J-man was somewhere around 18 months when I cooked this for the first time. The recipe belongs to a woman who entered a contest at ABC for the best Mac ‘n Cheese. She submitted the winning recipe, and then I tweaked it because I can’t leave well enough alone. Now I’ve never really been a Mac & Cheese fan; in Holland we grow up on a different kind of macaroni….
I was flipping through a BBC GoodFood magazine while doing my weekly grocery shopping—something I do every three days, or so it seems—when my eye caught a pasta recipe that included spinach and walnuts. Bingo! Those magazines cost E9,25 here! That’s a whopping $11,85. Absolutely crazy! Left the magazine at the store (seriously, it didn’t even include oven temperatures and their baking time was way off), and just incorporated those…
For years I’ve searched for that one breakfast pasta casserole—strange as it may sound to the Dutchies—recipe my grandmother always use to make. It wasn’t in the recipes I found after my mom died. When I described the dish to a friend of mine: the flavor, texture and feel to it, she handed me an old recipe belonging to her mother that she thought might to be the one. Or…
There aren’t a lot of real easy recipes out there I like better than chicken peperonata. Simple, too. You cut up some chicken, add onion, garlic, tomatoes and a boatload of peppers, simmer the whole shebang and voila… peperonata. That’s the recipe in a nutshell, mind you. Anyway, the flavor this simple combination of ingredients gives your poultry or meat is astonishing. Especially grilled meats. But I’ll be more than…
It wasn’t until a friend of mine casually asked me what I had put into the chicken casserole that made it so creamy without making it greasy, that it dawned on me this is more an American than a European way of cooking. Using a concentrated soup as the basis of your casserole—turning it into a sauce like that—isn’t really common in Dutch cooking. Actually, it’s really uncommon. I love it,…