La Dittatrice

A wonderful dessert – the end

This is the end! If you really want to get into the right mood whilst you read this, click for some musical accompaniment. With this final recipe, I’m taking us back to the very start of this blog. I started writing all this when I was living in Genova for a year, and I was looking for a fun way to record all the new food I was getting to know there. I’d been thinking about writing something…

Pollo alla cacciatora, the middle of the end

For the second course of our massive boozy goodbye party, I’ve decided to go for a classic. There’s not much to write about it this time. Normally I’d choose a recipe that had come up in the past week somehow, but this time I actually deliberately looked for a recipe with a bunch of booze in it to fit the theme of the goodbye party dinner, which makes for a brief story. It would have been fun to…

Penne alla vodka, the beginning of the end

Hello there. I’ve got something special to tell you. Did you know that next week will be my two hundred and fiftieth blog post? Aye aye, 250 recipes, tried and tested, photographed, coupled to an inane rant, and published here. It’s been five years that I’ve been doing this, pretty long eh? So I thought that it seemed like an opportune moment to call it a day. That’s right. The dictatorship is…

Burani bonjon as a consolation prize

I’ve got a couple of friends who play in a band together, and sometimes, when they perform, I tag along and sell t-shirts for them. It’s great fun, because I get to hang out with them and the other band members, I can see them play for free (they’re good! Check them out!), and usually I’ll manage to scrounge a couple of free beers out of it. Last weekend I headed over to the east of the country,…

Bucket list eggs benedict

Sometimes I can be a real Calvinist. Sometimes I do things not because I want to do them, but because I feel I should do them. For instance, that time I struggled through all of Crime and Punishment, and hated most of it, but wouldn’t put it down, just because I felt I ought to have read at least one of the Russians. In the same vain, I sometimes feel I should cook the classic difficult dishes,…

The aubergine, my trusty friend in times of need

Semester one of this academic year is over, which means that I just handed in the last of my essays and I can finally take it easy for a bit. Time management is still a problem for me, and instead of working steadily over December and January, I just took off for the Christmas holidays and had to pack two months’ worth of work into January. It wasn’t pretty. The past few weeks have consisted…

We loved kale before it was cool

For reasons that I cannot imagine, kale somehow became hip in the past few years. Kale, the least appetising-looking, toughest, most indestructible vegetable known to man. I’m sure it was announced somewhere to be full of antioxidants, and suddenly, as these things go, tonnes of people started eating it. Mostly across the Atlantic, at first, although the UK has caught on, and I think you can…

Brunch, the only acceptable portmanteau

A few years ago I wrote about how much I hate portmanteau words. This is still valid (Brexit, oh dear Jesus), but there’s one word for which I make an exception: brunch. I guess brunch isn’t so bad because it doesn’t really sound like a portmanteau anymore. Maybe because it’s been around for so long, who knows? I guess mostly I just cut brunch slack because of what it represents: getting up later…

The other reason leftovers are so great, is because you get to use them for all kinds of blasphemous creations of your own, rather than what they were actually intended for. You know, like meatballs that you slice up and stuff in your sandwich to take to work the next day. What makes it so good? Probably the fact that you know it’s wrong, you’re not meant to, it’s against the laws of, I don’t know, proper conduct or something.

My favourite illicit leftover is pasta sauce, preferably ragù alla bolognese. It’s so mincy, and salty, and tomatoey. It goes well with everything, which means your improper creations can never get too blasphemous – it’ll always work out! When I lived in Italy, I felt like ragù was somehow sacred, you couldn’t just put it in or on whatever – if you had some left, you’d just have to make more pasta the next day. But I live in the Netherlands now, I’ll do whatever I like with my leftover ragù. Like put it in a fried piadina with eggs and a bunch of other stuff for the best hangover breakfast piadina ever.

This is one of those things where I just use whatever’s in the fridge. You can do that, and use up all of your leftovers, or you can go for the ingredients I used. You decide.

For one hungover and starving individual, you might like:

one fried piadina – for lots of info on how to make them, check out this recipe for how to make piadine, and then, rather than chucking it in a pan dry, quickly fry it in some oil – but really, it’s easy, you won’t even need to look, just read the basics in the recipe below!

1 egg

some leftover pasta sauce (bolognese is best!)

half an avocado

half a small red onion

half a tomato

a couple of mushrooms

some cheese, grated or sliced

some crème fresh or sour cream

Make this fried piadina – mix flour, olive oil, salt and water – eyeball the quantities to get a large ping pong ball or a small tennis ball of dough. Stir with a wooden spoon, knead, make a supple dough, and roll it out to a very thin dough pancake. Then heat up some oil and chuck in the piadina. When it starts to bubble up, flip it. Leave until both sides are golden, then put it on some kitchen roll for a few minutes while you prepare the rest.

Now fry your egg, your onion and your mushrooms in the same pan. If you’re like me, you’ll want to keep the yolk intact so that the delicious yolk will spread out over all of the filling later.

Heat up your pasta sauce in a small pot or in the microwave. Meanwhile, cut up your tomato. Spread your avocado over the piadina, add the tomato, then add all of the other vegetables, the egg, the cheese, sour cream and the pasta sauce. Now try to roll up your piadina as tightly as possible, then cut it in half. Enjoy with a cup of tea, follow up with a nap.

Do you guys like games? I love games. You can keep me happy all night with a fridge full of beer and a good long round of risk. The competition, the hilarity when you wipe out one of your friends’ painstakingly built up army, the thrill of the win or the crush of defeat, I love it. But it doesn’t have to be a long or complicated game like Risk. Even simple games are great. I’ll get just as…

Swedish Christmas/New year’s glögg

Alright everyone, best wishes and all that! Partyyyyy! As it’s almost the end of the year, I’d like to see you all off to 2016 with a highly alcoholic recipe. It only seems appropriate, right? Once again, and probably for the last time for the next few weeks, this is a recipe that the Dane has shared with me. It’s for a thing called glögg, which I was also told is actually for Christmas. However,…

If you’re a frequent visitor to this blog, you’ll start noticing that Denmark is becoming somewhat of a theme. It’s just this Dane, he keeps coming up with the most amazing recipes! I’ve never really met all that many people from Scandinavia, and I can’t afford to go there because it’s so expensive, so this boy is just my culinary portal into the North, you know? Whatever he comes up with, I’ll give it a shot.

One of the more seasonal recipes that he’s shared with me is a rice dessert that I’d totally recommend making this year for your Christmas dinner. It’s called risalamande and if you’ve got any language skills, you may have understood that it involves rice and almonds. It also involves kirsebærsauce, or cherry sauce (literally cherry berry sauce, because cherries are berries in Scandinavia). The whole thing is pretty awesome, and not difficult to make. As so often, there’s a lot of different recipes going round, but this is the Dane’s favourite, and who am I to argue?

For 8 (but actually for 16 because after all that soup, turkey, stuffing, vegetables and what not nobody’s hungry anymore, anyway), use:

200 gr pudding rice

1 litre of full fat milk

1 vanilla pod

half a litre of whipping cream, whipped

sugar, to taste, probably around 3 tbsp

some peeled almonds, roughly chopped

For the sauce:

a big ass jar of cherries in syrup (700 gr or so)

2 tsp of corn starch

Slice the vanilla pod open lengthways. Chuck it in a pot, add the rice, and cook it in the milk according to the instructions on the pack. Mine said 12 minutes but depending on your rice it might take a lot longer.

When it’s cooked properly (just taste some to see if the texture is good – we’re going for a thick kind of porridge), take it out of the pot, put in in a big bowl and leave it to cool down. It’ll go hard, that’s OK.

When the rice porridge has cooled down, loosen it up a bit with a fork. Then whip up your whipping cream with a couple of spoons of sugar in. Roughly chop your almonds, then add those and the whipped cream to the rice. Now scoop it around carefully, folding the rice over the cream and the cream over the rice again, so as not to break the delicious whipped cream that you just whipped your arm off for. When you get a nice and smooth mixture, you’re done. Taste for sugar, add more if you want to (but remember you’re going to eat this with sweet cherry sauce, so don’t go mad just yet).

Now we have to make the sauce! Chuck all of the syrup from your jar into a small saucepan. Heat it up carefully, no boiling. Meanwhile, mix your corn starch with a few teaspoons of water. Mix well, make sure there’s not lumps, then add it to the syrup. Keep stirring, and the syrup will thicken in a couple of seconds. Add the cherries so that they heat up along with the sauce.

Serve the risalamande cold, with the hot cherry sauce. Optionally, add one whole almond before serving up, and give a present – no wait, fuck it, a glass of your best Scotch – to whomever finds it (even if that’s your 5-year-old nephew). Merry Christmas, everyone!

I’m of the hard pear type. For me, a good pear is so tough that it hurts your gums to bite down into it. At that point, they’re still fresh of flavour, and your hands come out of the experience relatively unharmed, that is, juice free. There’s only a very brief period in which pears are fit for human (or rather, hard pear person) consumption. A couple of days after purchase, usually, the inevitable softening sets in, and with the softening comes the sweetening. I don’t know how it’s possible, but soft pears are just so sickeningly sweet.

So there I was, in the university library café, with a pear that had seemed decent enough when I grabbed it in the morning, but that looked completely inedible now that it’d spent a few hours in my backpack. The Dane looked at it disapprovingly – he too, is a hard pear person. The thought of someone eating a bruised, browned, abomination of a pear like that one was unbearable to him. When I told him I still had a few more pears left at home, he quickly texted his mum to ask her for a recipe for pear pie, which she immediately whatsapped our way. I gave it a shot with the remaining pears and it was absolutely wonderful.

For one pear pie, use:

4 old, dirty, soft pears

240 gr flour

125 gr sugar

150 gr butter + extra for greasing

1 egg

1 tbsp cold water

a pinch of salt

a sachet of vanilla sugar

a small chunk, about 1 cm, of fresh ginger, grated

To serve, get yourself some sour cream! As for equipment, you’ll need some baking paper, some cling film, one of those funky little silicon brushes, and a spring form cake tin.

First, make the dough – it needs to rest for an hour before you can use it, so start making this well ahead of time. First, mix in the flour, sugar, vanilla sugar and grated ginger together. Also grate in the ginger. Cut the cold butter up into small chunks, and use your hands to mix those into the dry ingredients, making a crumbly mixture.

Now beat your egg with a tablespoon of water, and add that to the crumble mixture. Mix it around with a fork for a bit, then just get your hands in there, and knead the dough until it’s a smooth ball. I had to add a little bit of flour while kneading, because the dough got a little bit too sticky and difficult to handle.

When you have a nice smooth ball of dough, wrap it up in cling film and stick it in the fridge for an hour or so. Then remove it, slice it in two, put one half back into the fridge and roll the other one out to a little over the size of your cake tin. Grease your tin with butter, then put the dough in. As for rolling out the dough, it’s of the type that tears easily and that will stick to everything, so I find it really helpful to roll it out between two layers of baking paper. You can then peel off the paper fairly easily.

So put your dough circle in your cake tin and press it down well on the sides, making sure you have a little wall of dough that’s roughly the same height on all sides. Now quickly peel your pears, cut them in half, remove the cores, and put them in the cake tin, round side up, stem side to the centre of the tin.

Get your other half of dough out, roll it out, put it over your pears and press it down on the sides so that the pie is closed. Now brush some water on the top layer, then sprinkle with a little bit of sugar. Bake for 40 minutes in a preheated oven on 220°C.

The Dane suggests: Pear pie is really, really sweet, so it goes well with something slightly sour, such as sour cream with a little bit of vanilla sugar mixed in.

The worst thing about moving to new places is leaving other ones behind. The best thing about moving around Europe is that you’ll never lack a place to crash. The weirdest thing about moving on is when you go back to stay over at your old flat, and nothing is as it was before. Of course it’s inevitable that you’re replaced the moment you carry your last bag of belongings over the threshold, but…

Now that I study at a pretty international university, I’m constantly surrounded by all these interesting foreign types, which is great! It’s mostly Europeans on my course, although we get the odd Asian student as well. Although Dutch is a pretty difficult language, and not a very useful one to boot, some of the new arrivals here are doing their best to learn what they can. One of them (a Dane,…

Of course I don’t actually care much about politics or shopping, so the above-mentioned developments raised one of my eyebrows, but didn’t really shake me further. Of course this cannot be said for the brand new culinary delights that I’ve been seeing around the country. Because there’s a weird trend going on there, as well: everyone eats fuckin’ Flammkuchen now.

Seriously, Flammkuchen, where did it come from? What is it even? I never even knew this thing existed but there you go, this country lives off them now. It’s kind of like a German, white pizza, except there’s no yeast involved, so you get a super thin, crispy base, traditionally topped with crème fraîche, onion and bacon lardons, but in reality topped with whatever people here can come up with. Knowing the Dutch, that’ll be the wildest, craziest, most ridiculously disgusting abominations. The traditional one is really good though, and it’s not very difficult to make.

Literally, Flammkuchen means something like ‘flamecake’ in German and although it’s not a cake, it should ideally be cooked over fire, in a proper wood oven. I don’t have that, so instead I just preheat my oven to the highest temperature it can possibly reach and then I up the cooking time a little bit. Not ideal, but it’s the best I can do. See how hot your oven gets and change cooking times depending on that. You’re going for crispy.

For a couple of Flammkuchen, use:

200 gr plain flour

125 – 150 ml water

good pinch of salt

a small tub of crème fraîche

a wee pack of bacon lardons

a couple of onions

First of all, mix the flour with the water (go easy first, then add more if you need to) and a pinch of salt. Knead properly, you really want to take your time here. Once you have a smooth ball of dough, wrap it up in cling film and leave it for about an hour.

When an hour has passed, rip your dough in two halves, then flatten them both out as flat as you possibly can. Thin and crispy, keep that in mind.

When you’ve got two flat discs, top them both with crème fraîche, the lardons, and the thinly sliced onions, and stick them in a scorching hot wood oven for about 8 minutes, or a normal oven preheated to the highest possible temperature for about 12 – 15.

Eat with copious amounts of German beer.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Italy for a dear friend’s birthday. Of course it was a weekend filled with booze, food and partying. After the weekend, I was suddenly confronted with a couple of deadlines that I had sort of, you know, forgotten about completely. So I stressed. I went on a coffee-fuelled power diet, determined to stay up as long as it took for as many days as it took until I got all of my work done. After a couple of days of that, I felt… Somewhat poorly, as a proper Northerner would put it. But my symptoms (terrible stomach ache, loss of appetite, acidity) sounded awfully like something the Italians call gastrite, and which the Queen of the Nights Out sometimes had after a particularly boozy weekend. I tried asking people here if they knew what the best cure was, but no-one had even heard of it. People simply didn’t know what it was.

I decided to ask the Queen herself what I should do. The verdict was not a pleasant one. “You can’t have anything that’s fatty, acid, sweet, or caffeinated. No tomatoes, nothing fried in oil, no butter. You need lots of green vegetables, preferably cooked. Lots of grains, and everything wholemeal. Eat slowly and small portions. Oh, and Ditta? Strictly no alcohol.”

Noooooooooo!

Screw that. I’m not going to eat boiled broccoli for a week. I can live with cutting down on the booze and coffee for a few days, provided that I can still eat normal people food. No oil and no tomatoes is a tricky one, but surely I’ve had to deal with worse restrictions in my life. Nothing fried in oil, that means everything from the oven. No fatty foods, so lean chicken breast should be doable. Green vegetables, so spinach and lettuce are probably OK. Wholegrain bread with extra seeds, check. Cheat a little bit and have some raw onion, and there you go, healthiest, leanest, most dietary-aware chicken burger you’ve ever seen. Oven-baked chicken burger with spinach and nut pesto, awesome!

And just for the record: after a couple of days of eating super healthily I decided that I’m not Italian and that gastritis doesn’t exist up here. I went for a careful pint and realised that it stayed down just fine. Gastritis will only get you if you let it. Never surrender!

For one, and then you can just multiply the ingredients by however many people you’re feeding, use:

one chicken breast

some flour

some breadcrumbs

one egg

some lettuce

half a red onion

a roll of your choice

And for the spinach and walnut pesto:

a small handful of fresh basil

two small handfuls of fresh spinach

half a handful of mixed nuts (in my mixed nuts bag there were walnuts, almonds, and hazelnuts)

some freshly grated parmesan (I don’t know, like, three spoonfuls or something)

a small clove of garlic

some olive oil

couple of spoonfuls of water, for easier mixing purposes

a pinch of salt

Also get some

potatoes

for the chips!

So the first thing you probably want to do is cut up your potatoes in nice chip-shaped strips. Chuck them in a bowl of cold water, then rinse and leave them to drain. You want to put your chips in the oven (220°C) about 20 minutes before you put in your chicken. If you’re on a diet, sprinkle them with salt and nothing else. Otherwise, add some olive oil.

Now take your chicken. Put it on a chopping board on some cling film, then cover it with some more cling film. Now grab a rolling pin (or, if you’re a drunk who doesn’t own a rolling pin, an empty wine bottle), and smash the shit out of it. You want to flatten it out so that it cooks properly without turning into some godawful piece of dry, stringy I don’t even know. So nice and flat, don’t be afraid.

After that, slap it about in the flour, dip it in the egg, then bread it. Now put it in an oven dish on some baking paper, then pop in the oven for as long as it takes. Remember my oven? I don’t know how hot it gets exactly, but I think it’s about 180°C, so my chicken takes just over half an hour. You might get yours done in about 20 minutes on 220.

While you wait for your chicken, chuck all the ingredients for the pesto in a jug and just stick the hand blender in. Taste for any of the ingredients, and add more of what you feel is missing.

Wash and dry your lettuce, and slice your onion into the thinnest rings you can manage.

Assembly time! Cut open your roll, put in some lettuce, shove the chicken in there (check it’s cooked beforehand, but you should be fine, really), top with some onion and the pesto. If you’re a tough northerner, enjoy this one with a pint.