Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 8:43 pm
According to Jezebel this is a Dutch advertisement for the Burger King hamburger chain. Unfortunately I have been unable to confirm this, or to find out who the makers of this ad are.
I remember when the only hamburger joint in town was Wimpy, and they weren’t very popular. Back in the day fast food in the Netherlands tended to be french fries served in snack bars with a side order of frikandel or croquette. The introduction of McDonald’s in the Netherlands in the 1970s changed the landscape a little, although today there are only 200-something McDonald’s establishments and still over 4,000 snack bars.
A few days ago, beekeepers placed some 20,000 bees on the roof of the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre smack downtown in a serious attempt to help increase the honey bee population and eventually make honey. There are enough green spaces and trees in Amsterdam to hopefully start making honey this summer according to an optimistic beekeeper. And if you thought keeping bees on the roof of a theatre is weird, it’s been all the rage for years on the roof of the Paris Opera, in New York and other European cities.
Bees have been disappearing for years in Amsterdam, and so this is just another attempt at keeping them buzzing around. We apparently need bees for food growth and could use a boost of the wild bee population.
Bees can’t hurt you unless you mess with them, then they will sting you and die. I might be allergic to a proper bee sting so I go around them like the bully in the school yard at recess. I love watching them work, and who doesn’t like a good waggle dance?
Amsterdam is apparently the first European city to have a North Korean restaurant, which opened in January at the edge of the city in Osdorp. It has a cultural centre attached to it as well, although many people are sure it’s a propaganda centre. In fact, it’s been almost impossible to talk about restaurant Pyongyang, named after the North Korean capital, without it turning to politics.
Owner Remco van Daal keeps reminding the press and his patrons that his restaurant and the cultural centre is not politically motivated, but it’s a hard sell because in Asia, Pyongyang restaurants are associated with money laundering. If we could have Russian restaurants a few decades ago in the West, we should be able to have North Korean ones as well. And which major European city doesn’t have an Italian restaurant with ties to the mafia? Van Daal could be telling the truth, he could also be lying, but encouraging his restaurant is optional.
Two friends of mine went to Pyongyang for dinner, one for his birthday and to indulge in his fascination of dictators (no pics of Kim Jong Il there since his portrait may not be filmed), the other went with friends who are actually going to visit North Korea this spring. They both said it was expensive and not particularly special food-wise, but the song and dance provided by real North Korean women is worth experiencing at least once.
In this video you’ll see the clumsy decor and lighting with North Korean art on the walls, the food and the traditional song and dance. And if my friends or other patrons are horrible people for funding an oppressive regime, so are people who consume Nestlé products or whatever else that is on the current bad corporations hit list. And consuming questionable products has always been optional.
Yes, the Netherlands took first prize at the World Championship Cheese Contest in the US and kicked Switzerland off its pedestal this week, but a group of five women from Groningen also won a Gourmand World Cookbook Award in Paris recently for the cookbook, ‘Koken Met Kruidnoten’ by Karin Sitalsing. They won the award for the illustration of a cookbook that features a lot of ‘kruidnoten’ recipes from local chefs Pierre Wind and Siemen de Jong.
Back to the cheese bit: the winning cheese, Vermeer, is a low-fat Gouda type cheese by Campina from Wolvega, Friesland, and is only called by that name for export, as nobody had ever heard of it until a few days ago. Remember, this is a country that boats Australian Homemade as a Dutch chocolate brand.
(Link: www.rtvnoord.nl, Photo of totally unrelated Gouda by Jon Sullivan, released into the public domain by its author)
It’s white, probably taste bland and has cost 250,000 euro to make: it’s laboratory grown meat as proof that it can be done. Considering the future demands for meat due to population increase and a higher cost of living in parts of the world, trying to grow meat sounds like a good idea.
Some estimate that food production will have to double within the next 50 years to meet the requirements of a growing population. During this period, climate change, water shortages and greater urbanisation will make it more difficult to produce food.
Professor Mark Post’s group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle, and claims that synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.
It seems to me that eating less meat or none at all is easier and way cheaper than all of this, even for meat eaters. Nobody has to eat meat every day, and vegetarian alternatives don’t have to be of a lesser status than actual meat. And why a burger? That’s so junk food like.
Dutch Green party politician Ineke van Gent called Labour Party Jacques Monasch one of the old whinging geezers Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets during a debate on the high speed train line. She opened the door for him to quip back at her with, “I won’t tell you which Muppet you remind me of”, which most probably meant Miss Piggy, as she’s quite corpulent and blonde.
And if that banter wasn’t insignificant enough, a national supermarket had people saving Kermit points to be able to score Muppet hand puppets, but oh no, they’ve run out and people are pissed, small children are disappointed and a meltdown is in progress.
When the well-known character of said national supermarket commercials finally meets Kermit (notice the magical Dutch to English translation), he impolitely talks over him, calls his friends up and acts like a total douche.
Some judge in Den Bosch ruled that a webshop that sells alcohol from an industrial building was illegal because they should operate from a building marked as a retail shop or proper warehouse. The city is reviewing this decision, as it would also imply that any webshop run from a home would be illegal because a home is not location for this purpose. Imagine a physical liquour store taking a competing webshop to court and the latter losing because they aren’t run from an actual shop.
In the case of alcohol, the webshop cannot properly check how old someone is (an easy argument), but if this applies to all webshops — it probably won’t but imagine — some rules are going to have to change because they’ll give people a bigger headache than any booze could. Most webshops in the Netherlands are run from homes and the entire idea of having to be in a physical shop is preposterous.
I love the smell of a good marketing stunt in the morning: jarred food company Hak is campaigning to get a word out of Dutch dictionary Van Dale. The word is ‘potdicht’ (literally ‘jar tight’, meaning tightly closed and implying cannot be opened) and since the claim that their new jars are no longer ‘potdicht’ and easy to open, they feel the word should be scrapped from the dictionary. It is totally absurd to scrap anything that does not exist anymore on a whim, and so a lovely marketing stunt it is.
Besides offering jarred Dutch food products, their claim to fame with the non Dutch is that their jars are see-through. You can see what you’re buying and they do look nice on the shelves.
A goose meat croquette sounds to me like a Dutch Christmas appetizer or even a fancy French one. However, the geese in question are some of 100.000 geese a year that are shot to stop planes at Schiphol getting geese in their engines.
Beach side café Beach Inn in IJmuiden, North Holland is serving goose meat croquettes made from the geese shot down at Schiphol airport. As I also saw recently on telly, a goose hunter for the airport said catching and releasing would mean hiring an army (they fly back to the airport anyways, a waste of time) and poisoning their eggs is just not done anymore and doesn’t really help.
The geese are usually destroyed or sometimes end up in cat food. Rob Hagenouw, an artist from Amsterdam, contacted some hunters, score some goose and worked hard at creating his own recipe. He says that with his croquettes, the flavours really come out.
Eating goose, or turkey for that matter, is not really a Christmas thing in the Netherlands for many reasons. First, many people do not have ovens due to a lack of living space. They have combination microwave and and oven devices that barely fit a decent sized pizza. Second, even if you do have an oven like I do, a goose or turkey won’t fit. Guineafowl or chicken is the best you can hope for. Another reason is that it’s just not a Dutch tradition to shove a big bird in the oven.
One of this year’s Eindhoven Design Academy’s graduation projects was Ardie van Bommel’s Pure Nature.
The project consists of a group of tables, chairs and kitchen islands that were all made to look like they were made out of apple crates. Van Bommel originally wanted to use actual apple crates, but that approach did not lead to the desired results, Man and Public Space Magazine wrote.
Van Bommel even made, it seems, a diorama of her apple crate restaurant inside—you guessed it—an apple crate. Her website suggests that this restaurant was made for the Philips Fruittuin (a former job creation project initiated by the local electronics giant), although it’s not clear to me whether the set-up has ever been in actual use.
