June 6, 2011

McDonald’s biggest restaurant chain second year in a row

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 10:58 am
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American junk food chain McDonald’s has increased its lead on the other businesses in Misset’s Dutch food services Top 100, De Stentor reports. Second place is taken by the Van der Valk hotel chain. (Circumstances forced me to stay there one night in 2010 and I can confirm that the food is almost of Mickey D’s quality and not in a good way.)

Biggest investor was the Efteling theme park with its 30 million Raveleijn attraction, with further investments in the pipeline.

During the launch of the Top 100 in Zeist, copyfighter Ronald van den Hoff won Misset’s first Horeca Personality Award for his congress concept Seats2Meet.

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May 31, 2011

Dutch beer ads with Playboy bunnies and famous guys

Filed under: Fashion,Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 10:39 am

Bavaria beer ads on Dutch television currently feature two commercials with Mickey Rourke (see one below) playing upon his reputation as a major drinker. Besides the usual reasons for putting Americans in Dutch commercials, including sexing up your product, appealing to the youth and trying to be more international, Bavaria does sell 65% of its beer abroad, so it has good reasons for using heavy hitters. Although not a huge brand in the Netherlands, Bavaria is apparently sold in more than 120 countries and was caught up in controversy during the World Cup in South Africa 2010 with its Dutch dresses. The dresses were seen as advertising another beer brand than the main sponsor and some good looking blondes wearing the dresses got arrested, a fantastic marketing moment in retrospect.

I guess I like the Rourke ones better for the simple reason that the Dutch don’t censor English swear words no matter what time the ads come on television.

Here’s a funny Dutch ad with Snoop Dogg and Dutch singer Marco Borsato (a family man Neil Diamond, schmaltzy but much more ‘modern’) that anyone outside the Netherlands couldn’t have seen. It’s about having some choice when choosing a mobile phone, from a few years back.

(Link: reclamewereld.blog.nl)

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May 15, 2011

Chopper gangs on a beer and bikes tour (video)

Filed under: Bicycles,Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 5:23 pm

Here’s a video of the Key Town Cruisers (Leiden), the Rollin’ Daddies (Leiderdorp) and Chopaderos (“worldwide drinking club with a bicycle problem”, Amsterdam) on their yearly bock beer tour.

I had no idea choppers still existed. It seems they’ve not only survived the 1970s, but have gotten fashionable in the interim. These mean machines look like they could take on a bakfiets!

(Via Cycling without a helmet)

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April 8, 2011

Urk looking into getting drug sniffing dogs

Filed under: Animals,Food & Drink,Religion,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:01 am

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Every country in the world has that one town that people make fun of and in the Netherlands, that town is Urk, Flevoland.

The former island (that could explain some weirdness) seems to attract attention by making decisions based on its strong religious beliefs that are akin to fighting windmills because nothing they do seems to work, it just seems to get worse.

After banning strippers, attempting beer confiscation and littering the rest of the country with creationist folders, it’s now time to score some drug sniffing dogs to enforce the town-wide marijuana ban, which ironically is illegal. Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten warned Urk’s city council that it cannot declare the entire village a drug-free zone because that’s illegal. But hey, when you do things based on your religious beliefs the law goes out the window pretty fast and you can get away with murder.

The word on the Internet is that the kids in Urk are some of the most messed up youth in the area not because of some sort of preponderance of drugs and booze, but because of the very religious city council constantly making them the object of their problems. We’ll save the hard drug use and unwanted pregnancies stories for later.

Slightly unrelated, but I had to.

Lard – I want to be a drug sniffing dog

(Link: dutchnews.nl)

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March 23, 2011

Toxic spider crawls out of a bunch of bananas

Filed under: Food & Drink,Nature,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:30 am

It has all the trappings of the opening scene of a B-movie. Employees in the ‘quiet’ town of Bolsward, Friesland were working at the supermarket, doing their thing. All of a sudden, an employee was in the fruit section and saw something big and brown crawl out of the bananas to say Bom Dia! to the world.

It was big and is apparently high venimous. It was a Brazilian wandering spider (phoneutria nigriventer) that hitched a ride on a bunch of bananas from Costa Rica to the Netherlands.

If you get bitten by the Brazilian, it does things only its maker could have come up with after a bender of mojitos and samba. Here’s what Wikipedia tells us:

Aside from causing intense pain, the venom of the spider can also cause priapism in humans. Erections resulting from the bite are uncomfortable, can last for many hours and can lead to impotence. A component of the venom (Tx2-6) is being studied for use in erectile dysfunction treatments.

In true sober Dutch style, an employee caught the spider, put it in a jar, and eventually drowned it and threw it in the bin.

(Link: hartvannederland.nl, Photo of Ctenus exlineae (F Ctenidae) by Marshal Hedin, some rights reserved)

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March 15, 2011

‘Organic farming can be deceiving’

Filed under: Animals,Food & Drink,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 4:11 pm

When it comes to environmentally friendly products, we tend to collectively think that they’re automatically better than conventional products without even checking. The media and marketing play on these warm and fuzzy feelings all the time, which tends to be echoed by people whose need to believe always seems to outweigh checking the facts. Yes, these are nasty generalizations and yes, I too want to believe, but I don’t — yet.

After an aquaintance had posted an ‘I’m better than you because I eat less meat’ blurb on a mailing list, I promptly responded with our posting on producing meat is actually less damaging to the environment than producing cotton T-shirts. I’ll bet you she still buys cotton T-shirts.

However, I do agree that the video linked below seems to gloss over the issue of pesticides and other interesting comments the farmers were trying to make, but the deception is real: organic products have their own issues and according to everything I have read from several countries as an ordinary consumer, they are very often the same or only slightly better than conventional products.

And yes, killing animals is still killing animals, I got that part.

Watch the short video report: ‘Organic meat not better for the environment’.

(Link: Radio Netherlands)

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March 7, 2011

Carnival parade in Sittard, the Prince throws oranges

Filed under: Food & Drink,General,History,Music by Orangemaster @ 2:36 pm

I had heard rumors that in Sittard, Limburg, the carnival Prince throws oranges and I had to go and find out if that was true. Once his float arrived on the Market Square I snapped a picture of him (Tom 1) and I also caught an orange. I’m grateful he didn’t try to hit people with them.

A lot of the people parading also gave their social commentary about Sittard, a city falling apart and watching the number of inhabitants dwindle like many other places in Limburg. In local dialect, these signs read ‘Greetings from the torn down city’, referring to the many broken down and empty buildings in Sittard.

In sharp contrast to the ugly parts of town, the lovely Sjtadscafe de Gats dating back from 1535 on the Market Square makes for a lovely background. I saw a few more similar buildings from that era, as the town didn’t really suffer serious architectural damage from WWII.

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March 6, 2011

Children’s carnival parade in Heerlen

Filed under: Food & Drink,General,History,Music by Orangemaster @ 11:26 am

It’s carnival time again in the South provinces of the Netherlands and yesterday in Heerlen, Limburg they had their children’s parade with parents, prams and princes. The red-green-yellow scarf that doesn’t match the rest adorns the carnival colours, a must have for many.

Besides a good story I wanted to know if the kids on the floats threw sweets like they did in when attended carnival in Cologne, Germany a few years back. Just as I reached into my purse to get my camera, I got beaned by a waffle! And I collected enough for breakfast before writing this.

Eventually the children’s carnival Prince, ‘Martijn 1’, showed up in full dress, waving to the crowd. From what I’ve learned, picking the carnival Prince is done by a serious carnival association and is chosen from different schools alternately. They also have princesses, it is done months in advance and is kept secret until the very last minute, a very dear tradition in these parts.

Has the tradition changed over the years? Well, I’m sure some things have, but a few things have definitely remained the same according to a former junior carnival Prince, vintage 1981.

Notice the ship-like float the junior carnival Prince and Princess were standing on here back in 1981? Well, they still use it today, the Blauw Sjuut in local dialect.

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February 24, 2011

Slideshow: brown cafés in Amsterdam

Filed under: Food & Drink,Photography by Branko Collin @ 11:54 am

Reader Jeniece Primus alerted us to this “visual poem dedicated to the traditional Dutch bar” she created called Stolen Moments: Dutch Brown Cafés.

(Video: Stolen Moments: Dutch Brown Cafés by Jeniece Primus at Vimeo)

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February 13, 2011

J. Krist is the best pea soup maker in the world

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 2:52 pm

Last Friday the World Championships Cooking Pea Soup and Stamppot 2011 were held at the kitchens of the Euroborg football stadium in Groningen. Dozens of Dutch amateur and professional chefs, and one German, battled for the honour of calling themselves the best pea soup chef or the best stamppot chef of 2011 (stamppot is potatoes mashed with vegetables).

The winners of the 16th edition were one J. Krist for pea soup, and one E. Grootte-Bromhaar for stamppot.

Dutch pea soup, called snert, is traditionally made with split peas, several types of pork, celeriac, and additional ingredients like onions, leek and carrot. It is often served with rye bread and bacon, and like stamppot is a staple of the Dutch kitchen.

A 19th century recipe for Dutch pea soup from a cook book called Betje de Goedkope Keukenmeid (Betty the Cheap Kitchen Maid) goes as follows:

Prepare the green peas by soaking them overnight in rain water. Hang the peas and the water you soaked them in over the fire, and boil off most of the water. Now that the peas are done, rub them apart with a wooden spoon, and add bits of salted bacon and sausage, a bit of celery and black salsify; some people like to add onions also. If you don’t want pea skins in your soup, either rub the peas apart over a sieve once their done, or use split peas.

(Video: Youtube/RTVOOG. Photo by Remco Brink, some rights reserved.)

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