About Me
I
grew up in a small town in the north east of Holland, on the border
with Germany. My parents were not rich and had five children
to feed. Our diet consisted of mainly boiled potatoes, fresh
vegetables and meat. In that order.
The question: "What's for dinner tonight?" would not be answered
with "Steak" or "Chicken", but with "Green beans" or "Cauliflower".
This was quite normal in the fifties and early sixties.
Leftover boiled potatoes would be fried the next day and that was a
real treat. Beef was the more expensive meat and not all that
good; cattle was primarily raised for dairy. If we had beef it
would be more like a pot-roast, the rest was pork and some chicken.
In the early days we even ate horsemeat and rabbit sometimes!
Centuries of Dutch colonization of what is now the country of
Indonesia had an influence on our cuisine. Therefore
practically everyone in Holland sooner or later ate dishes like
nasi goreng, babi pangang and sateh.
My dad had a little garden and in the summertime we had lots of fresh vegetables. He also raised chickens, so we always had eggs. Young roosters and older chickens who ran out of eggs ended up in my mom's delicious chicken soup.
After school I served in the Dutch navy for about a year and then I started my professional career in the electronic communications industry. The company I worked for was very internationally oriented and so, at the ripe old age of twenty years old, I moved to Johannesburg, South Africa and continued to live there for more than a year.
From one day to the next everything changed for me: the language, the people, the currency, the climate, even the sun went through the north at midday. And of course the food. I was introduced to a totally different cuisine with Dutch, French and mainly British influences. I ate things like lamb stew and mutton and all kinds of seafood.
After my African adventure, I spent the next thirty years traveling across the globe and was exposed to many different cuisines, some quite exotic. I've eaten goat's head soup in the Middle East, fried jellyfish in Hong Kong, all kinds of raw fish and at one point even raw whale in Japan. Also some stuff that to this day I still have no idea what it was.
With all that exposure my interest in different foods kept growing and eventually I attempted to make some of it myself. Not the goat's head soup or the jellyfish of course, but the more enjoyable dishes. I learned how to cook and found out I have a knack for it. I want to get better at it all the time, so it has become a constant process for me. A process that I am willing to share in the form of cooking classes.
I do not pretend to be a chef, nor a culinary authority. I merely want to share my experiences and some of my stories.