It's (Amster)dam Cold Here!

After being back for Portland's coldest winter in 40 years, we came home to the rarely frozen Amsterdam. Every few years it gets cold enough here for the canals to freeze over and as soon as it does, the Dutch flock to the ice to skate. Here are some pictures Erika took in the park this weekend of our little Dutch Winter Wonderland.  

Goober-natorial?

Image courtesy of Rob's freaking parents.  

Happy New Year!

The new year finds us back in Amsterdam after a very relaxing two weeks in snowy Portland. We had a little bit of an adventure getting there, with an overnight delay/diversion in Minneapolis, but we were able to visit a couple of our friends while we were there, so it was actually pretty nice. Portland suffered through it's heaviest winter in 40 years, so that was fun. The area doesn't really have the need, practice or infrastructure to deal with snow and ice, so we spent most of the first week happily confined to Erika's mom's house eating and visiting.  

We spent the second week of our trip running around with wedding related errands, which was fun, exciting, and a little overwhelming (but mostly fun and exciting). We capped off our trip with a nice New Year's Eve party with some friends (Rob celebrated more than he should have and spent most of the next morning valiantly (and successfully) trying not to, um, revisit the previous night's festivities, especially since we stayed at a friend's house and while revisiting the previous night's festivities is unpleasant enough, it's a little rude to do it at someone else's house, especially when that someone else is sleeping in the next room and might be awakened by said revisiting).  

It's good to be back in Amsterdam and we're slowly getting past the jet lag.  We awoke this morning to a nice dusting of snow as Holland has been having a nice little winter, too.  We're looking forward to the coming year and are very happy to have some awesome visitors lined up for the rest of the winter and into the spring. And, there's always room for more if anyone else is up for it...

Hope everyone else had a great holiday and we wish you all a Happy New Year!

Christmas Market in Cologne

Last weekend we took the train with some friends to Cologne, Germany to visit the city's Christmas Market. We love the Christmas Markets because they bring so much of what we love together to one place: eating, drinking, shopping, eating, drinking, and eating.  

The Cologne Christmas Market is split into five separate markets throughout the city, each with its own theme. There was the main market, the angel-themed market, the medieval market, a market devoted to selling food (for cooking- every market had food for eating), another market on large barge docked on the river. We took our time and didn't make to each one, but saw most of them. The medieval market is like a renaissance fair, so it's kind of A Very Hippie Christmas, but the food looked great- giant kabobs of meat and "mead." Unfortunately, it was evening by the time we got there and, this being the medieval market, they weren't too big on electricity, which made it kind of hard to see everything. Still, the markets offered many temptations (that's our friend, Paul, ordering some cookies):

While the Christmas decorations are always beautiful, we mostly bought things we can use (i.e. eat) like some delicious German mustard and a handful of things from a booth where every thing for sale had vanilla in it. But, really, shopping is only a small part of why you go to the market. Here, Erika waits in line for (another) gluhwein (with amaretto, of course):

Japanese Pancakes

We don't know about you, but we'd never heard of Japanese Pancakes before, and when our friends invited us to dinner, we figured it was a weird Dutch take on Japanese food (the Dutch do love their pancakes). Instead, it's an actual real thing and even more, it was delicious.  The Japanese word for this kind of pancake is Okonomiyaki, which literally means 'cook as you like.' At the restaurant in town, they serve three different styles: Osaka, Hiroshima, and Negi-yaki. Naturally, we tried all three.

The Osaka style has most of the ingredients mixed in with the batter and then various toppings are added depending on what you order.

The Hirosima style starts with a thin, crepe-like pancake of only batter, and then several layers of ingredients are piled on top, including fried noodles and a fried egg. That's the monster on the left side of the picture:

The Negi-yaki style also starts with a thin pancake, but differs from the others in that it has no cabbage, but plenty of scallions.  The Negi-yaki pancake is also topped with another pancake and compressed as it cooks (also note the toppings added to the Osaka pancake in the foreground):

Most are served with a Japanese mayonnaise or a sweet sauce and they are very filling (but, allegedly, full of enough cabbage to keep the calorie content down, which of course means, sure, have another beer).  The finished product:

They were amazingly good and we can't wait to go back. 

Food!

Happy Thanksgiving! We had our big dinner a couple weeks ago (with a 28-pound turkey!) so we've already enjoyed a solid week of leftovers and get a couple extra weeks to recover before the Christmas meals. Still, in the spirit of the holiday and the fall season, here are some recipes we've enjoyed recently:

We went on a barley kick for a couple weeks and made this barley soup and this wonderful (Rob really liked it) risotto-style barley.  

To prepare for our Thanksgiving dinner for 30, Erika whipped up a practice batch of this stuffing, and then did it again a week later. That's a lot of stuffing. No Cuisinart over here, but it would have been nice. Twenty minutes seemed a little long for the lemons - we'll peel them a little next time and cook them for only 15.

If you can believe it...we're cooking brussel sprouts now (even Rob- of course, everything's better with bacon). 

And just another plug - the butternut squash lasagne is perfect for the fall. Good eating!

Snowstorm in Amsterdam!

We knew something was in the air yesterday when it hailed twice (for a total of 90 seconds):

But we weren't prepared for the total blizzard that hit the city this morning. Just look at our car! It's going to take us days hours minutes seconds to dig out of that:

Apologies to Rob's parents, who have already had one real blizzard this year and to those of you who can look forward to many more!