A trip to Flatland.

A few weeks ago I decided to take a trip to The Netherlands to visit two of our travel buddies Mitch and Lu who are currently living in Flatland. Mitch is working at a University on the same project that Roy is working on in Not-so-flatland so it was inevitable that Lu and I were going to want to cross borders to catch up with each other and share a passion we both have of food and cooking. We had heaps of fun hanging out in their town, cooking, giggling, sewing (not one of my best talents), drinking and more giggling.

Whilst out on one of our bike rides through their town of Nijmegen, Lu's bike fell victim to a well known bicycle thieving trick. Since Lu is very attached to her shiny wheels, she didn't want to let it out of our sight so I sat and watched it while she hunted for someone to come and rescue her lovely fiets. Read about the story here. It was a lovely (sarcasm) introduction the land of bicycles...

After the local bike rescuers set Lu's fiets free, we pedalled on back to her place to recover from our ordeal with a hot cuppa and a few stroopwafels - one can never stop at one stroopwafel. Whilst gobbling down these tasty, sweet treats we set about planning our dinners for the nights to come. Visions of grand Italian and French feasts we circling around our sugar infested minds and then the cooking started. Italian was first up.. the menu was - Gnocchi mac and cheese (minus the mac - I'm not sure I could describe the dish without using the word mac), almond, chocolate meringues and a nice bottle of Chianti.

Not the prettiest meringues around.

We made too much dough for the gnocchi so we had a bit of fun playing with the leftovers.

The gnocchi was a little bit "claggy" but once it was smothered with bechamel sauce, topped with cheese and baked in the oven we didn't notice our dodgy attempt at what was meant to be fluffy pillows of potatoey goodness. The meringues were quite ugly but once melted chocolate was sandwiched between two and stuffed down our gobs we didn't notice the knobbly appearance of the fluffy, chocolately egg whites. Even though our feast didn't really turn out how we envisaged, it still tasted great and was fun creating it too.

Our French feast the next night was french onion soup with a cheesy crouton on top and....... Crème Brûlée for dessert. We were a little too excited by the cooking to get any photos of the onion soup (which was really tasty by the way) but we got a few photos of the first few steps of Crème Brûlée cooking but unfortunately no photos of the finished product. You can't expect us to take photos when there's tasty food to be eaten can you? Here's a story about our Crème Brûlées.

After lots of cooking, giggling and eating it was sadly time for me to head back to Not-so-flatland to make sure that Roy had survived the four days without me. Before I flew back Lu and I had a few hours to explore Amsterdam (after we hopped on the wrong train and almost ended up over the other side of the country - which really isn't all that far). Amsterdam was really nice! I am definitely looking forward to going back sometime soon since four hours just doesn't do this great city any justice. I was introduced to a food which is a rite of passage for all travellers to Holland - fries with mayonaise.. YUM! We walked through the red light district and saw the sex workers who wait patiently in their little rooms with glass doors for their next customer. We walked over numerous bridges over the beautiful canals, dodged bicycles, walked past many "coffee shops" and soaked in what the city had to offer.