The Way Is The Goal

Tag: Amsterdam (Page 2 of 2)

Cooking Red Lentil Dosa’s with Potato Curry

Twelve years ago was the first time I was in De Peper. I was squatting in Amsterdam East and De Peper had just moved to the hospital on the other side of the park. I still remember how great their vegan food tasted.

Jump twelve years in time and suddenly I am that cook making the food that people like. What an experience: being allowed to cook a meal for fifty persons in a restaurant with such a tradition.

And I didn’t joke around with the food. I started two days ahead with fermenting red lentils and rice to make dosa‘s (check this recipe) and on the day itself I made a potato curry following traditional Indian recipes.

Steamed Broccoli, a salad and deep-fried tempeh were accompanying the dish, that I prepared together with Manu. We served a French Onion soup as a starter, with freshly made sourdough bread. I can’t wait for the next session.

Happy Rain

Rain. We have that a lot in Amsterdam. Recently winters haven’t been that cold as they used to be. Instead, there is just rain.

So it rained for the past days. Also during the weekend. But it didn’t seem to effect life negatively. I noticed almost everyone smiling, as I was walking in the rain to the Albert Cuyp market.

In “So long and thanks for all the fish” Rain-man is accompanied by rain. All the time. So he had described 231 different types of rain in his little notebook. (“And he didn’t like any of them…”).

During my twenty minute walk I went through types 47 to 51, “vertical light drizzle through to sharply slanting light to moderate drizzle freshening”. I only got wet a little.

I sang most of the time and many other people I could also hear singing or simply whistling. Rain, an underestimated source of cheerfulness?

“The clouds want to be near him, to love him, to water him”, Douglas Adams writes about Rain-man.

Back in Amsterdam

City of bike-lanes and water, my small town, I am back in your streets again, smiling. It took me five years and some months, but I am surrounded by ‘my own’ four Amsterdam walls and roof-top. Por fin! Yes!

I am back loving it, I feel this is where I (well… for the moment at least) ‘belong’. There are no palmtrees here like in Barcelona, and the beach is pretty far away (1,5 hours by bike…!) but it remains one of the better places in Europe to live. And what matters most: I feel at my place and happy here.

From where I live (for now, it’s a temporary place for half a year), I bike to the center in 15 minutes. At the same time it is on the edge of town, close to the Amstel river. It takes me five minutes to be in nature, cycle along the riverbanks, to feel space or to wonder around in the forest.

So, you know how it works: feel free to come along and please stay as long as you want. Just send me a nice pigeon before you come and clean the dishes when you leave.

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