Traditional: Capucijners met spek

Capucijners area brown pea-like bean that I have not managed to find outside the Netherlands – frequently sold dried, or tinned, they are (when soaked) round, quite firm, and with the texture of kidney beans.

Ingredients

2 large tins capucijners

1 pack spekreepjes (chopped up bacon pieces)

small pickled gherkins

small pickled onions

Method

Empty the two tins of capucijners into a pan, together with the liquid – warm through.  Fry the bacon pieces until very crispy. Drain any remaining liquid from the pan of beans.  Mix bacon and beans together.

When serving, add gherkins and pickled onions.  A very welcome addition is to garnish with mayonnaise.

More variations on this are to flavour the mayonnaise with mustard, and to serve pineapple chunks with the beans.  Diced apple also works well.

Leesmap.nl | De abonneersite van de gezamenlijke leesmap bedrijven

Leesmap.nl | De abonneersite van de gezamenlijke leesmap bedrijven.

De website van het KNMI – Met office (aka weather)

 

De website van het KNMI.

 

 

Royal Dutch Meteorological Office – equivalent of the Royal Meteorological Office in the UK.

(Weather)

nrc.nl – International

nrc.nl – International.

via nrc.nl – International.

Useful link to International pages of NRC Handelsblad – a broadsheet type newspaper in the Netherlands.

Goldfish bowl

In the Netherlands it is traditional not to have one’s blinds/drawn during the day – and to have no net curtains, so that people walking along the street can see into your house.  People on the street walking past look into your front room without shame, or fear of censure:  it is not nosiness, it is acceptable curiosity to see how one’s neighbours live.

Coming from a society which supposedly values personal privacy less highly (our English tabloid press has a reputation for invading the privacy of the famous and the “newsworthy” unfortunates) I find this strange – in the UK we know that to look into someone’s front window is to be “nosy” and to look at others with more than a fleeting glance is to pry, or to be a voyeur – something faintly shameful or immoral.

We are so conditioned to act this way that it can lead to extremes of neglect (not my probem, I didn’t see anything) of children or animals, because no-one wants to know – to be a busybody or a nosy parker and not minding-your-own-business is to invite criticism.

So, I am living as the Dutch do, in a goldfish bowl – looking out at them looking in.  At the boys who have just sailed down the street on rollerskates, clinging to the motorised wheelchair of their friend, waving at me as I drink a mug of tea and eat a sandwich.