The Netherlands - Fig Activia Yogurt

I love Activia because it makes you deliver chocolate cake in the toilet smoothly. In particular, I love Activia yogurts with fruits inside because I like having an idea that eating it helps me increase fruit intake (which also means fiber intake - and perhaps some vitamins and other beneficial nutrients naturally present in fruits although some of them might have been destroyed during processing). Actually, all of them don't really matter unless the food tastes good. And of course, when I say I love Activia, I really mean it from the bottom of my heart: Activia yogurt tastes really good. 

As far as I remember I haven't seen figs incorporated in yogurt in the United States. Well, I'm stupid enough not to take a picture of the fig inside. I think I know why. The fruit has lost most of its structure, and since it's covered in yogurt, I would just end up taking picture of some soft looking brown/purplish fruit covered in thick, creamy, white liquid. It doesn't look gross, but it's just that even if I take a picture of it, you won't recognize what it is.

The first fig product I had ever tasted was actually fig jam, when I was invited to present in American Chemical Society Annual Meeting conference in Anaheim, California for an undergraduate research award competition. Fig jam tasted really good with aged cheese and nuts. I've never had fresh figs before and I don't grow up eating figs so I'm not really familiar with the flavor.

Fig tastes good with yogurt in this case. I still like Activia's strawberry yogurt the best, though :)

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The Netherlands - Brain Tonic Mushroom Soup

I forgot to include this interesting story about finding a brain tonic herbal soup mix in Den Haag's China Town. 

I can't read Chinese characters, especially when they are too fancy. I can only read a word that means "monkey head mushroom" and "brain". The rest looked like some encrypted ancient language to me. Lucky enough, I was there with a friend from China. She translated almost everything on the package, and it says that it can improve your brain and also make you smarter. Ha!

The only ingredient I recognize was monkey head mushroom and golden mushroom. And it's actually pretty weird they didn't include goji berry in the ingredients list even though I clearly saw goji berries (on the first picture, the red seed-like dried fruits at the bottom of the package). The rest of ingredients can actually be found in Google and Wikipedia (and I'm actually quite surprised I was able to find good information about those ingredients).

All of the ingredients for Chinese herbal soups are normally preserved by drying. In this case, I have to rehydrate the monkey head mushroom (above) separately in a bowl of water for 10 minutes, then squeeze out the water from the mushroom. They call it monkey head mushroom because when it is at its original or rehydrated state, if you rub the caps, you feel like rubbing a monkey's hairy head :)

The ingredients were nicely and individually packaged. It made me think that this herbal soup premix is actually of high quality. The goji berries also look fresh (they are bright red; some poor quality goji berries look pale orange and are shrunk too much).

In the English instruction, they only said "add lean pork meat" into the soup but when my Chinese friend read the instruction written in Chinese, it actually said "add lean pork or chicken meat" into the soup. Why would they change the instructions? Is pork meat better for English speaking communities? LOL. Lost in translation.

I simmered the soup in low heat for 3 hours. It's very delicious (to me, who is used to drinking herbal soup since young). It's slightly earthy but also sweet because of the goji berries.

Do I feel smarter? Well, you tell me. I left my favorite gloves in an iceskating rink 1.5 hours away by car from Wageningen during an iceskating rink event organized by Thymos, a sports association in my university, a week after I drank this soup. It definitely doesn't improve my short term memory. But hey, it tastes great. I don't mind eating this soup again :D

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The Netherlands - Interesting LIDL Goods

Groceries shops are my best friends. The Netherlands is the fourth country I've ever settled for at least 3 months, and based on my personal experience and interest, groceries shops are the core of a country's food culture.

There are 5 supermarkets / groceries store chains that I know around Wageningen and Ede: Albert Heijn, C1000, LIDL, Aldi and Hoogvliet. Albert Heijn generally has more food varieties, and sometimes with a Bonuskaart (a card that lets you accumulate points and get discounts on certain products) you can get really cheap meats (before the 'best before' date, of course). Both LIDL and Aldi are German, but somehow from the information I gathered from people who have been living in the Netherlands for quite some time, these German stores sell the cheapest goods.

LIDL is particularly interesting to me even though it is quite far from where I live right now. Well, by far, I mean 15 minutes cycling. By location, C1000 is much closer (3 minutes cycling including waiting for traffic lights). While C1000 offers a great variety of alcoholic drinks, which are of many university students' interest, the prices tend to be a little high. By far, LIDL sells the cheapest goods with acceptable qualities. And sometimes you get unique stuffs too. Like these decorating sauces:

There are three kinds of sauces: a combination of three types of mustards, white truffle and wasabi soy sauce. Each bottle is sold for 1.45 euros. As a person who cares a lot about food presentation (unless someone cooks it for me - then I won't complain how bad the food looks like as long as they taste nice), these look very interesting to me. I've been decorating my plates with tomato ketchup whenever I have spare time preparing breakfast ever since I moved to Wageningen to live because my campus is only 3 minutes by bike. 

These were rolled omelet with cut cocktail sausage and blanched broccoli. This is probably not a typical Dutch breakfast. I'm not sure if this is a breakfast menu in any parts of the world. To me, there is no distinction between breakfast food or lunch food or dinner food or snack food. As long as my stomach can handle it and I'm in the mood for the food, I'll eat it. The whole prep time was about 15 minutes. I felt sad destroying my art as I ate it, but at the same time, I felt happier eating food that is presented nicely. It's weird, but it's my hobby.

Final product of using the decoration sauces I just used? This:

Smoked salmon on cottage cheese with 3 sauces and garnish. I got the smoked salmon and the cottage cheese from LIDL as well, and they were actually in a package, together with the black toothpicks.

The sauces actually taste pretty good. The mustard sauce was kind of sweet and mild. It's those type of mustard sauce you'd find on hotdogs. Definitely not the kind of high grade mustards you'd get from specialty cheese shops, but it's color and texture is perfect for decorating your plate.

The white truffle sauce is rich in truffle aroma, and if you compare it with real truffles of course this would be low in comparison, but you can definitely taste and smell the truffle flavor in this sauce. I'm not too familiar with truffle flavors because truffles are generally very expensive, and I treat truffle as an ultra fancy food. Actually, to be honest, truffle sauces has this offensive ammonia-like smell that I don't really like the first time I tried it. However, that smell is actually quite addicting and pleasant at low amount. I've grown to like the smell of truffle :)

The wasabi soy sauce is actually my least favorite because I grow up consuming soy sauce and I have a strong preference on soy sauce. The soy sauce used here is actually sweet soy sauce, and surprisingly this sweet soy sauce is the closest to the authentic Indonesian sweet soy sauce. I never like any sweet soy sauce produced in the Netherlands. They taste funny, and somehow I think they are overcaramelized. I don't really taste the wasabi in this sauce, it's really mild. But this is actually a pretty well-balanced sauce, and I think this goes well with many appetizers.

The sauces are very easy to squeeze, and the viscosity is just perfect for decoration. It doesn't break off easily in the middle, and controlling the volume squeezed out doesn't take a lot of time to learn.

I tried eating the salmon and cheese with three sauces at the same time, and it actually tasted pretty good. Kind of sweet, tangy, sour, earthy, salty, savory, astringent... it's a good balance, I'd say. I'm still thinking of ways to use these decorative sauces, but sometimes it's hard to decorate Asian food with these sauces (I cook better Asian food than Western food, except for omelets, if you count that as Western food). There is usually not a lot of free space on the plate, and we don't really use neither mustards nor truffle.

I'll see what I can do about them :P

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Cooking Collections during Bachelor's Degree

If you study food science major in the United States, you'd most probably end up in a somehow rural settings where entertainment is somewhat limited. After I came to Wageningen, I feel that there were actually more entertainment in Urbana-Champaign. Basically, Walmart is my haven. I remember spending 2 hours in food section of Walmart with my foodie friends after having a large dinner together. Yep, this was how I spent my bachelor degree without getting too bored.

I actually made recipe cards for the stuffs that I cooked. Printing photos in Walmart was quite cheap and easy, so I just did a simple editing by adding text into the pictures, and print them. Then I wrote the recipe at the back. Almost all of the food that I cook have no recipes - they were just something that I thought of when I was bored. Now my mum keeps this recipe-in-photo collection of mine.

It is actually easier to get ingredients in the States than in the Netherlands, although the freshness of the items, especially fruits and vegetables, might not be as good as those in the Netherlands. Farmers markets sell them at expensive price, and those found in large groceries stores like Walmart are normally picked before they were ripe, and ripening occurs during storage (because of increased ethylene concentration). Tomatoes taste less sweet, French beans last shorter... oh, and a lot of fruits are pre-packed. Cut pineapples in modified atmosphere packaging taste really sweet, and sometimes I don't know if they spray liquid sugar to keep its freshness (and also to reduce browning from oxidation).

Well, these were some of the things I cooked in the past. Somehow I feel that I was way more creative back then. Like substituting roasted seaweed with egg white as sushi wrap? Yeah, it's insane, but it's possible.

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The Netherlands - Seal Rehabilitation and Research Centre Lenie 't Hart

To celebrate Nicolas Appert's 50th anniversary, our school/department decided to adopt a seal from Seal Rehabilitation and Research Center in Lenia 't Hart in Pieterburen. It's located at the very north of the Netherlands, and is also quite inaccessible by public transport. 

I took 300 pictures of the trip but guess what? I ran out of space in Picasa! Which means I have to make collates to save some space. I have tons of cute seal photos to show, but I can only show some outstanding shots I got from the trip. Sorry!

The Seal Center was not very big but it is filled with passionate people. The staff consists of full team specialists and volunteers from various countries like Spain, and all of them are very helpful. 

When you enter, you will see a souvenir shop as well as information posters about seals. Unfortunately, the posters are written in Dutch. I barely understood some words, but I was lucky to be accompanied by my program head and another person, whom both of them are Dutch. However, there are also guide booklet written in English, so I think it should not be a problem if you can't understand Dutch. They also showed us a very informative video about seal and the dangers they face due to pollution and fish nets (also available in Dutch and English).

We managed to look around the Seal Center before we went to Lauwersmeer coast, which is about 25 km west of Pieterburen. There were another group of people who also adopted the seal and were planning to release the seal together with us. Our adopted seal named after Nicolas Appert (despite being a female seal) was the 6995th seal to be released back into the sea from this Seal Center. The 7000th position was given to an 11-year-old girl who won the cupcake contest judged by the founder of the seal center Lenie t'Hart.

She is 71 years old right now, and she is a really sweet, bright lady with a lot of energy and passion. I'd love to talk more to her! Her husband is also a charming person with a lot of smiles, and whenever he talked about his wife, he seemed very happy and excited, even though he kept saying that his wife was clumsy :)

Since there were four of us students there, we couldn't decide who will be the one to open the box and release the seal into the sea. I suggested we try guessing a random number specified by our program head, and I never expected I would have my guess correct. So I sat on top of the box with kneels down and lifted the 'sliding door' of the box up.

It was really exciting to see the seal crawled/slithered/jumped/walked by sliding its stomach (I don't know what the correct term to use) into the sea. The seal next to me didn't go out of the box after a minute. Maybe it was still confused of what was going on. Surprisingly, the seals did not show any big signs of discomfort during the transport from the Seal Center to the coast.

We came back to the Seal Center afterwards for a guided tour around the facilities. We saw how they prepare the food for the seals (they feed 600 euro worth of herrings to the seals every day!), and how the infected seals are quarantined and treated.

It's a really interesting place, and I kind of wish I could do some kind of short term internship there. I know I will smell like herrings if I work there but looking at those puppy eyes will be my oasis. Also, I think there are still a lot of things to be learned by taking care of the seals, and this kind of job gives you a lot of self satisfaction (if you love what you're doing).

Hope you enjoyed this post! I'd really recommend going to this place if you have a car. Otherwise, taking public transport would be too much of a hassle. It took about 3 hours by car from Wageningen. I can't imagine how long it would take if we were to take the trains and the buses there. There might not even be a bus that goes directly to this place.

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Instant Noodle around the World 13 - MAMA Kimchi

In Instant Noodle around the World part 7 I mentioned that I like MAMA Tom Yum Soup flavored instant noodles from Thailand. Just about a week ago I went to Den Haag again with my friend to pick up our passport from the Irish embassy and went to the same oriental groceries shop we visited before, and while my friend was busy getting pickled cabbage and fish sweet potato instant noodle, I was checking the entire instant noodle aisle for interesting stuffs. 

My discovery: Kimchi flavor MAMA noodle. 

Generally, Korean intant noodles, especially those with spicy-flavored soups, have thick, chewy noodles unlike MAMA's Tom Yum flavored noodles. Well, the noodle was indeed different from the typical MAMA noodles:

It's thicker and more pale. The typical "traditional" MAMA noodle is normally a little brownish and thin. You can even just pour hot water into the noodle in a bowl, and it will be ready to eat in 5 minutes. This noodle has very weak yellow tint. Somehow it looks a little unappetizing, but it doesn't really matter when the soup has an opaque, reddish/orange color, right? Might as well cut back on production cost and make it pale.

There was dehydrated vegetables, but none of them represents kimchi. And I was a little disappointed.

To be honest, I'm not satisfied with the overall appearance. The noodle's texture was okay, not too chewy, not too soft. The soup's flavor is mostly sour and I think it is kind of sweet. It's lacking the kick.  It's far from spicy, especially when you compare it with the Tom Yum flavor. It's not a really bad flavor; I'd eat it if someone serve me this, but if I have a choice, I won't eat it.

My verdict: I'd rather eat Shin Ramyun.

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The Netherlands - Gezellig

My native language is Indonesian, I speak fluent English, and I speak rather fluent Japanese. Now that I'm in the Netherlands, I'm bound to learn some Dutch words or sentences just by interacting with friends, bus drivers, cash register lady and even random people asking for directions on the street. 

One of the most beautiful Dutch word that has no direct translations to any of the language I know is gezellig. If you try typing it on Google Translate, it translates as cozy, intimate, sociable, social, homy, companionable and so on. When I asked around, gezellig is  also the sense of being fun and excitement in the presence of many people. 

I'm unfortunate to meet 23 people who would stick together with me for at least 2 years. We celebrate birthdays (one day we lit up candles on birthday cakes and got scolded by the janitor LOL), play secret friends (giving one person from the group presents while giving hints on our identity), have dinner together, drink and party together, study together, travel together... basically, they are like my new family in the Netherlands.

And the easiest way to describe this feeling is... GEZELLIG! :)

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The Netherlands - Shiitake Beer

Stir-fried mushrooms are my favorite. I was really excited to find a mushroom specialty shop at Wageningen's open market. They had a stall that specializes in mushrooms.

They have almost all types of edible mushrooms I've encountered in my life. Before this, I enjoyed a large variety of mushrooms cooked in many different ways in a restaurant called Mushroom Pot in Singapore. This stall sells monkey head mushroom (because the texture of the cap feels like a monkey's hairy head - when I rub it with my hands I felt like petting a monkey's head), one of my favorite mushroom. It has a texture like a meat when deep fried: slightly chewy, slightly fibrous.

I bought a small jar of black truffle sauce as well. It costs 7.95 euros, but I think it's worth the price because you only need a little bit of black truffle sauce in a dish. It has a really strong fragrance and taste.

And then, next to the jars of truffle sauce lies beer bottles. Shiitake beer, yup.

I was super curious about this. Technically, mushrooms don't contain a lot of sugar. I'm not even sure if the beer is completely fermented from shiitake mushrooms, or they just added shiitake flavor to it. There was no other information on the label, and the only information available was on paddestoelenrijk.nl.

Google Chrome automatically translates foreign languages into English, but it has some limitations. The translation I got from the website about the shiitake beer was:

"On craft brewed beer with Shii-Take your own nursery.
Made by Special Brewery Oijen."

The original text was:

Op ambachtelijke wijze gebrouwen bier met Shii-Take van eigen kwekerij.

Gemaakt door Speciaalbierbrouwerij Oijen.

It would be great if someone could help me translate this properly, but my guess is that this beer is uniquely crafted by brewing the beer using self-grown shiitake. To simply put it, there is no further information about this beer. Not even the alcohol percentage.

The taste? I'm sorry, I had to stop drinking it after the first sip. It doesn't really have a strong taste, but it's weird. As a mushroom lover I might be a little bit more sensitive towards the aftertaste from mushrooms, especially shiitake because it's the most commonly used mushroom in Asian soups, and I've been eating it for years. I would expect this kind of flavor to go well with savory applications. Not beer.

I couldn't finish drinking it, but I saved it. Have you ever heard of chicken cooked in beer? Yes, it was quite popular, at least I know it was popular among college students when I was in the US. Cooking chicken in shiitake flavored beer? I think it would taste awesome: extra umami factor added. I'll post the results when I'm done cooking it tomorrow for dinner :)

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