Dreaming the day away...

Every once in a while you have to give yourself something new and exciting to play with and in fact I got two new toys today. But then you know I have no self control to speak of so that must be the reason… I was meeting Julia and Dan for lunch today in Amsterdam. Julia (Always leave room for Dessert) and Dan are from Canada and I met Julia almost a year ago now during the fabulous Plate to Page workshop. I heard they were coming to Amsterdam for a couple of days so I pursueded them to have lunch with me at restaurant De Kas.

Julia and Dan (look in the window!)

Julia is a fun and lovely lady and I was excited to meet her again and meet Dan as a bonus. De lunch was lovely and in fact we had so much fun that we sort of didn’t notice that the restaurant was already closed… They are too polite to send people away apparently and we lost track of time. Anyway, Julia had this fun new toy on her camera, called a lensbaby. I’ve been wanting to get myself one of those for a pretty long time, but either forgot or had other stuff to buy and I had already planned on going to the camera store and get myself a 50mm 1.4 this afternoon. But then, here comes Julia with the lensbaby and I was sold. Just love the little thing and it is so much fun to play around with.

Gizmo thinks it is so not interesting!

I already have the 50 mm 1.8 which is a fantastic little lens for the cost involved but the 1.4 is sharper at full opening and well, I can always use a little extra light. We will be going on a fun little visit to Brugge with our Belgian friends soon and this is the only lens I will bring (plus the lensbaby to play around with!) Love to travel light!

Gotta love the special effect of the lensbaby!

So this post was all about making you jealous of my new toys and the fact that I got to meet the fabulous Julia and Dan for a fantastic lunch and I’ll leave you with one last shot of Gizmo taken with the new 1.4.

Do I see a bird over there moving in the bushes?

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Our shiny new kitchen!

It took a while and there have been times when we were less then happy with our dust covered house but now finally I can tell you that the kitchen is finished. Phew… You thought it would never happen and that I would never return to blogging, right…? I felt like it at times too as, man, what a chaos it has been. We’re still not done with cleaning the house as there is still dust floating around that settles itself whenever we’re not looking.

Right side with the stove, sink and dishwasher and lots of drawers too

The kitchen was finished on Thursday while we were at a wedding so it was a surprise to come home and see the final result. The last couple of days have been spend carrying all the boxes with pots, pans and bottles of whatever and something more downstairs from the first floor and the attic. Then of course everything needed to be given it’s place. I’m sure I’m gonna change things around a few times before I’m happy with the logistics of the new kitchen. After having spend 13 years in the previous ones there are a few things so ingrained in my memory that it will take a while to realize I have to turn around to get this or that instead of move to the left or right..

Of course I’m certainly not complaining as we’re really really happy with how it looks. To finish it all off we also bought a new dining time from old wooden boards in a greyish-bluish tone (which incidentally will also be beautiful for photo background!!) which is a little bigger then our old one.

Looking from the kitchen to the dining table

As you can see our dining table is no longer in the kitchen but because it is right in front of it, I feel it’s a part of the kitchen. People sitting at the table will be able to see everything and socialize while I’m cooking so all good. We will also make a sort of little bench where you now see the heater in the first photo. That will be made from the same material as the dining table but lighter in color and will be suitable to sit on with a few nice cushions. So anyone can hang around in the kitchen during cooking, read a book or have a glass of wine. There will be a few other changes too as we go along but since our savings are pretty much back to zero we will have to wait a while. But we can cook and bake in the meantime! Whoohoo!!

And the left side with fridge, freezer and more storage space

Tomorrow… yes I will finally share a recipe with you again and the results of the Donna Hay Challenge for March will be revealed very soon too! In the meantime have you checked out the new one? It’s up here.

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Starting to look like a real kitchen again!

If you also follow me on facebook then you’ve probably already seen some photos of the kitchen in progress. It’s been a pretty dusty last two weeks and I miss being able to cook a proper dinner! I had wild plans of eating healthy but this whole renovation thing is weirdly tiring. I mean, I don’t really do any of the hard work myself but both Tom and I are exhausted at the end of the day..

Love the look of our new stove!

I think in a large part it must be due to not having a home to come home to after a day of work. Normally you cook a nice dinner, have a chat, drink coffee, sit on the couch, watch some tv and do whatever other fun stuff people do in the evening. But for the last two weeks, I came home in a building pit sort of. And trust me, that doesn’t feel like home at all! Ofcourse, rest assured, I’m not complaining as I LOVE the look of the new kitchen sofar. It’s gonna be totally awesome once finished and so HUGE! (sorry I just have to use capitals here..;) )

Doesn't look like home now does it?

The new floor is very pretty (it’s already there but hiding under cardboard at the moment to protect it) but I did a sneak photo before it was covered up again. The color is a bit grey-ish washed out wooden floor effect although it is in fact laminate. It’s totally wrong with the current floor in the living room but that will be replaced soon. We ran out of money or else we would have done the floor in one go.

See gizmo lurking there at the end of the floor?

The good thing is that at least we have a fridge again! That saves a lot of hassle lugging a cooling box around which didn’t really work very well. We’ve gone out for dinner a couple of times which was nice but now I’m so ready to start cooking again! Once the kitchen is finished (and that should be middle of next week) the walls still have to be painted, I need to think of what I want in front of the windows but those are all details.

I can’t believe how incredibly big the kitchen has become. It’s funny as we’ve only moved the wall 60 cm but it feels like a couple of meters are added to the space. And while the living room is smaller instead of larger, it feels larger due to the fact that the wall is not so high anymore. Giving a more spacious feel to the whole place.

Overall I’m really happy with everything. Also very happy with our kitchen supplier as they work very precise, have everything under their own roof with their own people so if you’re looking for a new kitchen I can only recommend Grando.

Yes, we've been sitting in the kitchen..lol

Our old kitchen...

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Drawings of the new kitchen

I never knew we had so much junk…. Pfft, ok, you probably were wondering where on earth I went to but if you follow me on facebook you probably know by now that we are in the middle of a kitchen renovation. That means there will be virtually no cooking for the next three weeks. (we hope it’s gonna be finished in two weeks but I’m counting on the worst here.)

Our old kitchen (see below) is 13 years old and while it has served it’s purpose for all that time, it was never really what we wanted. And now it is slowly falling apart so time to get a new kitchen. O and let me tell you some more good news too; Tom has found a new job! As of April 2nd he will no longer be unemployed so that’s a very very good thing. Not the reason why we bought this new kitchen as that has taken place before we knew he would be having a new job soon.

Our old yellow kitchen...

But that’s a big relief as the unemployment benefit is not something to look forward to every month for sure. But we had saved for this new kitchen for years and if ever there is a good time to buy a kitchen, this would be it. So we did and went ahead despite the current situation and now I’m doubly glad we did.

Good thing too that Tom is still home at the moment, so we have a little more time to empty the entire first floor. Because the kitchen is going to be bigger by 60 cm, that means that walls will be coming down, the entire ceiling has to be freshly painted so that also means we had to remove everything downstairs.

The kitchen you see in the picture upstairs was this morning and it looks still fairly normal but all cupboards are already empty. But anyway, don’t expect a lot of recipes coming out of my hat for the next few weeks as we will be busy NOT cooking.

And drawing of the other site of the kitchen

Coming monday the old kitchen will be broken down… and we will be banished to the first floor most of the time, which is now ridiculously full with boxes of kitchen stuff, furniture and anything else you can think of. Good thing I still have the studio as a few items are moved there too.

I will post regular updates with the renovations going on. I’m sure the guys coming here will be getting annoyed with the picture taking… So no recipes, but kitchen updates for a while!

Wish us luck!

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Matcha pannacotta

Wake up, look at the alarm. Damn, it’s only 3 am… Too early… Go back to sleep. Wake up, look at the alarm… Hmmm, 5.30 am. That is late enough, isn’t it? I would jump out of my bed and run excited to my parents bedroom. Screaming something like ‘It’s my birthday, it’s my birthday!’ The tradition was that we would all go and sit on my parents bed (we actually all fell through the bed at one such occasion. Apparently the bed was not build for 6 people) and that’s when we would get presents. And let’s face it; birthday = presents, right?

Usually my parents – knowing us all too well – would give us a strict timeline. Do NOT wake us up before 6 am! But excitement and enthusiasm usually got the better of us so we would always be waaaay too early. Claiming we hadn’t seen that it was only 5.30! So my birthday was always fun and I loved it. Loved being the centre of attention. I’m not really sure when that all changed but I do think it was pretty early on. By the time I was 15 or 16, I no longer thought that birthdays were fun. O yes, the getting presents was fun, but I happened to have friends who did not get along together very well, so what was the point of celebrating when I could only invite one half of my friends?

Happy birthday girl at 4!

These days, birthdays are well, just another year older, really… Getting close to my fifties is somewhat daunting I have to confess. In case you were wondering, today is my 49th birthday. I sometimes still feel that there must be some kind of mistake made. That I wasn’t born in 1963 but rather much later. I don’t feel 49 (of course I have no way of knowing how one is supposed to feel at 49!) and I’m frquently being told that I don’t look 49 either. (I’ve had to show some sort of ID a few times to actually proof that I was that old..lol) But the truth is, that I am and o well, I do feel my age too from time to time.

When I’ve had a really busy day I can feel my bones and muscles protesting (doing a little more sports would help!) but overall, I think I cannot complain. Today is going to be a typical birthday for me; hiding in plain sight for friends and family… We never have a party and if we can, we try and get out of the country to celebrate somewhere else. Or we go out for a nice dinner. Just the two of us and sometimes with a few friends, but that’s it. Enough party for me!

Now on to the subject of matcha. I’d had seen matcha featured in many blogposts over the years but I’d never managed to actually find that elusive green powder and when I finally found a source for it, it turned out they ran out of it, the time I was there to get it. Luck was not on my side. I probably have looked in the wrong placed to, but that’s a whole other subject.

Matcha

I mentioned something on a blog post and sweet Kate from Serendipity send me an email asking if she could send me some of the matcha? I was delighted she would take the trouble to send it to me and a few days later I had two packages of matcha in my mailbox. One was bright green and from Japan, the other was a much duller color and apparently from Belgium. Interesting how those two would react!

Now ofcourse I wanted to make something that would highlight that fantastic green, so my first thought was to make a matcha pannacotta. I had found just the recipe for it, so I set about it. Having made a zillion pannacotta’s before I didn’t think much about it, poured the finished product into the molds and into the fridge.

But then something interesting happened; the substance split. I’ve never had this happen before and while the pannacotta’s are still delicious and if turned over they still hold their shape, it’s interesting to know why this happened.

Holding it's shape but barely

I used double cream and milk for this… You can read what I’ve done in the recipe below. If you’ve got any thoughts on why the mixture split, please let me know! I have a feeling that it wasn’t warm enough as you can still see the little powder dots everywhere which I think is not what’s supposed to happen…

Matcha pannacotta

Print recipe

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Serves	6
Prep time	20 minutes
Cook time	4 hours
Total time	4 hours, 20 minutes
Allergy	Milk
Meal type	Dessert
Misc	Pre-preparable, Serve Cold
From book	Panna cotta by Camilla Saulsbury

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons matcha powder
• 2 cups double cream
• 1 1/4 cup full fat milk
• 1 vanilla pod
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3,5 sheets gelatin (or 2 tbsp dried)

Directions

Put the double cream, milk, seeds of the vanilla bean and sugar in a small saucepan and heat until close to boiling but not actually boiling. Take of the heat. Soak your gelatin leaves in cold water for 5 minutes.

Put the matcha into a cup and add one cup of the hot mixture slowly into the powder while vigorously whisking. Once combined add the matcha mixture into the cream mixture.

Add the soaked gelatin (squeeze out the moisture) into the warm cream and whisk until dissolved. Pour the cream into your ramekins, glasses or other molds. Leave to stand in the fridge for at least 4 hours before unmolding. For unmolding you can dip the ramekins into hot water (making sure the water does not get into your molds ofcourse) for a few seconds and then turn them onto a plate and lift the mold.

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