Even before starting on the pea soup, Australia had already met another Dutch (??) tradition: apple pie! After a failed bake-off in Holland (Bastiaan had to withdraw from the competition) my apple pie submission was still received with great smiles and demanded a re-try Down Under.

And the re-try wasn’t just because it was nice, it was also to put the sultanas back in the apple pie! Sal’s good friend Robin (the Girl Wonder!) had for questionable reasons removed the sultanas from her apple pie… “A bloody shame!”, I hear you think. Indeed. So it was time to bake her one with sultanas and show her where the sultanas belong! :-)

It wasn’t that hard to find all the right ingredients, except for one, and unfortunately the most important one… the right apples. If you ask anyone in Holland what apple goes in an apple pie, the answer will be unanimous: “De goudrenet!!”. But although they offer quite a wide selection of apples in Australia, the “goldrenet” is not one of them… So I was forced to bake my apple pie in Australia with the sourish apple they got… the Granny Smith… Not half as sour as the goldrenet, but I had no other options…

I did add some more lemon juice to make it a bit more sour, but even so, you could still taste the difference from an apple pie with the right apples. But even so, the result wasn’t bad at all! Ok, pushed by the circumstances, I did try to serve the apple pie a bit to fast and hot, after just being out of the oven for 10 minutes, so the presentation was quite bad… but luckily the taste and smell were still enough to make the people smile! :-)

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Last “Dutch” winter I wrote about a great Dutch winter tradition: pea soup. Much earlier then expected I am eating it again! Never thought I would ever eat pea soup in July, but as I find myself now in “Australian” winter, the time was right to give Australia a taste of Dutch tradition! :-)

Although that did sound a bit easier then it actually turned out to be… My mamma was so sweet to email me the recipe, but finding all the right ingredients proved to be a little challenge, but thanks to Australian deli’s we were able to find almost all the ingredients! Even a Dutch smoked sausage, although not from Unox.

The trick of letting the soup “sit” overnight with the lid half on the pan worked wonderful and my joy was so great when the next morning the big wooden spoon stood up proudly straight in the pan! Yet my disappointment was so much bigger when I tried to heat up a bit at lunch time and it became a very thin soup… that was not good! Pea soup needs to be thick… Again, my sweet mamma saved the day by telling me to add more split peas… so I did and so it became a success after all! And just as important: People seemed to like it! :-)

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Ever since I bought the grill pan on my trip to Denmark and Sweden this summer, I only got to cook with it twice… once in Denmark an hour after I bought it, and a couple of days after I got back to see if it would work in Holland as well. It did. And today it worked again! Not that amazing, but the result was very satisfying! I filled the chicken boob with pineapple and cheese and with the slightly marinated (ketjap, sweet chili sauce, little sambal) chicken it worked out briljant! Served with rice and some grilled veggies, a meal to remember! ;-)

Oh, just one little tip (or hint to remind myself when making this meal next time), try to keep the chicken boob as thin as possible… I kept it to thick, so it took forever to get the whole chicken “done”…

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And fresh not just for the salmon but fresh for the dish in general as well! Very fresh! So quite lovely on a warm summer day as today. I must say it was a bit of a gamble making this, as I searched for nice recipes with salmon, but couldn’t find any that pleased me enough to actually make it… So I kinda gathered some bits here and there from different recipes and made it into something I thought would taste well. And it did. There is still room for improvement on this one though. I went a bit to wild on the lemon skin, so next time I definitely need less of that and less cream as well. But for a first time it wasn’t bad at all! :-)

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Mmmmmmmmmmm….. :-) It’s always such a pleasure eating pork tenderloins with satéh sauce! What a winning combination! This time served with baked potatoes and green beans. I cheated a bit with using out-of-the-box-ready-to-go potato slices with bistro flavor and as always the green beans in this dish are more for decoration and vitamins then absolutely necessary, but all together it turned out pretty darn good again! :-)
This recipe would in normal circumstance probably not have made the blog, simply because it’s a bit to easy to make. But as this recipe proves time after time: it doesn’t take a fancy recipe to taste good! So combined with the fact that this is one of my personal favorites, it’s spot is actually more then well deserved! :-)
There is just only one small problem with it… it’s hard, not to say impossible, to find a decent satéh sauce outside of Holland. Or at least I have never found a decent one on any of my travels… But to compensate that lack of availability around the globe, I am more then happy to ship some satéh sauce abroad if you wanne try this recipe! Just drop me an email! ;-)

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Pasta Pesto Chicken. Pesto Chicken Pasta. Pasta Chicken Pesto. Still having problems picking out a name for the things I cook… But well, does the name really matter? This is an old favorite. A winner, because it doesn’t only taste good, it is also great to build up energy before big physical events! :-) Last summer when Bastiaan and I went to the far east of Holland to compete in a 100km cycling event to support cancer research, I ate 2 plates of the Chicken Pesto Pasta the night before as preparation! And as finishing the 100km event, with a respectable 27km/hour average, wasn’t due to the fact of great preparation, so I have to give some credit to the Chicken Pesto Pasta! ;-) Unfortunately I haven’t been brave enough to sign up for the Vätternrundan this year (read also: “I am the messiah!”, red.), but I will be trying half that distance in the Amstel Gold Race in April. I am afraid that not being in shape and trying 300km will be a bit to much for me… and I don’t think I can blindly rely on the Chicken Pesto Pasta for that one… But I feel confident to do half the distance this year and then maybe the real deal next year! :-)

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Wheehoo! Recipe number two! :-) This one was a bit of a long shot, I must admit that, but it turned out really nice and definitely deserved his place in the recipe section of the limecrush website! I wanted to make something with spicy chicken and pineapple. After some searching for recipe, I couldn’t really find what I was looking for… so after a while I decided to just add some things together and see how far it would get me. During the process, I decided to throw in some banana as well. A master move! The banana really contributed to the success of the recipe! It was a bit spicy, so just lower the amount of sambal if you don’t like it like that. Seeing all the smiling faces around the dinner table told me everybody was pleased! :-)

I only need to come up with a more funky name for the recipe… but for now it will be called what it is: “Oriental spicy chicken with fruit”.

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The Shanghai beef recipe I found in an old magazine I kept about 10 years ago. Never tried it back then, but when I came across the magazine I thought, why not give it a try! And the result amazed myself! :-)
Some ingredients of this recipe were a bit difficult to translate to English… for example for the sweet soy sauce I just used a pot of stir-fry sauce from a brilliant brand called “Conimex”, but that brand doesn’t seem to exists outside the country :-( So the 250 ml of sweet soy sauce (at the ingredients) to stir through the dish is a bit of a wild guess. But I think it shouldn’t be to hard to figure out how much to put in while making the dish. Just share your thoughts when you find another (winning) combination! :-)

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