Eating Amsterdam

I don't often get the opportunity to travel outside of the UK, but we managed to grab a week away this February to Amsterdam. If you haven't been, it's an incredibly beautiful city that has so much more to offer than its red light district, chips and 'coffeeshops'. In particular, Amsterdam has an awesome culinary scene that was begging to be explored... So I'm going to share some of my foodie highlights with you!

The Fat Dog

On the corner of Ruysdaelkade and Van Hilligaertstraat sits the entrance to The Fat Dog, adorned with graffiti, you feel as though you are about to walk into a biker bar to sink a few whiskies. But the inside of the petite Fat Dog is warm and invititing. Couples and small groups sit in candlelight, nursing big and beautiful G&Ts to an eclectic and cool soundtrack. With 10 gourmet dogs to choose from, you're spoilt for choice and each dog is intriging. I went for the Speedy Gonzalez -  Chimichuri, guacamole, sour corn, jalapeno-cilantro mayonnaise, pork corn. Although slightly less colourful than I was expecting, the balance of flavours was delicious. Finish of your meal with a hearty slice of vanilla cheesecake to share - creamy, sugary goodness with a buttery biscuit base.

Pancakes!

Pancakes! No I'm not excited, that's what it's called. If you're heading to Amsterdam, you have to indulge in some gorgeous Dutch pancakes. Either at Pancakes! or The Pancake Bakery. I opted for a Deluxe Dutch pancake with apple, mixed nuts, calvados and cinnamon - surprisingly savoury and well balanced. Rob's choice was a joy to behold - spinach, goats cheese, garlic oil and pine cuts. All the flavours of an excellent pizza but with a pancake base. Thoroughly recommended. Pancakes! is also located in the Nine Streets (De Negen Straatjes) amongst a plethora of boutique shops and cafes.

The Lobby

The best breakfast in Amsterdam? Head to The Lobby - part of Hotel V and right in the centre of the city. I was treated to a gorgeous latte and eggs florentine. The poached eggs were indulgently silky, a hollandaise that had the perfect vinegary tang and toasted brioche buns. Their french toast was laden with cinnamon and syrup, with a dollop of creme fraiche to cut through the richness.

De Bakerswinkel

Pies? Cakes? Sugar? Visit De Bakkerswinkel, of which there are a few branches. The classic Dutch apple pie is a must or if you're heading for breakfast, try the brioche french toast - with extra butter and syrup! They also do an excellent selection of sandwiches and lunch platters. Or you can even book in for a 'high tea' laden with delectable cakes and treats.

G's Really Really Nice Place

Continuing my 'eggsterdam' tour, we started Valentines Day with brunch a G's. Every bit as hip as an East London cafe, Gs uses old records for it's menus and has a whole list dedicated to Bloody Marys. I started off with a Bacon Bloody Mary and followed with their Healthy Benedict - two poached eggs served on spelt on a bed of cottage cheese with sauteed spinach & avocado. The spelt bread added a new dimension to the traditional florentine and kept me going for hours of canal walking. Rob ordered Le Beef Burger - custom-made for G's by their local butcher “louman’s” just the way G likes it: topped with lettuce, tomato, red onion, pickle & mayo. It was juicy and slathered in mayo but gorgeous. I recommend the Challah Cinnamon French Toast - jewish braided bread soaked in egg / milk / cinnamon then pan-fried crispy and toppedwith banana slices.

 Little Collins

If you're wandering the streets of Amsterdam's bohemian residency - De Pijp, you'll want to stop by Little Collins. A petite Austrailian run cafe serving feast worthy food. The flat white coffee isn't widely spread throughout this city, so I was overjoyed to find it on the menu at Little Collins. Their crockery was reminiscent of Caravan, and I got a pang of homesickness. I munched my way through a huge skillet of Kasundi Eggs - Roast pumpkin, spiced chickpeas, feta, coriander, yoghurt and sour dough toast; I was eventually defeated but this brunch item is something I will definitely be replicating at home.

Lanksroom

Finally, the stroopwafel. For those who aren't familiar with this revelation, stroopwafels are made from two thin layers of baked dough with a caramel-like syrup filling in the middle. You can buy them in supermarkets in England, but they originated in Gouda (Netherlands). To get a taste of tradition, head to Lanksroom for a stroopwafel with different flavoured caramels. Coffee Caramel is a winner!

Tasting Texas

Back in March, I flew to Austin, Texas to attend SXSW 2014. Without blabbering on too much, I wanted to share with you some of my culinary exploits that I experienced while I was in the US.

Day One - Waiting for a transfer in Philadelphia, I began feeding my iced tea addiction. 

Our first meal in Austin, after nearly 24 hours without a proper meal. We visited Iron Works Barbecue.

Beef Ribs were had, along with Beef Brisket. Everything is served with a slice of white bread. 

A visit to the Flagship Wholefoods got me very excited and I bought a ticket for the Kombucha train. Kombucha is lightly effervescent fermented drink of sweetened black tea made with live bacteria and yeast. This concoction was particularly tasty due to the incredible flavour combination of Grapefruit, Lemon, Lime, Orange, Ginger, Sea Salt and Agave.

The next morning we started our day with a good cup of Tazo English Breakfast Tea. Yes I did go and find tea on my first day in the US. But to accompany we had deliciously sticky and sickly cinnamon buns (or chinnabons as they were soon to be renamed). Indulgence at it's best.

Our film badges did come with some perks. At a screening of TNT's The Last Ship, we were given free drinks, 'candy' and Bluetooth Speakers! Wonka Sweetarts were my top candy discovery of the trip. They are like eating dextrose tablets. Hyperness ensued.

I have a confession. Until this trip I had never really eaten Fried Chicken. So I'm extremely glad that my first experience was at Gus'. This was one of the food highlights of our trip. The chicken was moist and flavourful, the crust was crispy and moreish, the coleslaw was something particularly special and we all got to keep our soda cups! 

Rob and I had a more sophisticated lunch at La Condesa - my personal favourite restaurant in Austin. It was beautiful, fresh and the food was heavenly.

I had an Alma Blanca cocktail which was habanero-infused siembra azul blanco tequila, ginger liqueur, agave nectar, pineapple juice, fresh corn, hoja de hierba santa and a hisbiscus-rose-infused salt rim. It was almost too beautiful to drink but it was the best cocktail I have ever tasted. So intricate and delightful.

For lunch we had Tortas (mexican sandwiches). I had the Pambazo, which was homemade chorizo, black bean puree, mexican crema, cotija, baby romaine, avocado, duck fat-braised potatoes and a guajillo-tomato salsa.The potatoes were the unusual aspect yet highlight of this dish with the homemade chorizo adding an incredible richness. 

Brunch at the Moonshine Diner was a must. A ferocious bloody mary to start...

Followed by Gumbo - something that I was very excited to actually try whilst in the States as we have only made it ourselves at home before. Trying real andouille sausage was a treat.

Breakfast at Holborn Dining Room

It may not be as catchy as Breakfast at Tiffanys, but that doesn't mean you should be any less enthralled by the classy charm of Rosewood London's newest edition, The Holborn Dining Room.

Attending for a leisurely breakfast on a beautiful Saturday morning, we were greeted and sat in a cosy booth for two. With all the character of a Parisian bistro and the sophistication of The Savoy, this airy and stylish dining room is instantly enchanting.

Staff were delightful although we we're frequented by a number of different servers and very keen to offer up their knowledge and passion for the different dishes.

We started with a fresh mint tea and a refreshing earl grey, followed by a fresh grapefruit juice that had the perfect balance of sweet and sharp. I dined on Poached Eggs, Kale and Holborn Beans, while my companion sampled Eggs Benedict and Crushed Avocado and Tomato on English Muffin.

My beautiful mounds of delicate, white flesh burst with the satisfying and vibrant egg yolk that accompanies a perfect poached egg, soaking my kale and merging with my beans. The 'holborn beans' were deliciously sweet and smoky, made with luscious pancetta and cooked for over a day to develop their flavour. I could have eaten double the portion of this dish and perhaps some hot, buttered sourdough on the side for dipping and scooping.

The perfect poaching and fresh yolks continued with the Eggs Benedict, covered with a delectably rich hollandaise and crisp toasted muffin. One of the stand out components to our meal was the avocado, one of the ripest and most creamy fruits we have come across in a while - unusual for Britain. Mixed with juicy, sweet tomato and layered onto a sumptuous muffin base, this particular dish did not last very long. 

The whole experience was a delight and we plan to return for dinner very soon! 

Brilliant Breakfast

Today I want to tell the world how much I love breakfast. Don't worry, I'm not about to spurt out a load of cliched matriarchal advice about how breakfast is the most important meal of the day and it gets your metabolism going and ensures that you digest your food with as much pzazz as your body can manage - because we've all had enough of that in our lives. Plus, I've still got at least 8 years (I hope) before I'll have to start torturing my own kids with gems such as the importance of breakfast. 
Breakfast is seriously underrated, and I don't think that, until today, I've really appreciated just how good breakfast is.

Marc enjoys porridge.

At breakfast time, you can literally eat anything you want. It's the social norm to douse your body in greasy animal fat and to fry slices of stodgy white bread in said animal fat and stuff it down your gullet followed by an entire tin of sugary baked beans and a huge mug of whole milk, four sugar tea. Everyone loves a fry up, it's the king of breakfasts. Even when an "all day breakfast" is on the menu, part of you would still feel a bit guilty and dirty ordering one because of it's sheer volume of artery clogging goodness. But at breakfast time, there is absolutely no guilt. Because you need the energy... in fact you need as much energy as you can get - that's what your mother told you, right? A fry up is nearly impossible to turn down. Even if you just take the individual ingredients from fry ups - bacon, sausage, egg... people will still eat these for breakfast every day, almost because they feel they should. What's that you say BBC News? Eating bacon every day is going to give me cancer? I'm an adult I'll eat as much fucking bacon as I want, I'd inject maple smoked bacon straight into my veins if I could, I'd roll it up and smoke it if people weren't going to look at me like I was mentally deranged. Breakfast is the only time of day when you can eat juicy Gloucester old spot sausages and thick cut smoked bacon with the glistening juice running down your face and genuinely feel proud of yourself.

Alex enjoys a fry up.

 It's not just fry ups that make breakfast amazing. It's that you can say "I'm going to get a latte and a big sugary almond croissant on the way to work today" and it will constitute breakfast. Do you know how much butter goes into a croissant? To make the pastry, it's rolled out, slathered in an entire stick of butter, rolled out again and this process is continued until all the butter in the world has been used. Then for chocolate or almond croissants, it's stuffed with so much sugar that you are basically getting the same high as a class A drug. But that's the best part, at breakfast time it's totally normal to eat these things - because you tell yourself that's what the French must do. The same goes for danish pastries and muffins. If I want to feel even more smug about eating sugar treats for breakfast, I'll help myself to a 'skinny stem ginger muffin' from Starbucks, which is absolutely covered in icing but it says skinny so I'm basically going to lose weight while I eat it.

Breakfast is also a great excuse to be super pretentious. Sometimes I want to be one of those people who do yoga and eat greek yogurt with granola and fresh berries for breakfast and put linseed on everything but I don't think my bank account or my relationship could take the strain. Or at the weekend I might have toasted English muffins with steamed spinach, poached eggs and homemade hollandaise sauce. It's breakfasts like these that make me feel extremely smug, like I'm leading a life where I get to stay in my fluffy white bed on a Sunday morning in my light and airy loft apartment reading The Guardian and having my feet rubbed by Rob while I cuddle my pet daschund and eat crumpets ladened with so much butter I think I might die. 

For the normal everyday, clockwork breakfast eater, there's cereal. I'm not sold on cereal to be honest. Sometimes I love it and have to purchase 3 different boxes with my weekly shop but they always go stale so quickly - yes I know you can buy those airtight cereal dispenser things but who really thinks about buying those when they're at the shop. What I think cereal brings to the table is the "fun" aspect of breakfast. Cereals in crazy shapes, cereals that taste of chocolate, cereals that have toys inside (who can say they still wouldn't get excited about finding the toy in a cereal packet), cereals like Weetabix. Weetabix are great because it's impossible not to try and see how many you can eat before they absorb all the liquid in your body. They do also taste like hay, which is, you know, a bit of a downside. Cereals are also laden with sugar, and if you're eating the ones that aren't, then you're just wasting your life.

Rob enjoys peanut butter TOO much.

Did you know, that breakfast can also be incredibly romantic and cute? I didn't either until I discovered the grapefruit situation. Grapefruit is a funny one because it's a very acquired taste. My mum has been known to eat grapefruit in the past and put sugar on it. This I don't see the point of now because it just spoils the amazing taste of grapefruit... This is coming from a girl who will literally eat a whole lemon. But the best part about grapefruit for breakfast is that you cut it in half. I've noticed Rob's parents do this when staying at their house many times and it is, without a doubt, the most adorable ritual of food sharing I've ever seen. It got me thinking, what happens when one of them is away?! What happens to the other half of the grapefruit?! It made me want someone to share my grapefruit with. It made me want to force feed Rob half a grapefruit each day just so that we could be as cute and other couples would envy us and our harmonized daily grapefruit sharing. 


To sum up, breakfast is amazing. Breakfast is the best meal of the day because you can eat anything and by the end of the day you will have used the calories. This is the time of day when you should be eating the most and tastiest food possible. So you should listen to your mum, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Just as long as it's not porridge.