De Achtertuin

“c’est joli de monterer aux autres les belles choses de la vie mais c’est encore plus joli d’y participer soi-même”

— Advice unknown teacher to me in 1987 after graduating from secondary school

In May, my father passed away at the age of 92. I sat by his side for 33 hours until his final breath. In June and July, my attention was mostly on work, but August was mine. When it comes to cooking, this August was out of the ordinary. I spent two weeks on holiday at my father's house and, cooking two new recipes a day, tried around 30 different dishes. Many of the dishes were inspired by memories of my travels. The outliers were my Indian dishes, since I have never traveled to India—yet.

After the first weekend, I didn't drink any alcohol for a week and used meat only a few times. Most of my meals were based on vegetables and pulses. You may call this fibermaxing. Around 90–95% of adults in Western countries do not consume the recommended amount of dietary fibre, a number which has shocked me. And that's based on a recommendation of 30 grams per day. Increasingly, researchers argue that the recommended intake should be closer to 40 grams.

I made a fish version of the traditional Peruvian quinoa soup. Normally, it is prepared with chicken broth and chicken. I followed the same recipe but substituted the chicken stock with fish stock and used trout instead.

The trout was actually suggested by ChatGPT. I asked it to find a fish version of the traditional Peruvian quinoa soup, and it confidently recommended trout. When I asked for a source, however, it admitted there wasn't one. Its reasoning was simply that trout was introduced to the highlands of Peru by Europeans, so a quinoa-and-trout soup could plausibly exist. In other words, it had hallucinated the recipe. It was very good, though.

I made a cold-brew hibiscus drink, known as roselle in some English-speaking countries. Long before I learned the word hibiscus, I knew the Arabic name karkadeh (كركديه). In 1991, a truck driver prepared karkadeh for me in the desert of Kenya's Northeastern Province. I've never forgotten the word.

For the cold brew, I used one cup of dried hibiscus flowers for one liter of water. The flowers are intensely sour, so I added two tablespoons of sugar. Even then, the drink remained tart but very refreshing. The deep crimson color is entirely natural.

I spent most of my time on my bicycle — besides running in the morning and swimming in the afternoon. The area where I grew up is unique because the ruilverkaveling process (land consolidation) was never fully completed in this corner of the Netherlands. Most meadows are still quite small, and many dusty sand roads were never paved. In 2005, an area of 220 square kilometres around Winterswijk was designated as a National Landscape. It includes the Winterswijk hamlets of Miste, Ratum, Kotten, Brinkheurne, Woold, Huppel, Henxel, Corle, and Huppel.

As a child, some of my happiest moments were spent cycling after finishing my homework, riding until dusk during the hot summer months. I hated winter — and I still do. Other happy memories are of playing outside in summer until I was soaked with sweat. I still enjoy that feeling.

My ideal temperature is around 34 degrees Celsius (93.2 degrees Fahrenheit) — a rather lonely preference in the Netherlands. Apart from one unpleasantly cool Friday, when temperatures dropped to 23°C, climate change did its thing, and most days reached 30°C or higher.

I made another som tam with sticky rice and two types of fish sauce - one regular, and one fermented. The next day, I had some green papaya left over and turned it into an Indian dish. I simmered the diced papaya in a tomato masala. The dish is called green papaya sabzi and originates from northern India. In between, I made many Indian dal with: chana dal, masoor dal, and urad dal. Since I didn't have ghee, I finished with a mustard oil tempering instead. Fresh curry leaves are easy to find in Amsterdam, but not here in the east.

I also had some haricots verts—the thin French variety of green beans—left over from the som tam (I couldn't find regular string beans). I turned those into a Greek-inspired breakfast. First, boil the beans and plunge them into ice water to stop the cooking. Then gently cook garlic in plenty of olive oil, add the beans, oregano, lemon zest, and lemon juice, along with a handful of fresh herbs such as parsley or dill (I used cilantro). Finish by sprinkling the dish with feta cheese and, if you have them (I didn’t), some pine nuts.

I preferred to use my bicycle for getting around, but whenever I needed to save time, I took the car. Driving on the narrow, winding country roads is great fun—you have to stay alert every single second. Too many trees to potentially hit.

I made Hopi's ital stew again: brown beans simmered in coconut milk with green bananas, vegetables, and the usual Jamaican aromatics—pimento, thyme, bay leaves, pepper, and scallions. This time, I added some salt fish to the pot.

Hopi is the “coffee Rasta” I met in Jamaica's Blue Mountains. During my stay, I watched him prepare every meal from his kitchen, learning his recipes along the way. Ana Patwa, dem nuh use apostrophe. Dem dash weh di apostrophe, so mi fi call dis stew: Hopi stew.

When yuh a cook up Jamaican food outa di yaad, yuh haffi own a good cutlass — one tool fi everyting: fi open coconut, fi weed di yard, or fi chase weh any dutty intruder.

My cutlass, not sure what I can do with it in Amsterdam

I made Indian charcoal-roasted eggplant with a mustard oil tempering. This is one of the oldest cooking methods imaginable: simply place the eggplant, tomato, and garlic directly on hot embers and roast them until they are soft inside and charred on the outside. Our ancestors may have cooked this way for as long as two million years, although the earliest strong evidence for controlled cooking dates to about 780,000 years ago—long before the invention of clay pots around 20,000 years ago.

Scrape the flesh from the roasted vegetables and mix it with chopped cilantro, green chilies, and fresh garlic. Then pour over a hot mustard oil tempering. I usually flavor the tempering with cumin seeds, mustard seeds, sliced garlic, and green chilies, although you can add other spices as well.

I made a Spanish fabada asturiana with large white beans. I added carrots, spicy chorizo, and smoked paprika. The cooking method is simple: first, fry the chorizo over low heat until it releases all of its flavorful oils. Then, cook the onion, carrot, and garlic in the bright red chorizo oil. The beans, of course, are boiled separately before being added to the stew.

One day my sister came to visit to divide the contents of the estate, so I made Indonesian satay with a peanut sauce from scratch for lunch. Of course, I also made my own simple acar with carrot, onion, cucumber, ginger and chilli. It was a good opportunity to finally use the full length of my satay grill. I don’t buy my chicken thighs from a Dutch butcher, but rather from an Asian store, because they include the chicken skin. You need that fat for a good satay.

For the same reason, I don’t buy pork belly from a Dutch butcher either. And finding 100% pork mince can also be a problem. It’s either beef or half beef and half pork. Asian recipes often call for 100% minced pork, and so does the oldest known recipe for chilli con carne.

That evening I had nothing prepared, so I simply finished the leftovers from the fridge. To my surprise, they came together to make a remarkably luxurious meal. I did make a simple sambal matah, the fresh raw sambal from Bali. Since I didn't have any lemongrass, I improvised with rawit chilies, garlic, trassi, finely sliced lime leaves, salt, and hot coconut oil.

A cool find at the thrift store for just €3.50. Next week I'll be processing all my Mexican dried chilies—ancho, guajillo, pasilla, and mulato—so I figured I needed an appropriate straw hat for cooking in the sun.

Buying the hat wasn’t a random act. My father used to own a similar straw hat, although his had a lower crown. His hat was too small for my head, so I had to get rid of it a couple of years ago. Now I have one of my own. But starting to smoke cigars isn’t a 2026 thing.

I was happy to find my favourite board game from my childhood. I discovered it in the very last part of the house that I hadn't cleared out yet, after four years. I had convinced myself that we had played it so often it had fallen apart and been thrown away.

The 1960s game is in English, which was quite a challenge when I was in primary school and hadn't learned the language yet. It's similar to Monopoly, but with oil tankers, paper oil concessions and little plastic derricks.