This Works, and it actually does!

I got introduced to this great product in the Crown Plaza Hotel in St. Petersburg. Although you wouldn’t think I had difficulties getting to sleep in the gigantous comfy bed, the hotel provided us with a mini miracle solution to help us getting the peaceful night’s sleep we craved for after a stressful day in Ruski.

The little box on our bedside tables contained two items: a small but powerful deep calm pillow spray and a breath-in / pulse point rollerball. Both my friend K and I were a bit sceptic about the brand-name at first, ‘This Works’ is a big statement to live up to! However once we sprayed the intense blend of Lavender, Vetivert and Camomile onto our puffy pillow and inhaled the gorgeous smells of Frankincense and Eucalyptus  w e   w e r e   g o n e!! We literally went into a coma, we had the most resszztful night ever and only got diszzzturbed by szzoothing dreams about flowerszz, rainbowszz and butterflieszzzzzzz.

Words fail to explain how incredible this product is, but seriously. This product is a miracle! We slept far longer than planned as we forgot to put the alarm clock on and therefore missed out on a lot of sightseeing. But having catched up on weeks of sleep in just one single night thanks to ‘This Works’ was definitely worth it.

The first thing I did when I woke up was ordering a few of those bottles to be delivered at home, and purchasing the Deep Calm Pillow Spray has probably been the best decision in my entire life. Before I started using it I lay awake for hours worrying about silly things, and never felt fully rested when I woke up the next morning. Now I use this spray daily, I actually manage to get out of bed in the mornings without having to press snooze 3 or 4 times and also my horrendous grumpy morning moods are gone! You can buy the introduction kit for £8.00 here. They also wrap your orders up very pretty, a real treat for yourself. 

I haven’t tried any of its other products yet, be they all look very promising. I will probably ordering some bits soon as I have got a stressful exam period coming up! Have a look at This Work's website, I bet you want it all too!

Liefs,

Dutchy xx

The Dutch are still ahead...

Continental food for a home-sick Dutchy

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good old Roast for Sunday lunch and am also quite fond of a greasy bacon butty with builders tea every now and again.. Especially the latter one combined with scones, cream and jam! But for Jamie Oliver’s sake, English cuisine really isn’t that great!

I find myself wandering around Sainsbury’s and M&S for hours, only to realise at the check-out that my trolley mainly consist of standard bits and bobs and a variety of Polish delicatessen (because that is the closest you get to Albert Heijn food!) Shopping in English supermarkets makes me homesick more than ever.

Luckily my friends come from all over Europe, and are such a sweethearts for sending spices and ingredients so that I can cook non-English food or sometimes they even cook it for me. My parents and friends also make me incredibly happy by visiting me quite often too with lots of Dutch treats.

Suitcase full of sweets for sweet-tooth Dutchy!

Please find below some dishes from The Continent which reminds me of how boring English meals are (I am still very much against this expression of 'Mainland Europe' or 'The Continent' , but hey ho I'm slowly starting to accept that Britain is a bit of an 'awkward partner' in Europe):

- PAELLAAA! This mouth-watering Valencian rice dish is by far my favourite meal of all times. My dad is the #1 expert in cooking this superb combination of seafood, chicken and rice (whenever he picks me up from the airport he has a Tupperware filled up with paella wrapped up in newspapers ready for me in the car to eat on my way home!) But whenever I really crave Paella I either cook it myself with the fantastic spices my Spanish friend sent me, or if I am lazy I just hop down to Nothing Hill market – there’s a friendly man at a stall on Portobello mark who cooks up huge batches of paella. You have to be early because most of the time he totally sells out all the huge pans of paella. Recipe for paella (by a British chef that is) can be found here.

Paella spices from Spain with Love! 

- My Lebanese friend E made me a delicious and very festive looking rice dish called Riz a Djaj a couple of weeks ago. It tastes like it is made by angels!! (She is quite an angel I must say) If you want to know how to make this delicious meal made of rice, chicken, pine nuts, mince meat, pepper and cinnamon please have a look at the blog from the 3 Hungry Tummies. 

E's delicious Riz a Djaj

- And then the ‘encroyable’ French cuisine.... You could write a whole blog solely on the French kitchen. However, I can sum it all up and advise you to go either to Marco Pierre White’s Michelin restaurant L'Escargot (they do fantastic deals: 3 courses for £19.50 on weekdays before 7pm!) or to French Bistro 'Cafe Boheme' , this is another favourite of mine.

I recently had snails and frogslegs at L'escargot – they were very yummy and I really regret not tasting them earlier. We have a saying in Dutch: “wat de boer niet kent, dat eet hij niet” (A stick in the mud will try nothing new, or literally: if the farmer doesn't know it, he won't eat it!) This very much applies to me despite numerous attempt by my family to let me try everything at least once!

Sautéed Frogs-Legs

Cooked Escargots

Of course I can just go to Edgware Road (for Lebanese food), Soho (Chinese), South Ken (French) or Portobello Market/Camden Town to have some non-British food in England, but that only proves us more how English food is build upon the continental kitchen! Thus, the Netherlands gets an extra point for being closer to all these incredible cuisines (and for having the Walhalla of groceries: Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn!).  

Liefs,

Dutchy xx

The Continent 2 - The Island 1

What a crêpe week!

I've just realised its been over a week when I last posted, but I've got a legitimate excuse though: I've been busy stuffing my face.. with pancakes!!!!

As you all know, it was Shrove Tuesday (aka Pancake day) this week, one of my favourite days of the year! 

On this day before the start of the Lenten season (Ash Wednesday) you can eat as much rich, fatty food as you can handle. So a dozen of pancakes it is!

When I crave pancakes and am too lazy to bake them myself, I usually go to 'My Old Dutch' - a pancake house located in Kensington, Holborn and Chelsea. It's a really lovely Dutch country style restaurant with big wooden tables, pictures of tulips, clogs and windmills and your pancakes are served on large blue delft plates! Besides pancakes, they also serve traditional Dutch dishes such as 'poffertjes' and 'bitterballen'. When I'm feeling homesick I get this tingly feeling and I pretend I'm in the Netherlands for an hour or so! My Old Dutch is definitely worth a visit, and again and again and again... 

This Tuesday though, I committed a crime and made my own pancakes at home! When baking pancakes, I always follow Jamie Oliver's easy peasy recipe. We all thought he couldn't beat his '30 minutes recipes', but this year he has. With his incredible #onetweetrecipe!

You can literally add any ingredient you fancy to this 140 character recipe, such as blueberries,  bananas, bacon etc etc. I opted for apple, raison and cinnamon this time! They are the best! Especially when decorated with icing sugar (poedersuiker in Dutch) and Dutch maple syrup. 

FYI, the expression "Shrove Tuesday" comes from the word shrive, meaning "confess". Have you got any juicy confessions? Mine must be that I've given up chocolate for lent and have failed miserably already... oops!

Liefs,

Dutchy xx

It's still a draw! 

It's raining, it's pouring..

Every so often I try to recall why on earth I decided to study in England. Why did I pick Blighty, if I had the option of 195 other countries in the world? Obviously I can think of worse places to live, such as Uzbekistan, but I really wouldn't mind if I could revise in my bikini on the beach in a tropical resort..

No, No. I decided to emigrate to probably the wettest country of Europe instead, thanks to the North Atlantic depressions.

As Forest Gump would say: "we go through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stinging rain.. and big old fat rain. Rain that flows in sideways, and sometimes rain even seems to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rains at night". The UK really splashes and squelches its way through every single month! Every day the British weather conditions make me go mad. In the morning I leave the house wearing sunnies, only to come back soaked to the skin! (No. unfortunately not sun soaked)

I have accepted that rain is a part of the 'British experience', and I am not blaming Britain on having such miserable weather conditions.. But what does annoy me to bits is the fact that English people massively underestimate the wetness of their country!

When I say its chucking down with rain, my English friends believe its just a bit of drizzle.

When they suggest there's a little shower, I see the rain hammering relentlessly from a sky the colour of cigarette ash.

The only positive thing when it is bucketing down again 

is that I can wear my comfy hunter boots

and

its a legitimate excuse to bake home-made blueberry muffins 

and eat them all myself.

Oh, and it is of course blooody romantic to kiss in the rain too! *sigh*

But yeah, weather wise.. The Netherlands is definitely winning.

Liefs,

Dutchy xx

Its's a draw!

British vs Dutch university life

One thing England is doing extremely well is its university life. Despite the rising tuition fees (you can triple the Dutch fees by 7 for a ticket into British uni's - thanks Cameron!), going to university in London is  f a n t a s t i c. Not only is the quality of education much better than in the Netherlands in my opinion, also the social side of uni life is so jolly good and far better than how we rock uni back at home.

Unlike Holland, (sport) societies are an integral part in British university life. The range of sports clubs and societies open to university students is endless, most uni's have up to 200 different clubs and societies. Rowing, wine tasting, extreme frisbee, anti-war society, rugby, ski-fi and fantasy society.. name it and they have it! Dutch uni's should take a note of that. In the Netherlands we have no such thing. Throughout my first degree in The Hague I did rowing, but this was all independent from the university. 

Having played hockey ever since I could walk.. it isn't surprising I did trials to become a member of the uni's hockey club. What I love the most about it is that you represent your university in a league. This causes for a lot of tension between the competing universities in London, and this is mainly expressed through cruel songs about the opposite universities (e.g Poly on the Strand aka Kings College)

We don't have to argue about the fact that the Dutch will trash the British in hockey whenever the opportunity arises

All students are free from 1pm onwards every Wednesday so that they can represent their university during matches, after a team's victory (or loss) the whole club celebrates it at 'sports-night' in the uni's union bar. I will elaborate on these amazing shenanigans during sports night in future posts. But I could reveal you already that you could say that the actual sporting aspect of our society sometimes plays a secondary role to the numerous social engagements the socialsec's arrange for us hockey-fanatics. Think copious amounts of alcohol, lots of silliness, weekly fancy dress themes, naked calendar shoots for charitable purposes, drunken and loutish behaviour, temporary amnesia the morning after, and lots of fun of course. 

If I will ever get a job at the Ministry of Education in the Netherlands, Dutch university life will be changed drastically. I can't imagine anything better than representing your university with a hockey stick in your hand!

Liefs,

Dutchy xx

Let the games begin..