Still getting used to life in the Netherlands

Stone cold hand-washing

In all the years I have lived in the Netherlands, there are a number of things I will not get used to, things that I cannot adapt to no matter how I try.

Except in building with a very international staff the toilet do not have hot water taps, something one can endure in the spring and summer, but as we approach the days in which we see amid the winter’s snow my hands suffer.

Turn on the taps and see the hands go blue and congeal as if I have dipped them into a bottle of liquid nitrogen, I would not get used to this at all.

Tarts, tomatoes & turpentine

On Thursday night, as I returned from work, I just did not feel like entering the kitchen for a cooked meal. The fastest knock-up meal I could make is smoked salmon on toast after which pasta comes next.

The convenience of having a supermarket on the ground floor of my apartment block cannot be over-stated.

Albert Heijn is the king of supermarkets in the Netherlands, but it would not hold a torch to a third-rate supermarket in the UK.

It has considerably improved though because when I first arrived in the Netherlands, the shelves were staked in alphabetical order, I thought they had tablets, tarts, toilet paper, tomatoes and turpentine side-by-side.

Rumour has it that they brought in an expert from Marks and Spencer to take the concept from corner-shop to supermarket – however, I think they have relapsed into their old ways.

Dated cultures

I approached the salmon shelf and for all sorts of reasons I am date sensitive, too many times I have been in the supermarket and found out-of-date items even though in the evening you run the gauntlet of ill-disciplined, unprofessional and rowdy kids working part-time as shelf-stuffers.

The first was dated the 30^th of November, then the next was the 1^st of December and the next, and the next – 8 of them in all as it became apparent that it was the evening of the 4^th of December.

In the UK, a shop would not survive the evening if a foods inspector finds such stuff on the shelves, but meats and cakes have been found to be out of date too many times, I expect to see stuff like that every other visit.

The staff at this shop are so nonchalant and I really doubt there is any concern about dates on items, in fact, I think I should take pictures next time and forward the stuff to the Consumer’s Association.

I had some other salmon, but if attention to food safety is so lax, I do wonder about culpability if things really go seriously bad.

I have no choice but to continue shopping downstairs, I would ask to speak to the manager next time or cause a bit of a rumpus to embarrass them into really paying more attention to a critical public safety issue.

A building shorn of power

Talk about public safety, as I was working on Friday, my computer died at the same time as the lights, I sauntered out of my office and found the lights had gone out in all the offices in the three-winged complex of 10-storeys.

Only the emergency lighting was on, the lifts were out and the toilets were dark – someone had dug up the cable in the street below.

In my view, even though there was no fire, the building was incapacitated and should have been evacuated regardless of the fact that there was no immediate emergency.

Everyone would have had to use the emergency exits if one arose, but for at least another hour before I left having informed the absent project support office and managers of the situation, the building was still occupied to capacity.

I walked down 9 flights of stairs and returned to work from home but I really felt in a building that also contained three floors of the main power company, someone should have been more responsive, responsible and taken responsibility – well, maybe the building would be there when I return on Tuesday.

A Dog's Dinner from your Grocery

No Dutch on my palate

I have not been one to heap praise on Dutch cuisine, but it is not fault of the Dutch, the fact is a national dish depends on the kinds of crops, ingredients and animals for food that can be obtained local to that region.

Potatoes, pulses and members of the cabbage family feature in many dishes which are either dark or bland compared to colourful Mediterranean or Tropical dishes.

Like the English, many cuisines have come from the sub-continent to augment local dishes; the English variety of Indian cooking is probably the most eaten kind of food in England, here exotic tastes from Indonesian are very prominent.

There was a time I had a salad full of grit which I took back to the chef, rather than replace the salad with a fresh one, he took one leaf ate it and the declared the salad gritless, you could imagine my amazement.

Food snobs they are not

However, that exemplifies the difference in care and attention that the Dutch have towards food compared to the French, Italians or even Spaniards.

Furthermore, I have the advantage of a supermarket on the ground floor of my apartment block. For light shopping, I take down a bag, for serious shopping, I wheel the trolley home – living on the seventh floor of an apartment block which has a supermarket should count for something.

Albert Heijn is the biggest supermarket chain in the Netherlands as part of the Ahold group of companies. There have been lots of improvements over my last 6 years of residence in the Netherlands – shelves are better stacked and labeled, you rarely find out-of-stock stuff, tills get opened when queues get longer, they have not gotten to a bagging service yet.

Unfortunately, what has gone into a decent and organized shop floor has been lost in food psychology.

Yikes!

I picked up a pack of meat – heart cubed for stews – I use it for pepper soup and an assortment of stew recipes. Apart from the label signifying what it was, it had another sticker – (Dier Voeding) – Pet food in Dutch.

Don’t get me wrong, I would suppose most human food is dual purpose, that is, it can be served to both humans and pets, but that should be an unwritten prerogative of the pet owner.

One other explanation might be, the cost of gourmet pet food might be so high that preparing you own pet food is a cost saver, and there are humans whose work it is to taste the edibility of pet food. That, said, this would have better be put in the pet corner and not amongst food for human-beings.

To put that dual-purpose label on food in a supermarket beggars belief – need I say more? I think we can conclude the Dutch have no clue about the concepts of food psychology; this is the fundamental of good cooking, if you could get that from Dutch ingredients.

Albert Heijn have now done the Dutch a disservice, but, if it is acceptable to the Dutch, I would not complain, basically, anything labeled dual-purpose like that, is for the lowest common denominator – in this case, I would not be eating pet food.