Eddie’s Food Annoyances Disappear Like Snow in the Sun with This Golden Food Tip
Adeline (nickname: Eddie) loves food—lots of it, and often—and both at home and out. Usually, that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the series Eddie’s Food Annoyances you can read about the latter. This time, Eddie doesn’t have a food annoyance, but mainly a really good food TIP.
Oh, the days when all the bloody good restaurants suddenly started delivering. It was one big food festival at my house. I went from Tel Aviv-style sharing boards to lobsters delivered to my door and then on to creamy risotto with truffle. I estimate a kilo a week around the waistline.
My secret
I miss eating out, I miss hanging out under the party hook, I miss the terrace gradually turning from lunch into drinks and then dinner. But I also managed reasonably well during lockdown. I’ll just be honest. If you alternate spending ages doing your groceries with clicking and collecting at your local HEMA (hahaha, that hot dog pack for dogs—have you seen it yet?) and then have your favorite Mediterranean restaurant deliver to your home, you’ve got things pretty good these days. What a time to be alive, indeed.
Although I do want to share my secret for making this even easier to sustain (as in, even now, after a trillion days), and that is a well-thought-out tactic: make sure you get out of the house.
Change the wallpaper
Leaving the house actually makes everything better. A friend of mine calls it ‘changing the wallpaper for a bit.’ Sometimes you simply want to sit at a different table, flop down on another sofa, or take a different stroll. Preferably with the same man, of course. But what I especially want is… to eat something different.
By getting out of the house for a bit, you get so many new options, people. New delicatessens where you can sample a completely unfamiliar selection from left to right. Butchers with award-winning grill sausages (true story)—you’ll have to go to Rolde for those, by the way. Wine shops (with a wine drive-thru!) where, as a basic necessity, you can stock up on a different bottle for once. A stall where they quickly whip up a flammkuchen for you. But above all: a completely new source of restaurants delivering to your home. Long lists of menus you’ve never eaten from, cocktails you haven’t tasted, undiscovered delivery times, and restaurant pickup routines you’ve never experienced. It’s one big celebration.
Hot potato breath
That’s how I spent a week in Zandvoort. A house stuck right up against the racetrack and just three stumbles from the sea. Every 100 meters there was a stall selling fish, the village had the tastiest snack according to our Snackspert, and Zandvoort lies under Bloemendaal’s hot potato breath. And wouldn’t you know, there’s a whole mountain of better culinary experiences waiting for you there. Just browsing Instagram and rummaging through Facebook was enough to make the little kilos around my waist start purring contentedly. I picked up a five-course dinner that I’m still living off.
One more piece of advice: do bring along a nice napkin and some candles yourself. It’s challenging enough to dig four matching plates out of that holiday crockery, let alone having dimmers to serve your five-star meal under.
Next week, another annoyance, I promise. But I needed to balance out my acidity with this incredibly good lockdown tip.
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