Extreme outdoor, a.k.a. spring
Lotje Deelman was editor-in-chief of ELLE Eten, has been working for Allerhande for almost 15 years and worked behind the scenes on television programmes such as MasterChef, Worsten van Babel On Tour and De Nieuwe Lekkerbek. She ate pig’s trotter with Anthony Bourdain and flirted with Gordon Ramsay in his Aston Martin. Lotje is the (co-)author of more than ten cookbooks and, in her kitchen in the Drenthe countryside, is never too afraid to set something on fire. Every week on FavorFlav, Lotje gives vent to whatever is occupying her mind. This time: extreme outdoor.
I like playing the leading role. In my own film, that is. I’m the kind of person who spends all day pretending she’s being filmed, and therefore tries to do everything as coolly as possible, with an eye for every detail. Of course, I don’t really think I’m being filmed. I pretend. I wouldn’t want to be filmed at all. I simply like looking at myself from a distance; that way I can see myself better. And make a few adjustments every now and then.
Track pants
So you’re not likely to see me sitting on the sofa in a grubby pair of track pants. Or eating from a plate with a chip in it, or cooking in a mint-green apron with pink hearts. I just don’t think that looks good in my film. Those aren’t points; they’re penalty points. That sounds stranger than it feels. But since I’m on the subject: there’s one more thing you need to know about me if you want to fully understand the story that follows.
I’m crazy about shopping. Especially in unlikely places. Let me loose in Action and I’ll come home with Japanese washi tape, a fisheye lens for my iPhone and protein bars that taste like whipped cream and are still really good for building muscle (I hope). Leave me alone for five minutes in a hardware store or a shop selling livestock feed and barbed wire, and I’ll find a suede tool roll that can be used as an evening bag, or a flashy little jumpsuit you’d swear Ralph Lauren designed.
Stand-up pouch
Point made, Matthijs van Nieuwkerk would now say impatiently. Onward, or actually back, to last night, and my extreme outdoor dessert of instant chocolate mousse with granola and freeze-dried cherries. I was spooning it straight from a stand-up pouch inside my army-green-on-the-outside-aluminium-with-5000-rivets-on-the-inside camper van parked in my garden, while the birds sang and I felt intensely cool and content.
I had bought that chocolate mousse with cherries and granola at the outdoor shop that afternoon. Every year, when spring arrives, the birds start singing louder in the morning, it stays light longer in the evening and you start craving salade niçoise and rosé instead of sauerkraut with sausage, I want to go to an outdoor shop. A big one.
Red deer
I’d most like to buy a buck knife there, one that would allow you to gut a red deer in a single movement, but that wouldn’t be wise given my temperament. And really, I’d like to have everything else in a shop like that too. Orange hiking boots, titanium tea kettles, walkie-talkies… Next to the display case with the knives is the shelf with meals for treks, base camps and mountain huts. You know, those pouches in which you see people in documentaries making a meal with melted snow inside a little tent that has been hanging on a mountainside in a storm for days.
Those meals always exert an irresistible attraction on me, but I had never actually bought one. Until I saw that chocolate mousse with granola and cherries yesterday. And so I sat in my camper van in my garden, wearing my little jumpsuit and eating chocolate mousse. Which was delicious, too.
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