Gems
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. On FavorFlav, Lotje shares what occupies her each week. This time: the hard life known as making television.
I can feel the lukewarm warmth of the grilled sardines through the fabric of my bag against my hip. The paper placemats I’ve wrapped them in are already getting a little damp and could give way at any moment, so I need to hurry. Just a little farther to the car.
Russian roulette
I’m a big advocate of taking risks. I’m not talking about Ayahuasca or Russian roulette. I mean small things, like moving to Drenthe, seeing how fast your motorbike can go (170, I didn’t dare go any faster) or ordering pufferfish at a really dodgy sushi bar. Taking a risk makes you more alert, more awake. However it turns out, feeling awake always feels good. Even when it results in sardines in a wet placemat.
So, I’m travelling and I’m not allowed to say where. I’m on a recce. Pronounced like ‘reckie’, but with an r instead of a g. It means an exploratory trip, but that makes me sound like a Girl Scout. Recce is a military term and makes me sound like some kind of secret agent from Mossad. I’m not allowed to say where, because the destination is a surprise for the contestants on the cooking programme I’m preparing. Think sun, sea and olive oil. That way.
Pork cheek
On every trip, you hope to find gems. Restaurants where lorry drivers sit under fluorescent lights eating pork cheeks braised in red wine, motorway service stations with brilliant ice-cold raspberry pastries, a bar with three televisions all shouting at once and Bellinis made with fresh, ripe white peaches. You can come across a gem at any moment, as long as you’re open to it. If you’re willing to take risks.
So I’m sitting on a broken plastic chair on the terrace of a dubious restaurant, in a dark and cold alley in an ugly little Mediterranean village, looking at a grubby menu. The waitress confides that the leg of lamb is the very, very best thing on the menu. So delicious, she says, you wouldn’t believe it. My heart skips a beat. Leg of lamb? A gem? She has a sad face and a smoke-roughened, rasping voice, but very kind eyes.
Dead sheep
When I go inside to use the toilet, I smell the lamb, which in our country would really be called sheep. The smell of dead sheep hangs over the restaurant like a clammy, warm blanket. It wasn’t a young sheep. It wasn’t a skinny sheep either. When the waitress comes back, I order the grilled sardines. The sea really is very close, after all, even though you can’t see it from here at all right now. She seems disappointed that I’m not interested in her lamb.
Because I don’t want to hurt the kind-eyed waitress, whose face is growing sadder by the minute, yet again, I rapidly wrap the sardines after one devastatingly rotten bite in two paper placemats and put them in my bag, between my wallet and my silk scarf. I just hope she won’t notice in a moment that the placemats are gone. Or that there aren’t any bones on the little bone plate. Hypocritically, I thoroughly clean my hands with the dried-out lemon wipe from a sachet.
No gem today…
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