Happy Cooking
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 programs such as MasterChef, de 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 precious to set something on fire. On FavorFlav, Lotje shares what’s on her mind every week. This time: beautify the world, get a tattoo!
I’m rather easily offended, so when someone called the tattoo of a rose on my shoulder blade a head of lettuce, I had it removed. At a laser clinic on the chic Cornelis Schuytstraat in Amsterdam-Zuid. It cost a hundred times as much as getting it done: twenty-five guilders, by Wimpie Zuigerveer. It was only years later, when the word ‘zuigerveer’ turned up on a garage bill, that I realized that probably wasn’t his real name. Wim tattooed people in Groningen’s red-light district. The kind of place you barely dare enter when you’re seventeen. Zero hipsters, let’s put it that way—a bit of that vibe.
Scrapbook
Later, I regretted it. Having it removed. It really did look exactly like a head of lettuce, but that would actually have been pretty cool by now. It was vegetables that inspired me to get another tattoo after all. The vegetables on Sean Brock’s left arm. Sean Brock is an American chef who appeared on the cover of Fool (the best food magazine ever), is featured in season 2 of The Mind of a Chef, and in season 6 of Chef’s Table. I cut out his sleeve years ago and stuck it in my scrapbook. Yes, I scrapbook—no, that’s not for idiots, but that’s a whole different story. Focus.
Mr. Precise
Sean Brock’s sleeve is beautiful and consists of a collection of brightly colored vegetables: beets, radishes, ears of corn, butter beans, heirloom tomatoes (I never know exactly what that means, heirloom, but it sounds delicious) and the occasional stray violet. The story goes that he took the grower’s catalog with him to the tattoo shop. Extremely precise about everything, that Sean. Without tattoos, if you look closely, he actually looks a bit like a nerd. A tattoo really does wonders for your cool factor. I can think of a few chefs who would benefit enormously from one. No. Let’s not go there. Don’t.
Child’s Drawing
I have five now. Tattoos. Of the head of lettuce, you can now only see the outlines without pigment in summer, when I’m tanned. The funniest and most cheerful one consists of a fork, a knife and a spoon. On the inside of my right forearm. A kind of sloppy child’s drawing. Everyone can see it, and apart from my mother, a few aesthetic fundamentalists in my circle of friends and my accountant, people almost always have to smile at it. Happy Cooking is written underneath. Sean Brock had forgotten that, by the way: happy cooking. Just watch Chef’s Table. I can’t forget it, because it’s on my arm.
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