Summer Guests

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, de Worsten van Babel On Tour and De Nieuwe Lekkerbek. She ate pig’s trotters 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 timid to set something on fire. On FavorFlav, Lotje shares what occupies her mind every week. This time: what if you were a Summer Guest?

First, I would show Action Bronson. Making a poke bowl. I happened to come across Action on YouTube a few years ago when I was researching poke to write a recipe about it. I was immediately sold. Action Bronson is a big, fat rapper/chef from Queens, who is always stoned and makes really delicious poke with zero pretensions on a rooftop in Manhattan (“I’m gonna chop some of these scallion bitches up”) in a series called ‘Fuck That’s Delicious’. Action Bronson is the only TV chef who always makes something I immediately want to eat myself.

I think I’d leave Chef’s Table out, too fancy-chef, except perhaps for a few of the enormous open fires from the first season featuring Argentine chef Francis Mallmann. Staring into such a fire, he says that you can’t grow as a person without taking risks. True that. And of course Massimo Bottura, too. He really is a hero. Because he dared, in what may be the most fundamentalist country in the culinary world (Italy), to declare war on nostalgia and give traditions a new form.

“I bake”

Andy Garcia twice after that. Yes, sorry, it’s my evening. Once in a crappy movie in which he says “I bake’’ as a pick-up line in a bar. What woman doesn’t dream of taking a man home who can bake a pie and isn’t gay? Then Andy in The Godfather Part III, rolling gnocchi with his hand on Sofia Coppola’s. More intimate than sex.

Lady and the Tramp

From the Mafia category (people always eat well in mafia films), definitely the ‘cooking was always a big thing in prison’ scene from Goodfellas, in which Paulie slices the garlic cloves paper-thin with a razor blade. And immediately afterwards, to forget all those violent Italians a little, Lady and the Tramp, in which Lady and the Tramp each have a different end of a strand of spaghetti in their mouths and slowly come together for a kiss in the middle. Sweet.

Raw vegans

Then something that makes me cry with laughter every time I watch it: the raw vegan pizza on YouTube. In it, a fake new-age raw vegan confidently replaces every element of the pizza (the crust, the sauce and the cheese) with cucumber (sliced, puréed and grated). “As raw vegans there’s no reason why we can’t enjoy the fun and flavour of pizza, just because we don’t eat pizza.”

I would end the evening with the final scene from the film Big Night. Two Italian brothers have a restaurant in New Jersey, and it isn’t doing well. After all the setbacks life can possibly throw at them, they throw in the towel, and one brother makes an omelette for the other, which they eat together in the kitchen. Everything in this scene is beautiful. From the tapping of the eggs and heating the pan over the gas flame to breaking the bread. And comforting. Everything is all right. Life is beautiful.