What You Don’t Read…
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 vents about what occupies her mind. This time: what’s even more fun than writing columns.
The best thing about a column, then, isn’t writing it, but especially the time when you’re not writing it. The time between two columns, so to speak. Suddenly, everything that happens, has ever happened or is about to happen becomes a possible subject to write about. Your life still looks exactly the same as before, of course, but suddenly everything seems a whole lot funnier, more interesting or more dramatic. Free of charge. It’s all a matter of perspective.
A little calculation error
Take that waitress, for example, in a taqueria (a word that somehow irritates me in Amsterdam-Noord, by the way), who, when you point out a ninety-euro calculation error in her favour, says, ‘Thanks for thinking along.’ Ha! Great! Please say something else ridiculous. Material!
Or Dr. Oetker’s Verwen Lemon Meringue Cake Mix, which took my aunt three perilous hours to turn into a cake (I kid you not). Bag one, bag two, bag three. Plus three eggs. Three hours. Can I just write about this? The world is my oyster. Thanks, everyone. Keep it up.
Emotionally unbalanced
On the other hand, I’ve also discovered that there are limits to what you can write about. There are things (this may come as a shock to you, millennials) that you can’t share. Or that simply can’t be turned into a good story. For example, I have an unstructured, rather politically incorrect and certainly emotionally unbalanced piece about tuna and foie gras lying around. And it will stay there. Because you can’t reduce everything in life to five hundred Saturday words on a food blog.
Failed meal
And then there are the things you would like to share, but aren’t allowed to. I would love to write about the customer questions I occasionally answer for a large supermarket. Not to make fun of the people who write those letters, because I usually understand them very well. There are few things more frustrating than a recipe you don’t understand, an ingredient you’ve never heard of or, worst case scenario, a completely failed meal. You can always count on my full understanding there. Truly.
Plastic wrap
For me, it’s mainly about putting things into perspective—a little perspective that some people seem to lose when they send an angry email or a furious two-page letter, but which I can’t write about. Failed Christmas dinners because a sauce split? Global warming caused by a piece of plastic wrap in a sushi recipe? Unfortunately, I can’t say anything about that here.
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