There I go again…
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. At FavorFlav, Lotje vents about what’s on her mind. This week: that sometimes things just don’t go well for a while.
You get that too, right? That when you can’t sleep, you don’t count sheep but lamb chops? And all those other culinary highlights from your life? I simply start with one that comes to mind. For example, the first Daim bar after an insanely long long-distance hike with my parents in a country with far more mountains than valleys.
Caramel Crack
The first crack of the caramel between your teeth, that comforting creamy, smooth, slightly naughty milk chocolate. When I’ve eaten it ‘all’ (in my mind and in bed, obviously), I automatically associate it with the next one: from a plate of pasta with vongole near Naples to sushi at seven in the morning at the fish market in Tokyo, and then via key lime pie and a sandwich with piping-hot croquette to sauerkraut mash with bacon bits. You always do that too when you can’t sleep, don’t you?
Meeting
You know the kind. One of those days when things simply don’t go well between you and the rest of the world’s population. You make a joke and everyone keeps staring at you blankly. And nobody laughs. You say something in a meeting that’s rather sensitive after all, because you think everyone feels the same way. And then you get absolutely no support and everyone suddenly becomes very busy with their phone. One of those days.
Brothers from another mother
On a day like that, I think of you. Of all those people in other homes, with other jobs and other clothes, who also talk about food very, very often and in great detail. And think about food. And eat. My food-brothers from another mother, so to speak.
Because you also always prefer to go to the biggest possible supermarket on the first day of a holiday, right, to wander around there for hours? You’re also annoyed when, on another holiday, you’re staying in a hotel and happen to end up at such a beautiful old-fashioned covered market one morning, only to be unable to buy anything because you don’t have a kitchen at your disposal?
Bologna
You also play culinary games with yourself, like: if I could eat just one more thing, what would it be? Pizza? Foie gras? Or: if I had to choose between never drinking white wine again or never eating white bread again, what would I choose? And do you also know all the answers to questions about food immediately on a television quiz, while thinking the contestants who don’t know the answer are incredibly stupid? Because who doesn’t know what those stuffed pasta shapes from Bologna are called, yet does know how many kilobytes are in a megabyte?
French Toast
You also fantasise about what you would put on the menu of your imaginary restaurant, don’t you? Definitely something with béarnaise sauce, probably French toast too and certainly that spaghetti vongole. Compared with others, you’re also invited to people’s homes for dinner rather infrequently, because nobody dares cook for you, right? And if you ate everything you wanted and never exercised again, you’d also be three times as fat, wouldn’t you?
You also secretly divide the world into people who love food and people who don’t, don’t you? And then discover that you have far more friends than you thought on that day when things didn’t go well and you briefly thought, ‘there I go again’?
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