It’s not often that the Amsterdam Foodie ventures out of the capital, but I was lured to Beverwijk (which literally – and rather amusingly – means ‘beaver area’) by the promise of a market. Now, to me, market means food, but then again to me most things mean food… What I found, however, was several square kilometres of corrugated iron covering stalls that sold everything from leather jackets to Christmas lights. Though I enjoyed browsing through bric-a-brac, I came back with very little for the store cupboard. I did, however, find turmeric, kaffir lime leaves, sweet chilli sauce and the slightly less useful but extremely addictive wasabi peas. I’ve also been on a dim sum mission ever since I purchased my bamboo steamer. It seemed like a good idea at the time…
After all that shopping, I was hungry. The control freak inside me panicked: I was in the middle of nowhere with a man who didn’t know his prosciutto from his parsnips, and I was going to let him take me for dinner?
Miraculously, he knows a woman who owns a restaurant: Café Stoof, a gezellig, if rather twee, eetcafe somewhere on a road somewhere in suburban Holland. Sorry, but it’s not like you’re going to make the trip anyway. Despite copious mockery from the proprietress and her 16-year old daughter (it’s a small town, and my presence didn’t go unnoticed), we made it through the ordering stage and tucked into the bread with herb butter. I had veal stuffed with blue cheese, which was sensibly undercooked and served with sautéed potatoes and salad. My dining companion had a speciality of the house, which (unsurprisingly given his level of Dutch) was nothing like what he expected. Some small fish appeared to be drowning in a lot of sauce, fighting for prominence on a plate full of mashed potato. Clearly not versed in the art of filleting fish, he was not amused. Both dishes came with the restaurant’s namesake: stoofperen. Poached, spiced pears, that were perfectly edible, if a slightly random addition to the plate.