UNIDENTIFIABLE FRIED OBJECT

Over the years I've mentioned the Dutch fondness for deep-fried oddities often enough that some readers have built-up quite an appetite. So, not trusting my own recipes, I went in search of other sources.
Readers can be a querulous bunch.

Quote:
How do you make a kroket or bitterbal?
First you prepare a ragout. This ragout, can be varied upon in many ways. Not only can the main ingredient be different (meat, fish, shrimp, vegetables), but of course the herbs and spices, the used liquid (stock, wine, milk, even plain water), and added ingredients (fried onions, bacon or mushrooms) can be changed too. Then the kroket is breaded and deepfried.

Source: http://www.coquinaria.nl/english/recipes/Stock/Kroket.htm.
[Fried balls]

Yes, there are other recipes at the referenced site. But what you really want is the deepfried thingummajiggie.


The list of variations on a deep-fried theme is darn well infinite.
Kroketten, bamiballen, nasiballen, bitterballen, fondue schijf, kaas kroket, fried cheese soufflé, patatje open been (fries garnished like a leg-wound - with mayonnaise, peanut sauce, ketchup or barbecue sauce, and chopped onion), meatball on a stick, combat fries, lumpia, kibbeling, low-fat low-sodium vegetarian deep-fried monster, fried chicken, all meat breaded pocket, a Hungarian thing.......

For a fond detailing of the totally fried experience, read this article: http://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/patatdag-dutch-and-fried-food/.
[Patatdag]


So fond are the Dutch of their hot fat foods that even in the depths of Thailand they go in search of it. In fact, they are notorious for doing so.
I would think that even if you aren't a flaming degenerate, you might find sufficient reason to visit Thailand. Requiring your own fast-food while committing immoral acts, in a country where the local cuisine is actually rather fascinating, just seems perverse.

Evenso, I'm fairly sure that the German and French sex-tourists also insist upon dishes that only appeal to them while exploiting the locals.
Being a filthy brute is hard work, acceptable sustenance is required.
Disgusting behaviour and grease are a natural combination.

The English probably aren't like that, though. For one thing, they are all into little boys, and tend to go on holiday in SriLanka instead.
For another, they don't have any food to be fond of.
It's buggery sad.

In the main, and quite despite their propensity to travel abroad every summer for cheap booze, sunburn, and anonymous couplings with younger people, it can honestly be assumed that most Western Europeans are home-bodies who don't really like to travel.
Despite sheer hundreds of thousands of them on the road at the same time, heading south with their own tea bags, tinned peas, and bottles of proper mayonnaise in the trailer behind the volvo.

It's an inexplicable migration.
Seasonal absurdity.


ATTACKED BY A BAT

I mean, what's the point of being treated like sheep, I mean I'm fed up going abroad and being treated like a sheep, what's the point of being carted around in busses, surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kittering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors complaining about the tea, "Oh they don't make it properly here do they not like at home" stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in cotton sun frocks squirting Timothy White suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cause they overdid it on the first day!

And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellevues and Continentals with their international luxury modern roomettes and their Watney's Red Barrel and their swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending to be acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging in to the queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night there's bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some big fat bloated tart with her hair Brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.

And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with diarrhoea and flabby white legs and hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel, and then, once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel, and then one night they take you to a local restaurant with local color and coloring and they show you there and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keep singing 'Torremolinos, Torremolinos', and complaining about the food, 'Oh, it's so greasy isn't it?' and then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Lutton with an Instamatic and Dr. Scholl sandals and Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres!

And sending tinted postcards of places they don't know they haven't even visited, 'to all at number 22, weather wonderful our room is marked with an "X", wish you were here! Food very greasy but we have managed to find this marvellous little place hidden away in the back streets. Where you can even get Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays "Maybe its because I'm a Londoner"' and spending four days on the tarmac at Lutton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried Watneys sandwiches and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are vomiting and throwing up on the plastic flowers and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland waiting to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can pick you up on the tarmac at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac until six because of unforeseen difficulties, i.e. the permanent strike of the Air Traffic Control in Paris, and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at eight, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing Enterovioform tablets and queuing for the toilets and when you finally get to the hotel there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet, and half the rooms are double-booked and you can't sleep anyway!"


[The above represents famous British world-traveller and food connoisseur Eric Idle delivering a succinct description of the pleasures of travel.]


Anyhow, instead of Spain for the sunbathers and Thailand for the filthy pricks, hordes of Western Europeans have descended on Brazil, where many of the pleasures they absolutely insist upon may also be found.
Kroket, frikandel, tinned peas, and decent patat frites.
Plus chicken tikka masala or vindaloo.
And Whatney's Red Barrel.

It's just like home.


This year is very different indeed. It's the World Cup.
There will be no exploiting the locals at all.
Instead, it's the other way around.

Would you like fries with that?


AFTER WORD

I am actually extraordinarily fond of Dutch fast-food.
Frikandel with hot mustard, for instance.
As well as frites with mayo.



Tinned peas, not.
Bugger the peas.



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