Food

Once Google Maps becomes so important to the survival of restaurants it ceases to be a useful tool and becomes a thing to be gamed.

I get started late after jetlag keeps me up between 2-5am. Then when I finally catch sleep, it’s time to rise and leave. The Fitbit clocks me at 3h47m of sleep.

Not sure how many people know that this kind of deep data modelling is possible to do in Notion. I love tools with a high skill-cap and Notion is definitely one such.

Many chefs I know get upset at me when I tell them this. But this is the truth: If you can’t cook everything you make in a microwave thats a skill issue.

Looks like food waste and food security are going to be very important going forward.

The lamb ad does a good job showing the madness that is online comments sections. Also it made me want to eat a nice piece of lamb.

There was a brief period where Foursquare based recommendations were good and drawn from your wider social graph. Now we’ve gone back to Yelp and Google Maps where reviews and ratings don’t mean anything. A lower than 4 star review on GMaps has netted me a cease-and-desist e-mail for defamation.

So I felt I couldn’t really bring myself to do Advent of Code this year since I have more than enough other things to do (and watch and play) and with work and the kids, it’s always pretty miserable to keep up.

I painstakingly built a bespoke Rust web application to host the Cuppings venue data and to add Google place_ids to almost 2000 Foursquare location. That’s been done for a while now but now we have the announcement of Foursquare open sourcing their location dataset.

I don’t really know where to find a Honeycrisp apple locally, but since moving to Germany I have been eating tons of amazing juicy, sweet, crisp apples. It turns out that this is deliberate and these are not the apples of my childhood.

Coffee is already incredibly under pressure due to climate change. The last thing it needs is well meaning but harmful legislative burdens from the EU.

Coming from an area in the center of Turkey where water was always scarce, it’s not really possible to be surprised by this development. Though if you talk to people locally of course many of them will continue to deny deveolpments because they have no other option.

Lovely bit about the broodje kroket and about Dutch colonial history.

A bit ostensibly about a rice cooker but in fact much more about post-war architecture and social relations in Japan.

Foursquare is responsible for an inordinate amount of good times I’ve had, it still powers @cuppings and I’m still pleased that we got it to launch in Amsterdam as its first international city.

A lovely and long history of Nespresso a coffee I’ve hated to drink but it’s still been better than many alternatives.

The types of resistance available to women are particularly interesting: They themselves understand their daily tasks — the upkeep of their homes and the care of their families — as a form of steadfast resistance.

Pizza toast and all kinds of toasties are a staple here with small kids which seems to imply that an odyssey through Japan like Craig Mod undertakes here could be a great idea.

“Drinking has to be against the rules for taking a drink to be breaking the rules. Only a Muslim can know how good that tastes.”

Not surprising that those things at the MIT Media Lab that looked too good to be true, were in fact fake.

Oatley is by far our favorite plant based milk and I’m glad to read that they are seeing explosive growth (also animal milk consumption in the Netherlands has already dropped 14%).

Farmers are forced to be taught in a “reeducation camp”to use their mobile phones to monitor the status in the greenhouse including CO2, light strength, soil temperature, etc.

There is another dirty secret behind the German switch to alcohol-free beers: German beers just aren’t that good. I prefer any major foreign beer (Heineken, Carlsberg, 1664, etc.) over most beers you can buy here.

A well written defense by Markthalle IX in Berlin that sounds good but still paints a much more rosy picture of reality than is justified. Let’s be totally clear: removing the ALDI will advance the area’s socio-economic cleansing.

I finally got the chance of trying out the McB, McDonald’s new ecological burger tonight after a visit to the opera.

Here are my notes from a couple of weeks of drinking coffee in Tokyo on a fact finding mission for Cuppings. With Cuppings we try to give you a guide of the best coffee places around the world based on our personal tastings. Some notable locales are still not as well represented as they should be. London and New York have their own excellent guides for coffee with Oliver Strand’s Coffee App and the London Coffee Map. Tokyo is one place that I thought we should fill in.

A new coffee place had reportedly opened up in the area and I went out searching for it. Concierge is tucked into a gate on Paul-Lincke-Ufer and they are really nice guys pulling quality shots. It is amazing both that this part of Berlin which was quite barren when it comes to coffee is shaping up so nicely and also that

I just read the double interview in Amsterdam Weekly with Johannes van Dam and Undercover Glutton. It is a lovely interview and their combined knowledge of food is certainly impressive. What I am a bit less impressed with is their knowledge of metropolitan cuisine. At one point in the interview van Dam extolls the culinary variety in Amsterdam and there I must take offense. I have traversed the city far and wide and I have come up empty more often than not for many a dish. Eventually I gave up and moved to warmer culinary climes.

I witnessed a discussion yesterday that stated that for creative industries to catch root in a certain area there is the need for trendy coffee shops. While that is a necessary condition indeed, it is not sufficient. The coffee produced in said shops also needs to be of excellent quality or at least miles better than whatever most stores in the Netherlands are pouring. The lovely folks over at BERG also have a post about it.

I was already in the habit of starting my mornings drinking the best coffee in Amsterdam at Stumptown and would regularly chat with the mayor. After planning some morning meetings there, getting an early start, drinking great coffee and having a good conversation with people you’d normally not talk to, proved to be a good idea.

Via Johan Schaap kwam ik op het spoor van een popup store van Stumptown Coffee Roasters hier in Amsterdam op de Albert Cuyp (4sq).

Net bij de supermarkt geweest voor ingrediënten om Robby Rodriguez’s recept te maken.

Ik hou van veel en lekker eten en ik merk dat ik daarmee in het buitenland beter terecht kan dan in Amsterdam. Hier een paar restaurant-tips die voor mij in Amsterdam ontbreken en waarvan ik denk dat ze weleens een succes kunnen worden.

Veelgemaakte fout in het ervaringsontwerp en gevoelsmatig goed passend bij de faculteit bouwkunde.

My friendly neighborhood night store will gladly give me a plastic bag for every item of shopping I buy from them 1. This is pretty thoughtful and at the same time also pretty short-sighted. Now there seem to be some places in the world that have banned plastic bags though I’m not sure which ones. It is a pretty contentious issue. It seems to be difficult or something but it’s not exactly clear why that is. We’re one of the technically most advanced societies in the world and we can’t live without plastic bags?

Het is in Prenzlauerberg altijd fijn wakker worden met goede koffie, broodjes en kranten binnen handbereik.

Een tijdje geleden had ik een site gezien met de Lavazza 2008 kalender “The Most Majestic”erop met exuberante koninklijke dames die Lavazza espresso drinken geschoten door Finlay Mackay 1 2.

Vrienden die komen eten is fijn. Eten, drinken en gesprekken.

Hier nog even de foto’s van de tacos van laatst. Het was erg lekker maar het kan nog verbeterd. Foto’s maken terwijl je aan het koken bent is niet handig.

Hier het recept uit de video. Ik heb een Engelse transcriptie gevonden die ik gebruikt heb. Mijn recept met meer Detail in het Nederlands en met metrieke maten.

Vandaag de geest gekregen om voor het eerst in tijden weer te koken. In de stress met afstuderen, kwam het er niet echt meer van. Doordeweeks is eten in combinatie met capoeira ook niet echt te doen. Dat komt meestal neer op een snel broodje vooraf en een stoommaaltijd erna tegen elven.

Het internet op de TU Delft is nog steeds om te huilen. Hier in de Aula ligt het er elke tien minuten uit.

Gisteren wezen eten bij de familie en mijn nichtje Dilara vond het raar dat ik niet wist wat een kanun is. Ik verwarde het even met de santur die ik kende uit Crossing the Bridge.

Gisteren mijn aansluiting met lijn 3 net gemist.

Waar kun je (=ik) in de Delftse binnenstad koffie drinken en gebruik maken van gratis WiFi?

Ik kreeg van Oliver pas de tip dat er in Delft een nieuw lunchcafé is geopend waar ze Portugese specialiteiten verkopen. Lunchcafé Vrij is een leuk klein zaakje op de Brabantse Turfmarkt (zie Iens & Dinnersite en openingsbericht).

Hiram heeft puur gelijk. En hij schrijft ook nog eens leuk. Wat wil je nog meer?