Roses, painting and chicken nuggets.

Because it's a bank holiday overhere and lovely weather and Simone had to work, I bought her flowers to cheer her up :-)

I also wanted to surprise her by painting the shed. This is before.

This is after. Nice!

In the evening Milan and I made us all chicken nuggets.

Good stuff!

Valentine's day

I saw these 2 watches when we went shopping this morning. I like the right one very much.

I took Simone, Larissa and Milan out for Valentine's dinner and Simone took her mother along. We went to a resto where you go and have your food cooked fresh and take it back to your table. It's perfect for dinner with kids who are picky when it comes to food. It's also very fun I think. Food was yummy too. The only thing is that people need to leave the table all the time. Nevertheless I had a great time here and I think the others did, too :-)

My dessert.

Visiting Raymond & Joyce

After a good and long sleep Corinne and I went out for breakfast. We had a few hours before she had to catch her train back home and going out for breakfast is just an incredibly relaxing way to start the day.

This was my breakfast. Awesome! Bit much though ;-)

After dropping Cori off I took a train to see Raymond and Joyce. I see them only a few times a year but it's always fun! It's funny how effortless you can stay in touch with certain people. I've known them for ehmm.. 15 years now? Shees I'm getting old ;-)

This is their dog Amor. She's a doll. And very well behaved as well, for a girl ;-)

Raymond showed me a cooking device I hadn't seen before. This is to smoke your salmon in. It cooks the salmon as well but not very hot. You put some wood shavings in the bottom and it makes smoke. Was very nice! And I learned about a new cooking tool :-)

I brought a bottle of pink champagne with me.

All professional... ;-)

When I got back at Central Station they were just putting up this year's Christmas tree. It looks like somebody took a bite out of it!

The tail light

It started raining yesterday and it's still raining as I'm writing this in the evening. It rained all-fucking-day.

In the afternoon I went to my car to look at a few new things I wanna do. One of them is take out the rear lights and remove some rust around the opening. They did a shit job when they re-painted my car (before I bought it) and just left the lights in. It doesn't look good and rust is bad so it needs some TLC.

I cooked meatballs in the evening and....

... Kale!

This is the end result: A wonderful kale and potato mash, meatball and sausage. The mash was nice and creamy and the meatball soft and tasty. Job well done!

Meet Hacker

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This big little guy is Hacker. It's my boss' dog. I can't remember the breed but he's beautiful.

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Hacker likes biting in things including hands that want to pet him. He's still got his razor sharp baby teeth though so I gave up after a few tries. He was also very interested in my lunch hehe.

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Colleagues were getting instructions on how to put out a fire.

After a boiling hot tram ride home I went to the supermarket. The line-up was huge. I wonder if that's because it was cool inside...

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Another rose popped open.

And I just wanna say how great it is to cook with these pans. Potatoes boiling at the bottom, green beans steaming in the top. Awesome.

Meat balls!

This is my 8 year old laptop. It's rather a useless object just good enough for gathering dust unless... you are about to open a shop and just need it for streaming music and web browsing! So I have re-installed it and will give it to Nicole.

I felt like cooking so I made meat balls. They were actually very nice. I really should buy some apple sauce. God I love meat balls with apple sauce :-)

I also steamed some green beans. Very nice. I'm so glad I found out about steaming veggies.

And to not make it all toooo healthy I added over fries.

Bon apetit!

The dinner

I had invited Marjolein, Nantko and Gerrit over for dinner tonight. The only thing missing still were most ingredients and a steaming pan. So first things first, I went out to get me a steaming pan. The morning had been quite nice so far but as soon as i stepped outside it started pissing down...

Finally just after noon I had everything I needed and i started working. I started with 2 mini caramel-chocolate tarts.

The rest of the day I spent on an awesome fennel-tomato soup. In the evening I also made roast potatoes, steamed veggies and steaks.

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Nantko, Gerrit and Marjolein, each with their steak.

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My dinner. The steaks were 12 euro's each and I didn't have a good track record when it came to baking steaks. This one however was very nice!

The dinner was lovely and the company great. Afterwards we went to the pub.

The fantastic elastics were playing. They were fantastic indeed.

This was a very well spent day!

Rings: Off.

The view from my window today. The weather turned every hour. Dark, light, dark, light and dark again. Not happy with that...

I cooked for myself again today. That hasn't happened for about 2.5 months... Today I realised that the ONLY thing I take off my rings for is...

... making meat balls!

They went for a swim in nice hot butter. I also made a chili con carne which is in desperate need of more spice...

The Teriyaki.

I went to my old work this morning for a chat about work. it was fruitful but still early stages. More next week.

I cooked Teriyaki for dinner. It turned out quite nice.

In the evening i went to Mulligans. I was very tired and the music wasn't the best...

Simon and cake

In the morning Simon came to check our cars. He has a little mobile garage service.

In the back is this ancient piece of equipment that can be used to check old engines. It's not of much use anymore because these days cars have digital controlled engines and there is no standardisation across manufacturers unfortunately.

The engine of our little car. Not quite the Chevy big block...

The brakes inside the back wheel.

In the afternoon Nicole made a cake, A rather super delicious cake I must say!

Half the kitchen table was full with ingredients.

In the meantime it's got really cold outside: 15C.

And so much for cleaning yesterday. Last night's and todays bad weather dropped even more leaves in front of our door than there were before...

Here's Nicole with the finished cake, all proud and so she should be.

A single piece of heaven. For more info on the cake check Nicole's blog.