It’s winter
in the Netherlands. Food-wise this means green soup[1]
with cut-up wieners (from a jar) floating in it, doughnuts heavily veiled in icing sugar,
and . . . pears. Yes, the winter kitchen here in the Netherlands will either
kill you immediately or bore you to tears.
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| Dutch erwtensoep. Photo from www.maaltijdje.nl. |
Not wanting
to kill anyone, but needing a dessert, I settled on poached pears.
Then, because
I had not wasted enough time on the internet already today, I did some
research on coring pears. I
found the video below featuring a lady called Nina Pucillo who knows all about
coring pears and who informed me that coring pears is in fact “one of the
basics of cooking.”
She also noted
that while coring pears “sounds difficult,” it’s actually very easy. Making me
wonder who she has been trying to explain it to.
Then she said it was perfectly okay if I didn’t own a corer, because I could core my pears using a grapefruit
knife and grapefruit spoon.
Literal quote
from the video: “[A grapefruit knife] is what I started with when I started
coring pears.” When you started coring
pears? Like, as a hobby?
Plus, who
owns a grapefruit knife? And a grapefruit spoon? Or is this another “basic” of
cooking that I’ve been missing all my grown-up (sort of) life? I mean, I own
things called “knives” and things called “spoons.” I even have one specialist
knife. It’s called “bread knife.” Never in my wildest imagination did I ever
think anyone would ever even invent anything called “grapefruit knife,” let
alone suggest that it was somehow a more normal thing to own
than a corer.
By the way,
I also did a Google search for “grapefruit knife” and came up with
this image of what must be the deadliest kitchen knife there is. If you look
carefully you’ll see it’s serrated on both sides for maximum rippage.
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| And this is why we'll be having cereal. From Wikipedia. |
And then I decided to find out more about Nina Pucillo's company "Nina Cucina" and look what Google found:
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| Google search result for "Nina Cucina" |
I could get another whole post just out of the bizarro grammar of "where you learn't for cook healthy recipes" alone, but my favourite is the "Meet Our Medical Advisor" link, which I reckon just goes to show that you shouldn't be fooling around with a doubly-serrated grapefruit knife.
For this evening at least, we'll be eating around the cores.
[1] Pea soup, in Dutch spelled “erwtensoep.” Just try to pronounce that sucker. This must be one
of the most dreaded words a foreigner in the Netherlands will ever have to say.