Last weekend I went to the best music festival in the Netherlands: Lowlands. I was excited to watch some of my favourite bands, like the Low Anthem, The National and Mumford and Sons play. But, you know, I’m getting older and must admit I was a little worried if I’d survive. More specifically, I was worried about falling asleep in the middle of a performance and not eating well. Not that I mind the latter so much for one weekend, but I didn’t want to spent the entire weekend either walking to, waiting in line for, or sitting on the toilet. You know, with the belly problems and all.

I figured that if I just made sure to start the day of with some powerful and healthy foods, I just might get rid of all my worries in one go. Of course that meant lots of tomatoes and water, but also my old pal granola bar, or, as I like to call him, Survival Bar.

These Survival Bars were originally inspired by these bars over at Smitten Kitchen. I’ve made some adjustments, like using only honey and no sugar and using oil instead of butter. I’ve made these several times and I’m going to give you the version I like best. But you can certainly adjust these to taste or diet preference and I’ll help you by saying when you can substitute.

They are great. They’re chuck full of fibres, for the toilet part, and other good stuff that give you energy, for the not-falling-asleep part. And best of all, they are delicious. It’s almost a miracle.

And I made it through the festival, happily. I survived.

Survival Bars
adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Ingredients:

• 165 g quick rolled oats
• 50 g oat flour
• 50 g oat bran (or wheat bran)
• 100 g cranberries (or other dried fruit, or mix of dried fruit)
• 100 g pecans (or other nuts, or mix of nuts)
• 50 gram pumpkin seeds (or other seeds or mix of seeds)
• 50 g unsweetened coconut flakes (or more bran)
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon cinnamon
• 75 ml vegetable or nut oil
• 150 g honey
• 1 tablespoon water

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C (350 degrees F) and line a brownie pan with parchment paper.
2. Stir together the dry ingredients.
3. In a separate bowl, stir together the wet ingredients (oil, honey and water).
4. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry, until all the dry ingredients are somewhat wet.
5. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and press it in firmly with the back of a spoon.
6. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until it’s brown around the edges and golden on top.
7. Let cool completely before cooling further in the fridge for about 30 minutes.
8. Now you can easily cut the Survival Bar into small Survival Bars of your desired size.

Two weeks ago I spent the weekend with friends at sea, in my friend Gert’s parents house. I caught up with those friends from college whom I mentioned before. When the rain stopped coming down, we had a BBQ, followed by a walk to the beach.

I strolled around with one of my friends, watching two others jump into the cold water and looking for jellyfishes on the beach while cracking seaweed. It was very calming and nice, jacket around my shoulders and the wind in my hair. Afterwards we made ourselves smell BBQ-ed by sitting in front of a cracking fire, beers in hand, for the rest of the evening.

But I don’t have a BBQ recipe to share. My mum spent that same weekend at sea too, with family, and visited a fishing sort of festival from where she brought a recipe. It was in a brochure about fish and the health benefits of eating and the ease of cooking fish. This recipe caught my eye because of the mango in the mix. It’s real nice in combination with the fish and vegetables. And the dressing for this dish is especially good.

I changed some small things, like serving it with whole grain rice (which is a combination of rice, barley, wheat and wild rice) and swapping the sugarsnaps for peas. I also added in some parsley for a herbal note. I liked this a lot. I don’t eat rice very often, for one reason or another, but given that I basically stopped eating potatoes, it’s great to rediscover a worthy substitute.

Stir-fried cod with mango
If your rice takes a different amount of time to cook, start sooner or later with that part of the preparation. Look into that before starting.

Ingredients:

• 100 g frozen peas
• 300 g atlantic cod (kabeljauw)
• 1 mango
• 3 spring onions
• 150 g (whole grain) rice
• 3 el extra virgin olive oil
• 1 lemon
• 1 el ginger syrup
• 2 el oyster sauce

Directions:

1. Cook the frozen peas for about 4 minutes, until they’re just cooked and still crunchy.
2. Sprinkle the cod with the juice of half the lemon and let sit while you cut the mango and spring onions.
3. Cut the mango and spring onions into pieces of about 2 cm.
4. Cut the cod into pieces of about 3 cm.
5. Cook the (whole grain) rice for 8 minutes while you continue with the rest of the preparation.
6. Heat the oil in a wok pan and stir-fry the cod on high heat for about 3 minutes.
7. Add the spring onions and fry for about a minute.
8. Add the mango and peas and fry while you assemble the dressing.
9. Mix the juice of the other half of the lemon with the ginger syrup and the oyster sauce and add to the pan.
10. Continue to heat for about 2 minutes.
11. Add the cooked rice and stir everything together.
12. Enjoy!

This is going to be a quick one. Not only the preparation of this delicious salad, but also this post. I’ve written enough in the last one and now it’s time to return to the good stuff.

Like this here salad. It all started with a galia melon on sale at the grocery store (it’s amazing that in the short lifespan of this blog, this is the third recipe that starts with something being on sale). I took it home, only to realise that I find them too sweet to eat plain.

The well-known, but equally delicious combination with Prosciutto di Parma came to mind and I decided to turn it into a salad. With two pronounced flavours already on the plate, I figured the rest should stay a bit neutral.

Assorted salad greens (I used a combination of arugula, Swiss Chard and lollo rossa) give the salad some crunch and spice. Diced cucumber make this salad extra fresh and gives it some body without distracting from the two highlights. All it needs now is a bit of kick from half a squeezed lime and a bit of olive oil.

This is a great summer salad, with only fresh flavours, fruity and salty, easy and quick to put together. Serve it with warm bread on the side and you have yourself a great dinner to take outside. Or to enjoy inside, because the weather is bad.

Melon Prosciutto Salad
Serves 2

Ingredients:

• 150 g assorted salad greens
• half a galia melon
• half a cucumber
• 80 g Prosciutto di Parma
• half a lime
• 1 tablespoon good extra virgin olive oil
• salt and pepper, to taste

Directions:

1. Put the leaves in a big bowl.
2. Slice the cucumber, cut the slices in quarters and throw them in the bowl.
3. Scoop small balls (or well, pieces) of melon with an ice cream scoop or just a spoon and throw them in the bowl.
4. Rip the prosciutto in pieces of desired size and throw them in the bowl.
5. Squeeze half a lime (or alternatively, the juices of the melon) into the bowl.
6. Add the olive oil, salt and pepper to taste and stir everything together.
7. Divide between two platters and serve.

Yes, I’m still here. And it certainly wasn’t my intention to be absent for so long. But you know, things happen. Let’s start at the beginning: two weeks ago I made a great salad from a cookbook I picked up at a flea market. I wrote about it, took great photo’s of it outside (you know, considering the thing is a phone) then figured I should ask for permission to publish the recipe. After a week, they told me I couldn’t publish it.

So I moved on. My birthday was (at that moment) a week away and cupcake recipes needed to be tested. I stuffed my brothers with an assortment of strawberry cupcakes, which came out too sour or too soggy, proving to me once again that simply doing the conversion doesn’t do the trick. Ingredients over here are different from those in the States and tweaking is needed.

Which doesn’t mean I had well tweaked cupcakes at my birthday party, oh no. I wasn’t happy with any of the strawberry cupcakes I tried, so I picked one out of my go to muffin-mini-book and made raspberry cupcakes. They came out quite good I think, since they were all gone when the party was over. I also made this cake, but I didn’t have the time to try it out, and although it looked good, it was kind of soggy on the inside, so yet again, tweaking needed.

My brownies were by far the most popular and also the only recipe that is tried and tested and also almost self-written. I’ll share with you soon, when I have photographs to accompany. Because no, there aren’t any photographs of that evening. It’s insane. The garden looked so pretty with all the lights hanging in the bushes, the table full of colourful treats with tiny flags peaking out, chequered paper plates and cheerful people.

The next day, I had an egg for breakfast. Immediately afterwards I didn’t feel so well, so I lied down, and when I woke up, the horror began. I’ll spare you the details and just tell you what the doctor told me the next day: food poisoning. So yeah, that was new. The worst was over at that point, but I was still nauseous and wasn’t hungry at all (which was kind of a weird experience, because I can always eat). I didn’t eat all day. I just slept.

The day after that, yesterday, was my actual birthday. No cake for me. Luckily, I could eat that day, but it surely wasn’t a feast. We were supposed to go out for dinner with friends and family, which I would’ve loved.

(You see how much better this photograph is? That’s because my boyfriend made it and he’s awesome. Go check it out.)

I was really happy to be able to eat something that day and think about food and look at it without feeling sick, because I got these great books I’ve been wanting forever and hadn’t been able to even look at them. I spent my birthday curled up in the couch reading these books and they made me happy. They were just what I needed at this point in my life.

Because next to not paying as much attention to food as I should’ve been, my stomach has been bothering me for quite a while now. But it wasn’t until last week that I finally went to see the doctor to tell him about my (long running) stomach problems, and how I was banning more and more foods from my diet because they all upset my stomach. Weird actually, because it has been two years since meat gave me my first problems and I’ve been adjusting ever since, but apparently you even get used to an upset stomach.

The doctor immediately thought I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but there were some tests to be done to make sure it wasn’t anything else. The results weren’t in when I got that food poisoning, so for a few scary hours I thought these things were related and there might be something serious going on. Luckily, all the test results were good, so no infections, allergies or celiac disease. The food poisoning was just a freaky coincidence. So IBS it is. It’s good to know.

Although there will be lots of testing and adjusting, because there’s no cure or medicine and all you can do is chance your lifestyle (been wanting to do that) and your diet. Basically, you just have to live the healthy life: lots of exercise, fruit, vegetables and fibres. And keep track of what upsets your stomach. There are a few things that commonly react with a person with IBS, like cabbage, onions (nooo!) and sorbitol, but the rest is just up to you to figure out. I already know too much sugar isn’t working for me, as well as too much meat or fat, but I’m not nearly done analysing.

But I do feel re-inspired to eat well and natural by all this. Oddly enough, this food poisoning gave me time to think about (when it stopped making me feel sick) how little time I’ve spent cooking lately, and how that made me eat “bad” things and how that made my IBS be as bad as it was these past few weeks. And it also made me realise how much I really want to cook with good ingredients and time and attention. Those books gave me the final kick in the butt, by being a great example and I can’t wait to try tons of recipes. Starting tomorrow, because tonight it’s still soup. I’ll go from there.

These just came out of the oven. I’m eating one right now, sitting in the garden, enjoying the nice temperature and the cool breeze. The past couple of days have been so hot, it simply wasn’t an option to be outside. With 35 degrees C (95 degrees F) and no wind, the place to be was inside, with the windows and the blinds shut, where it was still sort of cool. Yesterday we had a bit of rain and lots of wind and today, it’s better. I can sit outside.

At the beginning of the week, I bought some Dutch blackberries. They had al sorts of berries 1 Euro off (and still expensive!), but all the others seemed to come from overseas, so I took home the blackberries. I planned to put them in something, but wasn’t quite sure what. Then it became too hot to cook anything and just eating them with some yoghurt seemed too plain. Today, as I remembered them and pulled them out of the fridge, three were already to far gone to use. It was time for some action.

I flipped through some cookbooks, found out one of them has the best summer recipes and I didn’t even know, but didn’t find a recipe I could use. The challenge here was that I didn’t want to wait for the supermarket to open and had to make do with what I had on hand. Also I decided I wanted to use spelt flour, so yeah… Thank god for the internet.

I came across this recipe, and decided to make them. I didn’t have any oranges, so I used yoghurt instead of the juice and left out the zest. I didn’t miss it at all, because the yoghurt, and quite possibly the applesauce, make these muffins very fresh and moist. I was actually quite surprised by it’s almost lemony freshness and how you can really taste the yoghurt. Perfect for a summers day.

Blackberry Spelt Muffins
adapted, with a few tweaks, from Whole Foods Market

Ingredients:

• 60 g butter, at room temperature
• 120 g raw cane sugar
• 80 g applesauce
• 2 eggs
• 120 g yoghurt
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 240 g spelt flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 300 g blackberries

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C (375 degrees F) and line 12 standard muffin cups with paper liners.
2. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, cream together butter and sugar.
3. Mix in applesauce, eggs, orange juice and vanilla.
4. In a seperate bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, zest and salt.
5. Stir flour mixture into butter-egg mixture until just combined.
6. Gently stir in the blackberries.
7. Spoon batter into muffin cups and bake until a toothpick inserted in the centre of a muffin comes out clean, 25-30 minutes.
8. Let cool completely or just a bit, take one outside and enjoy!