Kruidkoek

This is a typical Dutch recipe. It's somewhere between bread and cake, and people usually eat it with their breakfast, or with their tea or coffee.
It always seems to me that the Dutch cuisine had very little influence on the eating habits of the countries the dutch colonized, especially in comparison to countries like Spain and France... Except when it comes to cookies! Ofcourse this genuine Dutch recipe is embedded with Indonesian spices, so it's really a great example of some strong fusion cooking ;-)

Ingredients:
1 orange
250 gr raisins
4 ts cinnamon powder
2 ts coriander powder (a.k.a ketoembar)
2 ts ginger powder
1 ts nutmegg powder
1/2 ts clove powder
300 gr wholemeal flour
1 bag baking powder
250 gr dark brown castor sugar
1 egg
2 tbs kitchen syrup
200 ml milk
6 balls stem ginger, chopped

• Preheat the oven at 175 °C. Grease a cake mould (2 litres content). Wash the orange, grate the zest and squeeze out the juice. Heat the raisins and orange zest and juice and let cool a little bit.
• Mix the herbs in a bowl. Mix in the flour, baking powder and sugar. Break the egg over it, add syrup and milk, and stir everything to a smooth batter.
• Stir the ginger, raisins and juice through the batter. Pour the batter in the mould. Put the mould in the oven, a little bit under the middle. Bake the kruidkoek for about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
• Let the kruidkoek cool off for 10 minutes, and take it out of the mould. Let it cool off some more on a cake grill. Pack the kruidkoek in tinfoil and let it rest for a day.

To eat it you cut it in slices on which you put dairy butter.

Fig Bread

This recipe (for breadmachine) is coming from "Allerhande", a magazine from a supermarket chain in the Netherlands. It bakes one normal size bread.

Ingredients:
1 orange
250 gr dried figs
25 gr butter
500 gr wholemeal flour
10 gr salt
10 gr sugar
6 gr dry yeast
200 ml water

• Wash the orange, grate zest, and squeeze out the juice
• Cut the figs in fourths, bring to a boil with the orange juice, and let cool
• Put everything in the breadmachine in the way that is appropriate for your machine, and use the program for sweet bread to bake it

This is especially good with a blue cheese like gorgonzola!

Mexican Herb Mix

Because I have a lot of herbs, but usually no mixed herbs in the house, it's sometimes good to know what is in a mix when recipes refer to it.

Ingredients:
cumin seeds
coriander seeds (a.k.a cilantro)
black pepper
ginger powder
cayenne pepper
red bell pepper powder (a.k.a. paprika powder)
cinnamon powder (or cinnamon stick)

This is put together 'from the wrist'...
If you use everything from powders, just combine everything in a bowl and mix together.
In case you only have non-powder ingredients (or want an even tastier mix), dry roast everything that's not a powder, grind it, think of sunny things like drinking margheritas in a hammock on the beach, and mix everything together.