Kids loved us,
loved our food
July 8, 2008
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Chef Paul says ‘Eat your pumpkin RotiRol’
Lucky Mi, purveyor of in-situ snacks, enjoyed its new-kid-on-the-block status and dished up some Surinamese fusion food in our spanking new snack laboratory at the Zuidoost Kwakoe Festival this weekend. We dodged tropical size raindrops, gave the lab its first ever test-run, and were ultimately quite popular amongst the under-sevens.
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Raoul and Paul wait for the rain to subside while the gameboyz get physical discussing the children’s menu.
Not wanting to waste one drop of local expertise, we put the gaggle of charming chilluns straight to work advising us on our Kinder Menu for next week. It will be called the Lucky PiKind and will likely consist of a tiny pom croquette, a teensie pakora-tje, & a banana beignet called bakabanaantje. Pikin means small or pequeño in Surinamese. The kids think the menu should cost € 1. We don’t agree.
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Lucky mouth model Jeevan tucks into a pumpkin Hofwijkse Roti Rol, his first taste of pumpkin ever.
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and Daniele moderates the discussion of the child’s menu
The Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking Snacklab will be at the Kwakoe Festival each weekend until the 10th of August. The Kwakoe Festival is a perfect family activity where happily playing children will amuse themselves into the wee hours of the night whilst adults enjoy adult things.
debra at 22:09 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Butternut Brutalism
July 1, 2008
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Upon returning to the new kitchen garden the next day, I felt that the parcel along the fence just wasn’t speaking to me and I traded her in for the plot next door. Giddy with the even newer digs, I noticed what I had failed to see the day before, namely, useful in-situ building materials, in the form of cement curbing at the entrance to the drive. Imagining them to be perfect for fashioning raised beds, I started moving the blocks to the newer, sunnier allotment with the intention of quickly lego-ing some brutalism for my utopian permaculture kitchen garden.
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Turns out these blocks of béton brut were filled with a gooey, dark-matter centre and weighed in just a few grams shy of 75 kilos a piece. I was able to teeter-walk 18 of the gravity absorption buzz-killers over to the parcel, trying to experience the exercise as a meditation. I failed miserably in this endeavour. The entire raison d’être of raised beds is that they’re supposedly physically easier to deal with, but at this stage of the design and realisation, the pain-in-the-ass factor was dipping deeply into the negative. It was time to suck up and summon up some friendly muscle for the positioning of the blocks.
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It took Oumar and me all of the next day to raise the beds, but the job was so absorbing and transformative that we neglected to go to two art & design exam shows and two separate adult birthday parties! Landscaping and gardening are easily as addictive as crack, watching television and urban planning. Just let’s do another block.
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- Strangely associated links to this entry:
debra at 13:19 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us
New digs in the polder circle
June 26, 2008
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As of yesterday I became a multinational allotment holder. These are my new digs at Amsterdam Noord, a 7 minute bike ride from my flat, a 3 minute ferry ride from the mainland, and 4 steps off the ferry. Although the parcel seems to have some extreme shade, soil compaction and charm issues, the upside is that it’s close enough that I can garden in my pyjamas, which is known to decrease stress. Now that I have 2 allotments 1.400 kilometers apart, I can neglect them both equally.
In real life this allotment is part of Toine Klaasen’s Reserve / Reservaat at Young Designers and Industry HQ. Klaasen divided the 500m2 of virtually unused garden into 24 allotments and doled them out to us artsy-fartsy types as personal space. What this ultimately means is that I can potter in my pyjamas and that I will unlikely create kafuffles with my Permaculture Plus gardening style.
Upon arriving yesterday I dispensed with the observation phase required in permaculture and dove directly into the occupation phase, planting butternut squash and purple basil seedlings. Today I’ll get started sowing my beloved green manures and investigate what it will take to install some raised beds in September. The only abundant in-situ building material for the beds seems to be 20×20 cement tiles and I think that 20 cm high beds can’t in all honesty be referred to as ‘raised’.
- Toine Klaasen’s Reservaat at Young Designers and Industry - in Dutch unfortch!
debra at 14:44 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
