Grateful for Trash Day

Den Haag, Nederlands

Today is our once a week "rubbish collection" and we have never been so grateful for a trash day. It's the day when I bound out of bed, run down the "ladders", and happily take out our very smelly refuse.

There are no cans outside, no cans in a garage, and the seagulls get into our trash if we leave it out on our tiny porch. Hence, we usually have very smelly trash by the time collection rolls around every week.

On Monday night, a day I like to call Trash Day Eve, I scour the flat for things to throw away. Nearly finished box of cereal. Adios! Almost empty jar of pickles. See ya! 1/16 left in the Aveda Color Enhancing shampoo bottle. Tot ziens! I just cannot take the risk of those emptying in the middle of the week.

Of course, people on the street must think I am strange (like most of my friends already do). I will surreptitiously throw a chicken bone in the public rubbish bin on my way to the store if I know it is going to be a long time between pickups.

A few more things that strike me as different when you stay in the Netherlands:

• No recycling pickup - Paper is picked up once a month but other than that, you are on your own should you choose to recycle. This is a typical Dutch solution. The economics and environmental impact are debatable if municipalities pick it up curbside. Dutch solution: easy-to-empty bins (for trucks that is) at select locations around town.
• Deposit bottles go to the store - there is a large deposit on some bottles (EUR 0.25). Shaw's in Massachusetts has these sorts of machines although the small deposit makes it less tempting. The machine prints a ticket that you take to the cashier for a refund. I cannot figure out which ones are deposit and which ones are not, yet.
• Al Cans Don't Recycle? - I have not figured out where to take the few aluminum cans we have. At the recycling center I only see glass and paper. I have not seen any plastic either now that I think about it by the city hall says there are places to deposit those recyclables as well. Also no steel can (e.g., soup cans) recycling
• Plastic bags - Small plastic bags, the current scourge of humanity, are still widely available at the grocery and retail stores for free, unlike what I saw in Germany. Most people opt to purchase a reusable, heavier-grade bag of rice paper or plastic for a nominal charge. I don't see a lot of people with the designer bags that you see in the States and other places. My Gucci, collapsible bag certainly makes me standout.

A bit of regulation at the expense of marketing would probably make sense here as well as in the United States. The banks of the Maas river were covered with plastic bags and I have seen them skimming the bags out of the moat in front of the iconic parliament building.

My uncle told me a good idea: all packaging of a particular type should be the same color. For example, all food plastic should be brown, all heavy-grade cleaning plastic blue, all glass brown, etc. That way it could be easily sorted by machine. Apparently, glass is not worth very much when the colors get mixed. These days there are people who sort this glass by hand as it flies by on a conveyor. Yikes!

Comic: Grounded in Holy Water

Den Haag, Nederland

Thanks to my friend John for leading me to xkcd.com. Lot's of fun stuff. Electrical engineering nerds will especially like this circuit diagram. Check out the electric eel component. Hilarious!

Have fun!

Article: David Brooks on the Composure Class - The New Yorker

's-Gravenage, Nederland

It will come as no surprise that I am an ardent fan of David Brooks and just about anything he writes. I try to repeat what he writes as often as possible to sound smart, hoping that other people have not also read his column.

He has a smart-sounding-enablement article in the New Yorker this week. It is worth a read if you have twenty minutes to spare. An easy to read story (as only the New Yorker can deliver), it surveys a lot of cognitive science research that has been going on over our lifetimes. Though, keep your should-be-skeptical-of-liberal-narrative-journalism guard up, he does make a few leaps.

A few of my favorite lines:

• People generally overestimate how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them a series of miracles. The coincidences gave their relationship an aura of destiny.
• According to research by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others, the daily activities most closely associated with happiness are social—having sex, socializing after work, and having dinner with friends.
• Human beings are overconfidence machines. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.

Don't worry if you don't have time to read it. I'll be sure to tell you all about it the next time I see you and try to pass it off as my own.

"No-Work Bread" My A##

s'Gravenhage, Nederland

For many reasons, most behavioral economists would advise me not to date Maggie. Chief among those reasons, she has a brother-in-law who is amiable, cooks well, is handy, and has a solid job. He also manages to stay in shape (I should have packed it in as soon as I learned this). To underscore his awesomeness, the last time we visited Portland, out of nowhere, he baked a delicious loaf of bread for us to eat as a snack (while no one was looking, I ate the whole loaf as a defensive measure). I decided then that I too would make delicious bread from scratch as a nonchalant gesture for guests and loved ones.

Hence, when I arrived in the Hague and found that there are few bakeries and very little good bread on hand, it was the ideal time to try my hand at baking a loaf of bread. Unfortunately, the standing mixer our apartment is furnished with is the sort of thing you would find at a Walgreen's next to the “As Seen on TV” shelf. For this reason, a recipe that did not require a lot of kneading was particularly attractive. The recipe I decided to try was Jim Lahey's “No Knead” or Mark Bittman's “No-Work” bread. Apparently, this recipe was something of a fad three or four years ago. No matter, being late to a fad has never deterred me before (check out my new jeggings).

This became a sort of white whale/white loaf obsession for me. First of all, none of my loaves have been “No-Work.” After the second rise, I ended up with dough that can only be equated with floury Jello. It was so soft, sticky, and unruly, I practically had to use a funnel to get it into the preheated Dutch oven. The cotton cloth I covered the loaf with during the second rise had to be tossed because it had become one with a third of the dough. Flour and raw dough ended up everywhere (it's a wonder that any dough actually made it into the pot).

The maddening part of all this is, that given the recentness of the “No Knead” bread fad, there are tons of videos where preschoolers are making these nice, effortless dough balls and having fantastic results totally unlike the dough I made.

Loaf after loaf I have had the same result. I tried less water, more water, more yeast, less flour, more salt, more flour and everything in between (I am an engineer after all). We also now own a silicone baking mat, a scale, and a pastry scraper. It got to the point where I decided I needed to buy a Stroud enameled, cast iron Dutch oven for EUR 300. Maggie talked me down from that ledge.

More loaf pictures here

After much soul-searching and cathartic kitchen cleaning, I went to my mother's for Christmas unfulfilled in my quest to equal Maggie's brother-in-law in this one dimension. Out of habit, I decided to make a loaf of bread to have around my mother's house. I bought King Arthur Flour, the brand you see eight-year-olds using in all those YouTube videos, and some Fleishmanns instant yeast. Eureka! The dough came out nice and tight, baked into this delicious crusty loaf. It also left easy cleanup for my mom when she got home from work.

It turns out, if you compare the KAF all-purpose to the flours you get here in the Netherlands, it has about 13.4 grams of protein per hundred grams of all-purpose flour compared to the 11% in the all-purpose I get from Albert Heijn. That is 20% more protein, and I am told it will give your loaf much more shape and rise. Also, my mother's oven gets a lot hotter than my oven at home. Unfortunately, Maggie was not around to sample my accomplishment.

Maggie will be so delighted when I bake up a crusty loaf of bread even if I did not bring back that pair of high heels she needs for work. Or so I thought. Then I did what any boyfriend desperate to prove he has skills would do: I brought back 2 kg of flour and left behind all of that other stuff she wanted me to bring back to the Netherlands. 

After cooking about 15 loaves of bread, here are the biggest takeaways I have:

• Don't attempt to make bread at home – Bread is one of those things where economies of scale matters. I doubt that you could ever break-even, economically speaking, on the cost of baking a loaf of bread at home. Especially after you buy a the silicone mat, enameled cookware, and  steam-injected oven.
• Use King Arthur Flour - or something with high protein content. Yeast breads are not a big thing in the Netherlands and there is a scarcity of good flour. At the Safeway back in the States they have a whole aisle dedicated to flour and baking needs. Here, in The Hague, there is a half of a shelf with only two flour options (white or whole wheat).
• Measure your flour on a scale – There is about 125 g all-purpose flour per cup of flour. By weighing it you'll get a lot more precision.
• Use parchment paper – This will save you a ton of clean up time.
• Get a hot oven and an oven thermometer - We are lucky to have a "full size" oven in our apartment. Most of our friends do not. Hence, Dutch "ovens", which sit on your stove-top. Our oven's maximum temperature is about one dot above 200C (400F). For the no-knead bread or most pizza doughs, you want hot ovens from 450 F and up.
• Find a mate with an untalented brother-in-law

I have made a loaf since arriving from the States. The dough was neither as manageable nor the crust as tasty as the one I made at my mother's. Certainly not worth worth leaving those high heels behind in her eyes. I am back to the the drawing board on the effortless loaf but I have enjoyed the quest so far.

Let me know if you have any baking tips or other suggestions for me to prove that I am a keeper. I think I will move onto something else. I might be a natural wooden clog dancer.  

Gelukkig nieuwjaar! (Happy New Year!)