Today I went on another food finding mission. I like to try new recipes and I'm mostly attracted to "exotic" stuff, so very often I find myself roaming the many Asian, Turkish, Surinamese, etc. supermarkets trying to find some infamous ingredient for yet another cooking experiment. I love these food finding missions, it is so much fun to browse these stores and look at ingredients I have never heard of and have no idea how to cook! I love how you can buy pretty much everything in Rotterdam, it's one of the best things about this city.
Anyway, so today I was on a mission to find
Ras al-Hanout and vine leaves and I found myself at Ali Baba (i.e. the local Turkish/Moroccan supermarket). And lo and behold, what do I see on the spices & herbs shelf? BAKING SODA. I was so excited I almost squealed and did a happy dance. I have been looking for baking soda everywhere, and the Ali Baba was pretty much the last place I had expected to find it, but they have it! And I wasn't even specifically looking for it today! Just goes to show that you will always find things when you are actually looking for something else...
Now all you Americans might think, baking soda? What's so special about baking soda? Well, it basically doesn't exist in the Netherlands. I'm not sure if it's just an American thing or more widespread, but either way, in this country, we don't use baking soda and it's pretty much impossible to find. Whereas in a lot of recipes for baking I find online (I mostly look at American sites as they are far more extensive than Dutch recipe sites, and by far I mean the from here to Sydney type of far), baking soda is an essential ingredient. It's very frustrating. So when I very unexpectedly found baking soda at the supermarket, it was the highlight of my day. I wonder what it says about my life that I get excited about baking soda... :D
By the way, in the Netherlands an Asian or Surinamese store is called a
toko, which apparently is the Malaysian/Indonesian word for "store" and is obviously a remnant of colonial times. I wonder how long it will take before we start calling the Polish stores
sklep?
Incidentally,
sklep is also the only word I know in Polish and I am really pleased I can finally use it in conversation. :D