Bol.com of the Netherlands and Belgium is carrying two of my books posted by Ruth Paget

Thank you Bol.com of the Netherlands and Belgium for carrying two of my chapbooks about Asia - China Hand and Eating Soup with Chopsticks.

Posted by Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Nourishing Waffles by Ruth Paget

Nourishing Waffles by Ruth Paget 

I learned that waffles, even toaster Eggo waffles, contain protein and calcium thanks to the egg and milk in their ingredients in my health and nutrition classes in junior high and high school in Detroit, Michigan where many descendants of Dutch origin live. 

According to Wonderful Mini Waffles by Catherine-Gail Reinhard and the editors at Dash, waffles are Dutch and came to what is now the United States in the 1620s when the Dutch founded New Amsterdam (later named New York). 

From New York, waffles spread throughout the US especially with Dutch settlers like my teachers and classmates in Detroit. My thin teachers told us to limit ourselves to two small waffles with two tablespoons maple syrup to keep calories down. (Maple syrup was readily available to us in Michigan.) 

When I moved to Europe in the late 1980s, I ate warm waffles with powdered sugar on them that I bought from street vendors in Brussels, Belgium as I toured comfortably well off Brussels that is rich on lambic beer and the income of Europe’s civil servants. 

Belgium is also a famous country for waffles thanks to the country’s Flemish population. The Flemish are the Catholic cousins of the Protestant Dutch north of Belgium. 

Waffles are easy to make at home with a waffle iron. You have to remember to only fill the bottom of the iron with batter. You lower the top lid on top of the base. The waffles ingredients will make the waffle rise to double its size with the heat.

I own an excellent cookbook that has recipes for both sweet and savory waffles (162 pages) that was written as a companion book to go with a Dash mini waffle iron (4-inches in diameter). The cookbook entitled Wonderful Mini Wafles, was written by Catherine-Gail Reinhard. Three sweet waffle recipes stand out to make this book a great purchase. 

The stand out recipes include: 

-classic recipes made with eggs, milk, flour, and batter (waffle batter is made with more butter than pancakes) 

-Belgian Liège waffles made like classic waffles with the addition of vanilla, honey, and cinnamon  

-banana bread waffles made with mashed bananas, buttermilk, and brown sugar 

Readers who might enjoy this book include: 

-young families 

-college students 

-baby sitters

-lacto-ovo vegetarians

For everything about sweet and savory waffles, Wonderful Mini Waffles by Christine-Gail Reinhard is an excellent purchase. 

(Note: To try waffles in Salinas, California check out Waffles Breakfast and Lunch Restaurant on North Main Street by Saigon Noodle and Grocery Outlet or IHOP on West Davis Road by Carl’s Junior, Sonic, Mountain Mike’s, Vallarta Supermarket and taqueria, 24-hour gas station, and AAA.)

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Pancake Supper Fundraising in Detroit, Michigan by Ruth Paget

Pancake Supper Fundraising by Ruth Paget 

I learned about pancake supper fundraising as a child when I attended pancake suppers at my family’s Baptist church in Detroit (Hazel Park), Michigan. 

The entire congregation came often with friends to eat pancakes and raise money for children’s programs. The cost was around $5 per person plus any voluntary extra donation in the 1960s and 1970s. 

The following items came with the pancake supper: 

-3 pancakes 

-3 packages of maple syrup (This was easily obtainable in Michigan.) 

-3 butter packages 

-a fruit salad for dessert 

-cold, sweetened iced tea

-lemon wedges, if requested 

-a silverware and napkin packet

Our church had a cafeteria-style kitchen where we would get a tray and be served our pancakes, fruit salad, and silverware packet. 

At lunch tables covered with paper tablecloths, servers would bring us our sweetened iced tea on trays to avoid spills. The fruit salad was low-calorie and pretty nutritious. 

 The fruit salad was made with the following items: 

 -canned, no-sugar-added mandarin orange sections with the can juice

 -fresh apple cubes 

-slices of fresh banana 

The fruit contained Vitamin C, and the pancakes made with milk and eggs contained protein and calcium. 

Sometimes the teen group would perform a skit from the Christmas play. Little children sang Sunday school songs. 

Pancakes cost very little to make, if made from scratch. Pancake fundraisers are profitable and easy fundraisers if organized well. Check if you need catering insurance to do this for your organization. 

I always enjoyed going to pancake suppers as a child in Detroit, Michigan and think these events might do well in the 2020s as well. 

(Note: Pancakes have their origin in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, but the Dutch are credited with creating their modern version.)

(In Salinas, California, you can sample many kinds of pancakes at IHOP on West Davis Road.)

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Interning with a Dutch Accountant by Ruth Paget

Interning with a Dutch Accountant by Ruth Paget 

When I moved to Detroit (Michigan) from the suburbs (Royal Oak), I attended a private Friends School (Quaker) my freshman year. 

The Quakers wanted Detroit’s nomenklatura kids (“We’re going to live on the parents’ auto stocks”) to do vocational training that would lead to jobs. We first took the Myers-Briggs Interest Inventory to find out what kinds of work skills we already had. 

I scored highly in quantitative and analytical skills with accountant listed as a good profession for me. I was mortified. I wanted to be an anthropologist, travel writer, and art historian. My smart Quaker teacher said, “Use math and analysis when you do all of those.” 

We next did informational interviews with people doing jobs we thought we like to do. One of the people I interviewed was an accountant at Coopers and Lybrand, who worked in the Renaissance Center downtown. (I liked the office location and wanted to live in the hotel there.) The accountant’s job was very busy, but interesting. She noted that communication skills were just as important as math skills to be an accountant. 

When it came time to do our internship, I worked for the school accountant, who was Dutch. I wanted to be compatible with a Dutch boss, so I put on my anthropologist’s hat and did some research. 

One of my friends in Royal Oak was Dutch, so I did know some things about Dutch culture: 

-The Dutch eat lots of casseroles made with sliced vegetables, shredded cheese, and cream. Casseroles are a delicious food $ hack. 

-The Dutch also eat pancakes at any time of day. These are made with eggs and milk for a hidden source of protein and calcium. 

-My friend’s mom worked part-time selling Amway cleaning products. 

-My friend’s dad was an engineer with Wayne County and was probably waiting to get a job at an auto company. 

-The family’s religion wad Dutch Reform. I went to vacation Bible School with my friend several summers and won Bibles for memorizing Bible stories. 

-The kids and I all went ice skating after school like little Hans Brinkers. 

That was my ethnographic survey of second-generation Dutch in Michigan. I also read about the importance of maintaining dikes to keep below-sea-level Netherlands from flooding in a Time-Life book about the country. 

I thought my Dutch boss would be a stickler about maintaining order given her cultural background for my analytical part of internship preparation. 

My boss told me I would be helping her organize “Accounts Payable” – bill or invoices the school had to pay. The “Accounts Receivable” – tuition payments and other sources of income – were private. She had a stack of bills piled up on my desk. She showed me a legal date stamp and told me to stamp areas on invoices with no printing on them to not cover up numbers. 

Once I went through those, she gave me a chronological journal to write up the bills I had stamped with the following information: 

-date received 

-creditor name 

-invoice amount 

-creditor invoice number 

Once I had the chronological file done, I was to assign payments to budget accounts. The accountant showed me the Chart of Accounts, budgets allocated for payment. She cut up strips of sticky notes and had me write the account number of which account I thought the invoice should be paid from along with the name of the account to help me memorize the Chart of Accounts. 

Then, I was to put the invoices in order by account number. Once, the invoices were in numeric order. I had to put them in alphabetical order within the account number. 

The accountant reviewed all my work before entering it into the IBM computer. 

I also used a business correspondence reference book to help draft business letters for the accountant and did inventory control (newest items in back of older ones). 

At the end of the internship, I told my teachers I had learned the value of maintaining systems, especially financial ones. 

(Note: I met my Dutch boss at a Youth for Understanding host family orientation several years later where I was volunteering as a former exchange student to Japan. She was going to host a student. I knew she and her family would have a happy, well-organized time.) 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Viewing Malevich's Paintings and Eating Indonesian Food in Amsterdam (Netherlands) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Viewing Malevich's Paintings and Eating Indonesian Food in Amsterdam (Netherlands) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Of course, the next day was my vacation day as well, so I was out the hotel door at 8 am to explore Amsterdam (Netherlands).

I visited the historical part of downtown by the Royal Palace and a little area called the Beguinage – the site of a former church of reformed Presbyterians called the Beguines.

From there, I walked from one end to the other of the main canals – the Singel, the Herengracht, and the Keizersgracht.  I made a few stops to buy coffee with cream.  Walking along canals to admire architecture is cold yet informative tourism for learning about architecture that is not usually introduced in university art history courses.

I walked along the Leiderstraat and found myself on Museumplein again.  I visited the Municipal Museum and enjoyed Malevich’s paintings such as “White Square on White.”  He reminded me of another Dutch painter named Mondrian, who did “security systems” paintings I thought for office decoration.

I went back on Leidestraat and found an Indonesian Restaurant.  I was going to see the Rembrandt collection at the Rijksmuseum, but my innocent sounding Rijstafel (Rice Table Lunch) took three hours to consume. 

Indonesian food is so spicy that you have to wipe away tears away as you eat it.  I loved every morsel, but I had to drink a lot of water to deal with the heat.  I planned to buy an Indonesian cookbook and learn to make this delicious food, but tone down the spices a bit.

After the dragon-hot meal, I just enjoyed walking around Amsterdam and buying coffee with cream and looking at stores and apartments.  I knew everyone at work would laugh at my wild weekend in Amsterdam with its liberal drug and prostitution laws.

The next day I wrote down some Amsterdam notes before returning to Paris:

-Windows – Building windows are so clean in Amsterdam that they glisten in the sun.  Glistening windows make brown brick buildings with red geraniums look very upscale no matter what kind of neighborhood they are in.

-Pulleys are located on rooftops of buildings to make moving furniture in and out of apartments easy.

-Amsterdam has great urban planning.  The city has a lot of trains, canals, and bikes for moving people and goods around quickly.

-I think the Netherlands is the largest market for bicycles outside the Peoples’ Republic of China.

-Fashion from the 1960s prevailed in Amsterdam in the 1990s.  (Blue jeans, T-shirts, and tennis shoes.)

-Amsterdam has many good bookstores including English ones.  The City of International Trade requires many multilingual lawyers, bankers, accountants, and salesmen.

If you plan to visit Amsterdam and visit its art museums, I would recommend reading Simon Schama’s  The Embarassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age and Rembrandt’s Eyes.  People of English descent should read about our ancestral trading and naval rivals.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (Netherlands) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (Netherlands) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

Laurent drove me to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Roissy (France), so I could go on a business trip to Amsterdam (Netherlands).

I was staying at the Japanese Okura Hotel, which was the tallest building in Amsterdam at the time.  I was going the weekend before the meeting to do some tourism.  It took an hour to go from Paris to Amsterdam with no time change by plane.

As soon as I arrived at the hotel, I threw my bag on the bed and rushed out to see as much as I could on Saturday of the city.  I almost got hit a few times by throngs of bicyclists as I made my way to a tram stop.

The tram driver spoke perfect English (British, but understandable to an American), which I did not expect.  He told me to exit at Museumplein to visit the Van Gogh Museum. 

A French woman on the Museumplein saw me with the Michelin Touring Green Guide for walking tours and asked me which museum I was going to.

“The Vincent van Gogh Museum,” I answered.

She asked if she could go with me to the Museum.  She worked at a French foreign investment bank and loved it that I had studied East Asian Art at the University of Chicago.

The van Gogh Museum had many paintings from van Gogh’s early period and several representative ones from his time in Provence and Auvers-sur-Oise in France.

My favorite van Gogh paintings were those he did showing inspiration from Japanese painting.  Van Gogh used the Japanese technique of painting at angles to make you feel as if you could walk into the landscape in the painting or pick flowers off the branches in front of you. 

“Landscapes and flower paintings sell well in urban environments,” I told my investment banker museum friend.

Van Gogh received little money and recognition for his work in his lifetime.  His brother Theo had to support him financially.

In one of his letters to Theo, Vincent wrote that he was happy with his artwork and that he was his own harshest critic.

However, van Gogh certainly must have resented handing his cherished artwork over to café owners to pay for meals.  Van Gogh’s café paintings still turn up in Provence and sell for millions.

I read a collection of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother entitled Dear Theo edited by Irving Stone before I visited this museum.  I learned from reading this book that it is good to have a “day job” to create a financial situation for yourself, so you can create what you want and have freedom of expression.

Most of the paintings by van Gogh in this Museum use brown and golden tones rather than the bright yellows, oranges, and blues that were typical of van Gogh’s work in the South of France.  He also painted farm and family scenes most notably The Potato Eaters.

My French banker colleague and I drank a beer in a noisy and smoke-filled Dutch pub.  (All of the pubs were noisy and smoke-filled.)  I was going to order fish in a pub, but said I wanted to eat elsewhere.

We left the pub and walked along the streets with many kinds of restaurants located along them.  We decided to eat dinner in a Tibetan Restaurant.

Tibetan food in its Dutch form seemed to be a heartier form of Mandarin Chinese food.  We ate bao buns with spicy meat and butter tea.  I also ate ribs, French-style with a knife and fork, to keep my hands clean.

My banker colleague and I exchanged phone numbers, so I could go to the Chartier Restaurant in Paris for lunch.  (I was going to lord that over my colleagues at work that I was going to the Parisian Financiers’ Canteen for lunch.  I already felt like the trip to Amsterdam was a pay dirt success.)

We went to our different hotels as I wandered through the streets.  I went in the general direction of the Okura Hotel, keeping it in sight.

On my way, I found the Amstel Beer Factory.  I drank a lot of that as an undergraduate and wanted to take a photograph for my buddies.

I was tired when I arrived back at the hotel.  I flipped the security locks on my hotel door and plopped down into bed and slept peacefully, so I could get up bright and early for a full day of tourism on the next day in Amsterdam.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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