Sinterklaas 2011

Ive no idea what these are. 'Best to buy one of each!

I've been berating American friends and relatives for putting up their trees and decorations at the end of November, straight after Thanksgiving. It's outrageous isn't it? Well now I'm feeling guilty because we put up our Advent Calendar on December 2nd and today we are celebrating the Feast of St Nicholas, or Sinterklaas as the Dutch say.

Being married to a woman who is Dutch/American has its advantages ("Go on", you say, "Name one!") OK, I will: We get to celebrate 4th July, Thanksgiving and Sinterklaas. We could also do Koninginnenacht (The Queen's Birthday), Martin Luther King Day and a bunch of others, but we are reasonable folks. We just do the ones that involve food!

This week, people around the world celebrate the feast of St Nicholas (honestly, they do!), but Holland is the place to be. He arrives in November by ship from Spain with a his Moorish servants who are all called Peter (the Zwarte Piets) and they have a lot of fun, especially around the ports. After he arrives, the Dutch kids get to put out their shoes every night. (I thought you Yanks were indulgent.) They expect presents every morning until St Nicholas day on December 6th. AND they still do Christmas! If you are a Lego rep. in Europe, 'best get over to Antwerp, quick.

Our Indonesian meal.

We get caught up in all this frivolity on the nearest week-end to the actual feast when we try to make it special by getting hold of all the ingredients for a "Dutch treat". This year we decided not to do pancakes with various fillings, or chips with mayonnaise (which is my favourite food on the whole planet) but opted for a Dutch/Indonesian meal of Chicken Sate and Nasi Goreng with green beans. 'Sounds easy enough until you read the ingredients.

Indonesian food calls for stuff like pindas sauce, ketjap manis, sambal ulek, sambal badjak, lemon grass, coconut milk and lots more. Where can you get them in the UK?

Actually, you can get them on the Internet, usually made by Conimex, but we used ingredients from a company called B.V. Lucullus, which is based in Leiderdorp but has a base in the UK too. We bought the lot over the counter in Cambridge!

What's in the box, Darling?

By co-incidence, Cambridge's Mill Road has its own festival every year at this time. We always go, and every year it gets better and bigger. Last year it was a frozen, snowy affair with patches of mud on the grass, but this time it was dry, mild and very busy with more people and more stalls than ever.

The entire street is closed to traffic and so people mill about outside all the specialist, ethnic shops and restaurants (it is Mill Road after all). Many of the businesses add a stall on the pavement selling (or even giving away) treats to draw you in.

The Chinese shops are the biggest and they sell everything you could possibly want to make the best Chinese meal ever. We are talking sacks of rice, china teapots, rice cookers, seafood, vegetables, sauces, spices, chop-sticks, meat and a million kinds of noodles.

Korean sushi.

We sampled Korean dumplings at one shop, but we could have had sausages, soups, noodles, pastries, burgers, breads, cheeses and beverages from a dozens of different stalls. However, our main stop is always Al Amin which is the place to buy food from almost any culture on Earth, and possibly beyond.

This shop has a big selection of Indonesian and Thai ingredients, along side Middle Eastern and Oriental cuisines. What's more, there is a Post Office in the shop. How could it fail to make money?

The atmosphere of bonhomie during the afternoon captured us completely and we left at dusk with laden arms and smiles on our faces, in order to get home and cook up our feast and wrestle our son Dan to bed. But first, we had to put out our shoes for St Nicholas and a carrot (wortel) for Schimmel his dappled grey horse.

Lieten for the horse's hooves.
Sinterklaas is on his way... I hope.

Dan gets very excited about presents, so we spell everything out so he can't work out what we are on about. But St Nicolaas night is bit of a give-away. The Advent calendar is bad enough, but once the shoes go in the fireplace he is beside himself with anticipation. For an hour, he was up and down the whole time, going to look for presents in the fireplace. In desperation we moved the shoes, lights and decorations to his room so he could watch them from his bed. Amazingly, this worked and he had a normal night (up at 2.00, 4.00 and 6.00 am). Still, by nine it was obvious that Sinterklaas had a problem with the ferries and so we had to phone him to remind him we were here in the UK, not Amsterdam where Auntie Katy lives.

Our presents duly arrived and now we have a pile of new Christmas CDs to play. I like the one by Carole King best.

If you want to know more about Sinterklaas go to www.stnicholascenter.org
For Indonesian recipes in English try www.indochef.com





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