Third Place Game - Struggling through Dutch Food - World Cup Eating Challenge

Well, it looks like I wasn't the only Brazilian that had issues with the Dutch on Saturday. I love to cook and I've been playing around in my kitchen long enough that I have a great sense of how to adapt recipes or where/how to add flavor. Granted, this isn't always perfect, but I feel like I just couldn't get anything to work with the Dutch food.

I found this nice little list of Dutch foods to try and the first thing I wanted to make were Bitterballen. Despite the name, Bitterballen are not at all bitter. They are actually little fried doughy meaty balls. Ok, well that didn't sound too bad...

I knew that I was going to make some Paleo substitutions here so I didn't really stick with one recipe. I basically went with a mix of this blog post and this Pinterest pin. For some reason I pictured "stew meat" as "pot roast." I've seen stew meat in the store a thousand times but I guess I was just feeling the pot roast idea... I didn't want to take the work to make pot roast and then all the other steps for the bitterballen so I bought a packaged version in the store. I'm normally wary about packaged foods but the ingredients for this one didn't seem too bad and it was locally sourced. 

Since the pot roast already had a gravy, that saved me a step. I used that and tapioca flour (to replace regular flour) to thicken it up. I let it sit in the fridge for a couple of hours and when I got back to it, I was able to roll it into little balls. 

I then rolled the balls in tapioca flour, dipped them in egg, and rolled them in almond flour (to act like breadcrumbs). 

I fried them in a bunch of avocado oil, rolling them around occasionally so they'd be evenly fried. They were looking awesome!

...but they weren't awesome. The fried outside was perfectly crispy and the almond flour made great "breadcrumbs" but the issue was the inside. I must have used too much tapioca flour because it ended up being this gummy gooey mess. I tried just picking the meat out of a few of them but it was a pretty tedious task. In the end, they were just inedible. 

The other dish I wanted to make was called stampot. It's a dish that combines potatoes with some kind of vegetable (usually kale) and served with sausage. I really loved the ease of it and anything that adds a little green is always nice so I got to mashing my potatoes!

Next I cut up a bunch of kale and added it to my mashed potatoes along with almond milk, grass fed butter, and salt. I probably should have cooked them first or at least processed them... oops.

I also threw some sausage into the pan which was super easy. 

This was the end result. The sausage was prepared so there wasn't much I could do but I was really disapointed in the potatoes. I added quite a bit of salt and butter and it still just tasted like bland mush to me. I ended up grabbing some sriracha just to survive dinner. 

A few hours after dinner, I was starving. I'd had a big work out that day and then Dan and I went to the Legends of Candlestick flag football game (which was amazing) and the disappointing Dutch food just was not cutting it. We ended up stopping at a local burger joint on the way home and I got an amazing gluten free bacon avocado cheese burger. It paired wonderfully with my Bonny Doon Contra red blend and I didn't have to go to bed hungry. 

Flavor is my best friend and Dutch food was just super bland. I did find a great way to work around the potatoes though. For leftover lunch I threw in some bacon and cheese and treated them like loaded potatoes and that worked much better.