Ploughman’s lunch and a day of rest

Our sweet hosts are off on vacation — leaving us with paid transit passes and coupons for museum entrance (!) — and we took a quiet day to enjoy our peaceful Amstelveen digs and plan our sightseeing. Today we went to the market to pick up some local meats and cheese and Val prepared a take on a Dutch ploughman’s lunch. He paired dark brown fries roggebrood (pumpernickel) with Dutch butter and aged Gouda cheese, and a grainy wheat bread with zonnepit (sunflowers seeds) with mild goat cheese, Cobergham and Ossenworst.

Cobergham is a mild smoked ham of this region of Europe. We got it in glassy thin slices.

Ossenworst is a sausage originating in Amsterdam in the 17th century — when as the world’s powerhouse trading center, it had spices and steers in abundance. Traditionally, aged steer meat — coarse-ground and mixed with pepper mace and nutmeg — was smoked so slowly and gently, it created a sausage which is essentially still raw. Our still-tasty, but mass-produced, supermarket version was made of lean beef and was probably not aged. Later this week, are going to try to find one of the Amsterdam butchers who still make the sausage the old fashioned way.

Also on the menu: cucumber and butter sandwich, olives, a doughnut peach, a small cherry tart and Cotes du Rhone.

Later we walked through the polder (more on this tomorrow) with its profusion of wildflowers and birds, sheep and calves. And of course, there was an afternoon nap. And, a roasted chicken for dinner. Tomorrow, more countryside exploration.