Catching up: Birthday

It’s been more than a month that I posted, so it’s high time for a few posts to catch up with what happened in May.

In some countries, like Denmark, flying the national flag is some kind of generic thing to mark joyful occasions. So if it’s someone’s birthday, you’d fly the national flag to celebrate! But in the Netherlands our protocols and customs surrounding the flag are much more restrictive, and flying the flag for your birthday is ‘not done’. You only fly the flag for national holidays and birthdays of the royal family.

The only exception is when you’ve cleared your exams for your secondary education — then you’d fly the flag and tie your schoolbag to the flag pole — because you’re not needing it anymore! But that, too, is understood to be a breach of official protocol.

This is also why the ‘wimpel’ is so popular in the Netherlands — it is not governed by the flag protocol, so you can fly it any way you want!

But if your birthday is on a national holiday, such as Liberation Day on May 5th, then flying the flag comes kind of “built in”!

When I was about to have my fifth birthday, a neighbour from across the street learned of it. She told me that she would fly the flag specifically for my birthday! And of course I went to check first thing in the morning, and lo and behold: there was the flag! (Of course I understood that she only did it because it was a national holiday, but I also understood that she might have had a different intention from the other people flying the flag that day.)

I wrote about buying a flag for ourselves some time ago, and this was a good occasion! So we proudly flew the flag for Liberation Day, but also, secretly, for my 50th birthday…

My parents and klik’s mother and sister visited. I had done a lot of baking: I replicated the strawberry mousse tartlettes that I made for Christmas dinner, and we had those with a glass of (alcohol-free) bubbles. I also made sable cookies with a ganache filling: matcha cookies with a white chocolate-vanilla filling and a chocolate cookie with a coffee ganache. I also baked chocolate chip cookies after Dorrie Greenspan’s recipe, but I didn’t add any nuts this time, because the next day we would have a visitor with a nut allergy. (And I also add a hefty splash of cinnamon too, really makes the flavour pop!)

I had made rendang (an Indonesian beef stew) for dinner, which we served with fries. And we had panna cotta for dessert.

Usually I will leave the celebrations at that, but since I was turning 50, I had decided to also invite some dear friends for an afternoon tea the next day. We had been preparing the shopping and cooking for a week in advance…

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Catching up: more birthday

The next day, we had seven dear friends visit us for an afternoon tea. As I wrote earlier, we had been preparing for a week in advance. When I’m hosting, I certainly don’t want to have too little food prepared, so we always end up with way more left-overs than we had anticipated, because of course we have way too much food…

We started off with toast with baked assorted mushrooms and various spreads, along with a cup of mushroom bouillon.

The next course were ‘crudite’ (rettich and carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes) with a sesame dip. We also had double sandwiches filled with a vegetable cream: shredded red cabbage and carrot mixed with thick yoghurt with some herbs and spices — those were more delicious than we had anticipated, and they looked very colourful! We had also made potato curry sandwiches that we grilled freshly. Those were nicely spicy, especially with some chutney spread on top!

For the sweet course, we had gotten a box of scones and I had made lemon curd. I had also tried to make clotted cream — I tried four different recipes and none of them worked out for me! So in the end we ended up buying the clotted cream after all. But we put that in a bowl and whisked it loose a bit, with a drop of vanilla essence added for a smoother taste. This was the most popular dish, but we also had strawberry and cherry jam for those who would prefer something sweet instead of sour. We also baked chocolate danish for this course.

And then for dessert, we had panna cotta again — coffee flavour, at the request of klik. And for those who were still hungry after all that, we had a large plate of cookies afterward — though as you can imagine, we were left with a lot of cookies!

It was wonderful to celebrate, surrounded with friends!

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Catching up: gaming

My birthday gift from Klik’s mother was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I had pre-ordered it, and she reimbursed me for it. It came out on May 12th, a week after my birthday. As it happened, Klik was away on a trip with her mother when the game came out. The trailers had me very excited to play, so I had made the necessary preparations! I had cooked in advance for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so I had meals in the fridge that I could just shove into the microwave.

Friday the game arrived, and after work I started in on it. I didn’t continue too late.

But Saturday, I started around 9 AM. I broke half an hour for lunch, and around 6 PM I thought: “Oh, better get something to eat…” so I broke another half an hour for dinner. But after that, it was straight back into the game! Late that evening, Klik called, and she started with: “Oh, it’s late, are you already in bed?” just as I was about to enter another shrine…

Since then, the obsession has faded a bit, but I’m still playing it a lot. And Klik, who is even a bigger Zelda fan than I am, has started as well. Our play styles are very different, so we get to see a different side of the game through that.

Of course, the biggest innovation of the game is that you can build your own constructs and use them in the game. They play an especially large role in the shrines, but you can also use them “in the field”. That is a lot of fun, but I find myself using it not that often. If I have to go somewhere, I prefer to just walk or climb, the “good old-fashioned way”, because it lets me experience the game world in a much more direct way. I get to see all the little nooks and crannies, get to pick up cooking ingredients along the way and in general just take it slow. I do enjoy seeing the weird constructs in game clips on YouTube, but I do not really feel the need to try and build something as grandiose.

I also dislike the Depths, which is essentially the whole map in one big underground cavern. It is dark (until you activate that area’s ‘lightroot’) and the enemies do ‘gloom damage’ from which you can’t recover by just eating, so it’s extra challenging. When I started out there, I got the same feeling as I got from Dark Soul’s Tomb of the Giants, which is not a good thing — when I got to that area in Dark Souls, I just bounced off the game and never finished it. Luckily, in Tears of the Kingdom, there are items you can use to shed some light on your path, and they’re quite easy to find, so it’s not that big of a problem once you’re prepared. (Yes, I know there are light-giving items in Dark Souls too, but those are not the same as Brightbloom seeds: you’re still mostly bumbling around in the dark.)

Just like its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, this will take us a few hundred hours to fully appreciate. And maybe multiple playthroughs as well.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.