Kerstpakket

What a surprise to find that the infamous kerstpakket (the official christmas present from the university medical center) this year contained useful stuff that will (probably) not make you ill or waste your time!
In the package of last year we got some best-before-the-end-of-the-next-millenium food and snacks, including a cream cheese that did not contain cheese and a pate that we had to return because someone found glass shards in it! Of course we got other less dangerous stuff too, like a collapsable shopping bag and a fake coin for shopping trolleys which completely failed to match the size of any of the Euro currency...

This year however, we got a set of four dinner plates, four glasses, a tin of sweet biscuits, a foccacia bread, olive oil, a bag of pasta, a glass of tomato sauce, a tin of olives, a bottle of wine and a cookbook on italian food. Now that is what I call useful content.

Illustration courtesy: easyorder.nl

Christmas fun the Danish way

Last weekend Sarah visited me in Nijmegen (actually my first visitor who is not a close family member). We made sure to start December with a lot of christmas fun the Danish way, e.g. baking christmas cookies. We did not limit ourselves to the traditional Danish brown coookies ('brunkager') but we also made chocolate muffins and chocolate cake.

The immense pile of brunkager brought joy and christmas spirit to my colleagues at the university the next day.