Athlete of the week: Stephanie Renee Lucinda van der Raad

Yes that is her entire name, a very long one at that! Stephanie, or as some like to call her "Gwen" after Gwen Stefani is one of our youngest strikers on the team, at the young age of 19 years old. She comes from the small town of Amersfoort and just recently moved out of the "nest" for the first time and is now living life in the big city of Amsterdam for the first time!

One of the biggest changes of living on your own, is that you now have to fend for yourself for all meals! Gwen has a great mindset on cooking for yourself, she said "It doesn't have to be difficult to cook, you can use easy ingredients and recipes." I thought it was only fitting for Gwen to teach me how to cook one of the most traditional Dutch recipe's out there, Pancakes!

We picked a date and time and met at the Albert Heijn (local grocery store) to begin our adventure of making Pancakes! The three main ingredients to make these infamous pancakes are milk, flour, and eggs. Once we purchased that we had to decide what we would put on top of the pancakes. The Dutch have many more options for suitable toppings for the pancakes besides just syrup! We proceeded to buy brown sugar, jam, apple mousse (apple sauce), and dutch syrup (much thicker than american syrup!).

Once we biked back to her apartment with all of the ingredients in my bike basket, it was time to start cooking! After putting 3/4 of the milk in a bowl, we added the flour until it became the proper thickness. Then we added three eggs to complete the mixture. We heated the pan and put a bit of butter in and then added a scoop of the mix into the bowl. Gwen then proceeded to do some crazy swirling movement with her arm to get the mix to thin out around the entire pan, you could obviously tell that she had done this before! We made a great pancake feast, trying all different toppings, it lived up to everything I have heard about them!

From what I can see of her cooking at only the young age of 19, she has a great future of preparing many more lekker (yummy) meals!

Until next time!

Lauren