I’m in Saskatoon for Christmas. I love to have tea in the afternoons with my Grandma. She has a beautiful home that backs onto the South Saskatchewan river. I love her Royal Albert tea set and her Christmas Cake that she soaks in liqueur. She let me borrow one of her furs and she gave me some silver serving trays for if I want to put on some dinners or somthing. I went for a walk in her fur along the river bank and almost frose to death. The cold here is for real. I forgot about that.

Lately I’ve been thinking alot about design. Like someday I’m going to design the “room” of my restaurant and the kitchen and everything. So I should start thinking about that stuff now. I love to think that part of my career as a cook can also involve design…or maybe I’m getting ahead of myself and sounding like an asshole. Head down, mouth shut Crust, don’t run before you can walk.

This is the house Kyle and I stayed at part of the time. I love the thatched roof. They had lots of fun stuff, like horses and a pool. Kyle taught me how to ride the quad. They also had an outdoor kitchen by the pool, with a grill, a flat top and a gas burner. Kyle and I cooked the family dinner to thank them for letting us stay with them. I was really fun we just put on some music and hung out in the kitchen, we work together really well. I also love cooking in a bikini. The town near by is famous for their chicken so we grilled chicken. We made pizza on the grill also. It was easy and chill. They loved it.

We went to Holland’s Disneylandish thing, it is super old and based on Scandinavian fairy tails. Families gave us dirty looks as we smoked in Fairytale Forest and then power drank before running around the park. Kyle kept making me jump off the train while it was moving when he saw a ride he wanted to go on.

We found an old bar with a carousel in it and we stayed there for a bit pretending that we were in the real Fear and Loathing. Then we went on some more rides. We got some more wine and borrowed a row boat, we were supposed to bring it back but we realized that the parking lot was across the pond. Kyle beached the boat on the grass on the other side and we ran off to buy waffles before going to our car, the boat drifted off into the middle of the pond. God we’re assholes.

Kyle’s family gave us a Peugeot car (same as the pepper mill) and a GPS so we could go where ever we wanted. On my day off we decided to go to Belgium for the day so that I could drink my fill of cherry lambic. Back when I worked at Feenie’s I was introduced to Bellevue Kriek cherry lambic from Belgium. I drank it for years and then it got discontinued in bottles and then in kegs and then even Chambar didn’t have it anymore.

It was so hot out in Belgium that day, then the sky got dark and it down poured so hard, when it stopped the sun came out again and everything was cool and fresh. We saw a cool culinary mushroom shop but it was closed. We also saw a huge castle. The sunset was also beautiful on the drive home.

We went boating, and ate dutch cherries, the last of the season. They were the best cherries I ever had. The boat was so 70’s, it was fun. It was Kyle’s great aunt’s boat. She is 90, but she seems 60. She fell off the boat in all of her clothes, and pulled the dutch flag off the back of the boat on the way in. When her nephew tried to help her in she wouldn’t give him her hand until he saved the flag first. It was a super hot day and she enjoyed having a story to tell.

I knew about coffee shops from when I went to Amsterdam a few years ago, but I didn’t know about smart shops. In Coffee shops you can buy weed and hash and smoke it in there, they have vaporizers and bongs and shit if you want. Mushrooms are illegal to sell in Amsterdam because the law just changed. You buy mushrooms at smart shops. The people who own the smart shops have found this crazy loop hole where they sell magic truffles instead of mushrooms. The truffles are the underground mycelium of the mushroom, so technically not mushrooms. But some smart shops we went into the guy behind the counter would just pull mushrooms out of his pocket and sell them to us. One guy had some really good little thin ones from Hawaii. Kyle hates the taste of the truffles so he eats them with chocolate.

I don’t know if mushrooms are bad for you, I thought they were a natural poison. I know poison isn’t good for you but after it’s out of your system is there any lasting effects? Someone once told me that girl cooks are either bull dikes or head cases, I’m a head case. I thought that I could self medicate with mushrooms and use them as antidepressants. I thought that they can’t be much worse than real antidepressants that make me feel sick and not even happy. I’m not that bad in the head, I was just being lazy and thought that instead of working on myself I could just take pills from a brain doctor. None of the pills that I tried made me happy and I realized that I should just consciously try and improve my self everyday. I told a server once when we were out for a smoke that I give up, I think I’m just going to be sad forever. He told me to never stop trying to overcome it. I don’t know why but what he said meant a lot and I’ve never stopped trying since. It’s been slowly and steadily getting better ever since.

Mushrooms make me laugh, and feel generally lighter. It helps me see things from a different perspective, like through the eyes of a child. This is important to me because when I was a kid I was to busy worrying. Once mushrooms exposed me to being in the moment and everything being magical I could carry that with me into my everyday life. I never forgot how to feel that lightness.

I don’t see crazy visuals. I’ve only ate them a few times, but I’ve noticed that they don’t effect me as much as other people. Kyle sees crazy visuals. I want to break down the wall that I’ve built up that makes me fight different perceptions and perspectives. I feel like it will help me be open in many aspects of my life.

Some people say that mushrooms are really bad for you but I haven’t seen any scientific proof. Everything is bad for you in excess, but I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist! Kyle says that mushrooms bend connections in your brain and if you bend them to much they can break and you can go crazy.

Part of fear and loathing in Amsterdam is tattoos. I’ve always thought that cooks are pirates, I love the cooks that are grinders, covered in tattoos. If cooks weren’t pirates I don’t think I would have stayed in this business, I love the idea of doing whatever it takes to make it happen during prep and service, it’s just so fun.
“Where’d you get all that Valrhona for the catering?”
“Bud I need some large vac pac bags stat!!”
” I’ll be right back, don’t ask, don’t tell.”
So we went down to Hanky Panky’s in the red light district, a famous tattoo parlor owned by the angels. Kyle has begun to realize the full extent of his dutch heritage. When his mom was in Holland with family she went to Hanky Panky’s and got a tattoo of a tulip, the dutch flower. It struck Kyle that with every generation his dutch blood and heritage is fading, and unless he does somthing to change that it will wither and disappear. For his tattoo he decided to get a tulip, but one that is just beginning to turn black, wilt and drop it’s petals.

Don’t worry mommy, no tattoos for Crust. I want to stay pretty and pure like a baby.

Kyle and I stayed here for a few nights because it was closer to De Kas and the red light district. It was a student accomadation for 4 euros a night that we found out about from one of Kyle’s cousins. It was sunny and beautiful. Our room only had a sink so I had baths in the laundry sink in the laundry room next door. I fit perfectly, it was so fun. We shared a key with another guy to get into the main doors so we were supposed to follow his hours, but there was no way we were going to be home by midnight every night. After work we would go out and go crazy, we found some great shit hole bars. Our fav was the place we called the clown bar, it was decorated like a tripped out circus from the 60’s. It always had locals in it and the old bar lady was the owner and she would chain smoke and talk to the guests. The T.V.’s in the clown bar were always playing the latest fashion collections from across Europe so I loved that. We would leave our window open even though we weren’t supposed to so that we could get back in to get a few hours sleep before work. Once Kyle was climbing in and he got in a screaming match with the hotel owner next door because they thought he was breaking in. The next night we took some herbal xtc and drank our faces off, I decided I could scale the wall and swing into the window in my heels. Kyle said I he would catch me if I fell and that I just needed to swing my leg really hard, no hesitation. I hesitated and fell like a rag doll right on Kyle. We were both fine, he completely broke my fall. The next morning he had a pretty sore neck and I realized that all of the polish was scraped off my big toe and my next toe was broken near the tip, I taped it to my other toe with a bandaid and I think it’s going to be fine. From then on we decided that it would be more discreet for him to boost me in then I could run through and let him in the front. We would have our breakfast in the courtyard out back, and listen to music on the macbook and smoke joints. We just got some crazy looking mushrooms from Hawaii, but we haven’t eaten any yet.