Gnocchi à la Huize Briljant
‘Vegetarian chicken is always chewy’
Door Remco van Veluwen
By Remco van Veluwen
Gnocchi à la Huize Briljant
For six people
1 kg of vegetarian chicken
3 bags of potato gnocchi
2 jars of green pesto
2 jars of crème fraîche
500 grams of chestnut mushrooms, cut into pieces
3 bell peppers, diced
3 onions, diced
600 – 1000 grams of spinach
Fry the vegetarian chicken and onion in a frying pan. In a different pan, boil the spinach in a little bit of water. Distribute the gnocchi over two frying pans (you could also boil them, but the guys at Huize Briljant like them crispy). Add the mushrooms and the bell pepper to the gnocchi. Lastly, add the crème fraîche, pesto, spinach, and vegetarian chicken and mix well.
The kitchen of Huize Briljant is bustling. ‘Do we really need two bags of spinach? That’s a lot of vegetables. A thousand grams?’ Joël asks. ‘You can also fry the gnocchi’, he says professorially. That’s enough for Martijn: ‘All right, we’ll fry them.’
‘But that’ll take forever!’ Sem protests. Martijn looks at him, unblinking. ‘We can boil them, but then it’s your responsibility.’
The guys live in the house at the Briljantstraat with three others. Joël, Sem, Jorik, and André moved into the house last year. Their friend Obed then moved out and was replaced by Martijn. There’s one more student, but they never see him. ‘He keeps to himself’, Joël explains. ‘But his parents do own the house.’
Bonding
The five others often have dinner together, in groups of at least three or four. ‘We also regularly take empty beer crates back to the supermarket together. It’s a nice bonding activity for the whole house’, Joël explains.
The gnocchi are frying up well. ‘See?’ says Martijn to Joël, who nods in agreement. ‘Ha’, says Martijn, happy. ‘I managed to convince a law student.’
The guys decided to eat vegetarian chicken tonight, but Sem isn’t too happy about it. ‘It doesn’t matter how long you cook it, vegetarian chicken is always chewy’, he grumbles. André notices how Joël occasionally yoinks a blackened piece of gnocchi from the pan. ‘You best pay for those.’
Usually, just one of them cooks, but tonight, they’re all in the kitchen together. It’s clearly overkill, especially when a pan suddenly falls off the stove. ‘Stuff like that happens at least three times when Sem cooks on his own’, Joël jokes. ‘Oh man, too easy’, says Jorik, laughing. Sem steps in closer and innocently says: ‘I’ve genuinely never dropped a pan.’
Cleaning
Fortunately, it’s also Sem’s job to clean the kitchen this week. It’s a good thing, too; it’s pretty dirty. ‘When Obed moved out, he somehow took the cleaning elves with him’, Joël says.
The guys resorted to a cleaning schedule. ‘We did just get this giant new dishwasher, which saves us a lot of time’, says André. Their large refrigerator is also new. All courtesy of the landlord. ‘We also have a fridge just for beer’, Sem says proudly. ‘It’s in the living room.’
It’s time to move over there, since dinner is ready. But then, someone lets out a sudden cry. André has been iced: he’s found a bottle of Smirnoff Ice that one of his roommates hid, which he now has to finish in one go.
Pledge
While Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’ plays loudly on the television’s speakers, André slowly drains the bottle. He is visibly uncomfortable. Sem laughs. At the supermarket, he and his roommates figured it would be fun to ice the UKrant reporter. ‘I guess I was the only one who didn’t know where you’d hidden the bottle’, André complains. He’s been the target of his roommates’ jokes before.
As the last person to move into the house, Martijn is the official ‘pledge’. The guys pranked him when they went for a walk through Vinkhuizen on a rainy day. ‘They wouldn’t let me on the boardwalk, so I had to walk on the wet, slippery stones.’
André’s room is next to the bathroom, which is less than ideal. To get rid of the worst of the smell, the guys have a neat trick: ‘You set some toilet paper on fire and throw it in the toilet bowl’, Sem explains. ‘The smell of shit is worse than the smell of smoke.’
The guys are happy with their gnocchi. But André doesn’t want dessert. He can’t even finish his main course; his stomach is full of Smirnoff Ice.
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