Check out a (tongue in cheek) description of Dutch food here, listing it as one of the five most horrible cuisines in Europe, along with Icelandic, Lithuanian, British and Czech. http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,1783596,00.html

I write as a British man with a Czech wife. When she read the description of the horribly bland things they eat in Lithuania, my wife said "they sound yummy..." Though I must say there are several other strong contenders for most horrible cuisine in Europe across Scandinavia, the Baltic region and and eastern Europe.

Nowhere man refers to use heavy use of spices in the Netherlands. I've not been given heavily spiced food in the Netherlands outside of an Indonesian restaurant. And actually I would say I have had better SE Asian cooking in Britain than the Netherlands. A bit like saying the British eat a lot of spices. Well we do when we go to the very many Indian and Thai restaurants, etc, but you won't find much of it in British vernacular cooking, which is characteristically bland, as with the rest of the potato/cabbage/pork world of northern and Eastern Europe.

A couple of things I do like about eating in the Netherlands are that they commonly put milk on the table as a lunch-time beverage, and their aged cheeses. But on the other hand every lunch I've had seems to be just the same. Once you've had one good Dutch cheese, you discover the rest aren't much different. France it is not. Even the Irish manage a better variety of cheese.

That has just reminded me of my "favourite" recipe from my friend's Finnish cookbook, "nailed trout", which is more like a Monty Python sketch than a recipe. It runs something like this.

(To be read in a Finnish accent.) Take a trout and nail it to a board. Then cook it.

I am also reminded of that comedy sketch where some British Asians go out for an "English", and one of them says he is looking forward to something "really, really bland".