A Luxembourg First week in review, part 2

A Luxembourg First week in review: Food 

Alright, today's post is a little bit of a treat! 

It's a little self indulgent for me, because I just get to write and rhapsodize over the food we're receiving and making here in Luxembourg & on our travels. I'm trying to be sequential about things, even though that means I'm at a bit of a backlog (for reference, it's officially been two weeks since we left Ohio to be here in Lux) so I'll try to make these snappy yet flavorful! 

The hardest part of blogging so far has actually been formatting the images where I want them alongside the text, so bear with me if things look a bit janky. They will get fixed around!

Additionally --and this will be the last aside before we get on to the main course-- these are going to be the lunches I've eaten at the château where we learn at as well as the dinners we're making at home! I thought about making them two separate posts, but for this first week series I think they're just gonna be together for the sake of brevity (if I'm capable of such a feat) and ease of access. 

Ok: Let's Eat!

January 29th -- Dinner!

So, where I left off last post, we had just gotten on the shuttle bus to take us out of the Luxembourg City airport and into Differdange, where our château is. I'll talk more about that in my soon-to-be written château post, but for brief context it is a literal castle (not overly large, it was only a summer residence) that we have all our classes in. When we arrived there, we were each given a little welcome packet with the orientation materials and told to wait for our host families to come and get us to bring us to our homestays. Now, we hadn't actually received any response from our host family at the time, and we were half-convinced they weren't actually real. Perhaps nobody would claim us! In a whole different country!! Still, we waited at one of the tables in the cafeteria for perhaps ½ an hour, until a man came to pick myself, Sophie, and our third roommate and friend Maelynn up.

Seba, our host father, has been hosting international students for over 20 years now, though we had no idea at the time. His car wasn't big enough to fit all our luggage as well as us, so Maelynn went first with her and Soap's stuff, and Sophie stayed with me and my luggage for him to come back for round two. Unpacking and settling down was a whole ordeal that I have grand aspirations to write about soon... and it's not really important to this post about food but this is very important scene setting for the sole image I have of the first thing I ate upon landing in a different continent!

Aforementioned Custard filling, Chocolate Glaze Eclair.
Time of Meal (ToM): 20:26 (8:26 PM)

So, all that aside, when we get there we unpack and settle in, and I fall asleep for maybe an hour before Sophie comes in my room to tell me that Seba has made us dinner. I slept on my glasses and now I have these huge dents on my face and I'm a little disoriented from a previous 32 hours of no sleep so I'm slightly frantic and catastrophizing that I might not be able to go downstairs and eat anything at all, that I'm not ready to have a conversation with our host father and that I'll be so embarrassed because I'll look a total mess. After airing out those thoughts and sitting with them for a minute, I decided I would have to venture downstairs for the inevitable.

He had made us pasta and gotten us eclairs.

And maybe it was the exhaustion getting at me, or the hunger, or the tiredness or whatever, but I was so relieved to finally be here and be eating that I nearly cried. I don't have pictures of the pasta, because even then I was aware that when eating with him it would be kind of rude to just pull your phone out right then, but when he gave us the desserts I had to sneak a picture of at least my nearly last bite :).

January 30th -- Lunch, First Day of Orientation!

pasta !!! ToM: 12:33 :)

For our first official château meal, we were provided with pasta and a yellow soup whose contents were then and henceforth unknown to me. But everything still tasted really good! Before we left, they had us all note if we had any food restrictions or preferences, in order for them to have an alternative option available for us. Sophie and I were both placed on the no red meat list! (Soaps later requested to be on a no fish diet as well. I however, have maintained m love for cod and salmon and so-forth so if you see any meal discrepancies between the two of us, it's 'cause it's a fish day.) Every weekday they provide us here with a main meal and a more buffet-styling of a side dish. It'll either be a soup, a salad, or a variety of fruits. Alongside that, they always provide us with bread and packets of butter, which can come in pretty handy in cases of food distaste or additional carbs, or as something to break up our main plate. 

Additionally, you can see on my pasta a nice helping of cheese which I put on --they also offer lactose-free cheese! Which is so fantastic, because that means cheese for all! Sophie took the lactose free cheese and we were quite surprised at its meltability and general cheesiness.

And, if you're an eagle-eyed viewer of my plate & tray, you'll notice in the bottom right the pit of a nectarine. This will be a reoccurring phenomenon as we cycle through the lunch meals on days they serve fruit. 

 

January 30th -- Dinner

Sophie and her masterpiece! ToM: 18:52 (6:52 PM)

For dinner, we picked up some ramen and a couple of veggies that night to make a small dinner for ourselves. Our homestay has this really lovely small kitchen and it's been an absolute blast making meals together! Pictured here is Sophie with her incredible work on the noodles, and a small garnish cup full of spring onions. Alongside the noodles I also chopped up some carrots. 

And before you go and start making any more assumptions: our meals become better than this! This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we'll be eating. 

Up close & Personal!

January 31th -- Lunch

Time of Meal: 13:28 (1:28PM)

Now, for those of you who know my relationship with chicken, this meal may be a little worrying for you. For those of you who don't, allow me to regale you with my tumultuous trials in trying to get the driest, whitest parts of chicken. I detest "goop", which up to this point in my life has consisted of any dark meat whatsoever as well as the slightly fatty bits. To add another caveat, I was just starting to get the cramps and was generally not having a blast. I could only eat a little bit of the chicken thigh before I felt like I was going to upchuck all my hard work. :( 

However, the fries and the salad I made were tasty! So too was the muffin we got... though I didn't know what flavor it was at the time and can't begin to recall what it could have been now. When it came time to put our trays away to be cleaned, I felt incredibly guilty for wasting the food, but what's done was done.

January 31th -- Dinner

For dinner, though I don't have any photos of it, we ate a reheated frozen pizza that Maelynn had bought. As far as easy and cheap dinners go, it was fantastic. 3 euros for a whole pizza! Or, at least 4 slices of a pizza. We were still trying to figure out the oven, (it's from the 90s, and the heating symbols were not as intuitive as I'dve hoped.) So, the pizza was still kind of lukewarm in the center, but we were hungry and tired enough not to really care. 

We might be doing the same tonight, actually, if we're tired enough when we get back! 

    Update: we did exactly that. There were pizza shenanigans which I'll have to write up soon.

February 1st -- Lunch

Today's lunch might have been my favorite of all the lunches I've had thus far. Here, too, you'll begin to see a repeated pattern of me gushing over the vegetarian / no red meat meals, because they're so incredibly delicious! I mean, we do have a legitimate chef making our lunch meals, which is wild to say but it definitely tastes like it!

So, for today, we had a round zucchini stuffed with quinoa, mashed potatoes, a braised endive, and a peppery tomato sauce. Not pictured here, off to the left side, it the multi-veggie soup we had that day. What is pictured which you can clearly see is the copious amounts of fruits I have at my disposal here. Now, in this way I truly am my fathers daughter, because when we went to the grocery store the first day and I saw the prices of the fruits by the kilo and then thought about the amount of fruit they have for us during our lunches, the no-brainer decision is to simply load your bag up with as many fruits as you can get your grubby little hands on and take them home for you and your friends to ravage. Let me tell you something: these fruits? They're good. They're GOOD, good. In diametric opposition to the fruits we have at the Miami campus dining halls, which are so heavily plasticated you'd think they'd just recently come to life curtesy of some plastic fruit bowl fairy. These fruits, however, are diverse and delicious! Green, red, and yellow apples, bananas, grapes, kiwis, nectarines, oranges, clementines, pears... what more could a girl like me possibly want? Nothing!

February 1st -- Dinner

Our dinner tonight was simple, but so tasty! You can see our centerpiece is beginning to bloom with the labors of my fruit! For this, I took my Mom's recipe for her roasted vegetables, crudely appropriated it into Celsius and popped those suckers in for 40 minutes and our came a delicious roasted vegetable dinner alongside toast with a knockoff brie and apricot jam. The faux-brie has quickly risen the ranks to become one of my favorite snack cheeses, at 2.50 a block slice! For our vegetable mélange we had carrots, parsnips, brussels sprouts, and garlic.

February 2nd -- Lunch & Dinner

It's a dangerous red for today, and that's because... well, I hate to admit it, but I didn't take any pictures of today's breakfast OR dinner. They put the week's schedule out for lunches so I can confidently say that I ate Chili sin Carne... Vegetarian bean chili with rice! Simple, tasty, pretty good! 

PICKLE

I feel I must make an aside here though to absolutely shill these pickle chips Soaps and I bought that day. Bought them at our local express small grocery (Carrefour Express if you are reading this I love you) on a whim because I was feeling snacky and a little sad because the second was Groundhog Day. If you are unaware, the Harkins-Hodges are a bit of alternative holiday celebrators. We celebrate the normal holidays, sure, but we love those small off the beaten path holidays like Groundhog Day. It's not so much about what the actual Punxsutawney Phil has to say about the current state of our weather affairs, and more about watching one of my favorite and most classic time loop movies Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. So, my parents and I facetimed and screenshared and watched the whole movie together, and Sophie and I watched it from our TV in our main area upstairs, snacking hard on those pickle chips. I didn't get any photos of them, but they're in the corner of this one I got with Soaps holding Cheetos "Riz"os (for those of you unaware of current slang, "rizz", short for charisma, is used both as an adjective and as a verb to describe someone with charisma or someone trying to put the moves on you). 

The pickle chips are the green ones to Soaps' left!!

February 3rd -- Breakfast 

Toasted sandwich with Tea
ToM: 8:45

Special breakfast post to make up for the lack of food the day before! Most days I have an egg on avocado toast for breakfast because:

    A). I am fancy

    B). I did the math actually and by the amount I use of each material this meal costs me ~ €0.78

    C). Very tasty

But today I felt a little different so i made myself a turkey and cheese sandwich! Yum :)

Alongside it is some Auchan brand English breakfast, the same stuff I'm drinking right now! And take note of the shrinking fruit amount... we're snacking hard.

February 3rd -- Lunch

The third was Saturday, and we decided to go to Luxembourg City to check it out! The train and tram system here is free so there was no reason not to explore around the country! We went with a group of seven, and they had decided on this pub down in the valley called Scotts Pub, serving more traditional and simple English food. Soaps and I ended up splitting a chicken, and let me tell you something! They gave us a whole chicken which I was not expecting, along with the fries. 

Chicken before it met Me                                                                                                                                 Chicken after it met Me

As I've mentioned before: me and dark meat are frenemies. We are girlfighting. But, I thought, we're paying for a 25 euro chicken, I'm gonna eat what I can. And my goodness did we eat! I ended up eating so much of that chicken, I felt carnivorous. I felt cannibalistic! I felt feral! It was kind of fantastic! I still couldn't eat the fat itself, or some of the really fatty parts, and I got a rib bone once or twice, but I've really never been able to eat chicken like that before! I feel like a changed woman!

My Mom took a screen recording of my text exchange, which she put on Facebook. I can't do an embedded link, but you can find it here!

February 3rd -- Dinner

When we got home, we were pretty hungry! But we were also a little lazy. So pasta for dinner it was! Shell pasta with spinach and butter and spring onion. Lot of spinach, 'cause you know I love me my greens. 

Sophie and I live with a third roommate, Maelynn, who I think I've mentioned so far... but if I haven't that's who she is! She's really cool and very nice; --what I'm about to say isn't a but and rather an and-- she has no experience with cooking! Her family just didn't do much of that kind of thing, and because of their pickiness she hasn't had a very wide variety of meals. So, Soaps and I have been slowly introducing her to the world of cooking. So, Saturday, we taught her how to wilt spinach! I should've let it wilt a little longer, but it's not like it's dangerous for it to be a little snappier than soggier. 

I've really been liking home cooking; it makes me feel quite competent and kind of like a baby-in-a-trench coat version of my Chef-Dad.

February 4th -- Brunch

So, we've finally come to Sunday. The three of us decided that even though we're not drowning in the money we're throwing around by any means, we do want to have a small treat maybe once or twice a week. So, we've begun going to cafés around Niederkorn where our host house is and Differdange where we go to school. 

In this photo, we're sitting in the corner booth of Fischer's, a chain bakery that is somehow leagues and leagues better than any Starbucks or Panera, despite making an appearance in every town we visit. We each got cappuccinos, and they give you a small dark chocolate square free of charge! Maelynn, pictured here, got an apple danish,  Soaps got a chocolate-filled croissant, and I got a kind of fig/plum-filled powder sugar beignet!

Now, I've definitely had my fill of good food in the week since then, but my track record for blog posts is tragically low with the amount of time it's taking me to pump this out. My output will definitely get better as I'm finally getting settled, and I have a few drafts already in the works! I'll give you a little spoiler... they're about the château, the classes, and the towns. Soon I'll have some little ones as well on my Groundhog day experience, Lux City, and my most recent two day trip to Köln in the midst of Karneval!

Thank you for coming with me on my little "tour de manger", and I'll see you all in the next one (hopefully sooner than last time).

Au revoir! 

--Kirienne :)

A Luxembourg First week in review, part 1

A Luxembourg First week in review: Planes

First of All... Moien!

That's the Luxembourgish hello. Technically this isn't a week in review just yet, as I've only been in Luxembourg for 6 days so far. But, counting the day I departed from CVG, it's been a week since I've slept in my bed at home!

There's been a lot this week, both mentally and physically, but now that I think I've been fairly acclimated I'm going to begin this blog with my first entry, all about the flight!