Cooking in Luxembourg

the expats

2011-12-15T19:21:00.019+01:00

We left Luxembourg almost exactly two years ago, a predawn drive to the airport, then onto Geneva and a week in the Alps. One evening, I noticed that Alex seemed to be in a serious conversation with another boy—in French—dragging their sleds up the hill. I later asked Alex if he understood the boy. "No," he told me, unfazed. "But sometimes, Daddy, when people ask me things in French that I don't understand, I just nod and say 'oui.'" He had learned how to be an expat, just as we were leaving.

But before we moved, I'd started going to cafes downtown—mostly Coffee Lounge, on rue de la Poste—with my computer, after school drop-off. I opened a new word-processing document, and typed THE EXPATS on page 1. I kept typing until I'd finished a novel.

THE EXPATS is, by many people's accounts, an exciting read—it's an espionage thriller. My literary agent found not only an American publisher for it, Crown, but also Faber and Faber in the U.K., and another dozen international publishers (most of Western Europe, plus a few countries elsewhere) as well as a film option. But THE EXPATS is also a book about what it's really like to be an expat, and a parent, and married.

So I'm no longer Cooking in Luxembourg; I'm now http://www.chrispavone.com/. As a way of leaving this blogspot, I want to include a short passage from near the end of the book—edited slightly to remove some spoiler sentences (it is, after all, a thriller)—about leaving, something I've done a lot of in the past few years, always more bitter than sweet . . .

* * *

Luxembourg seemed empty in mid-August. Or empty of expats. Kate’s friends were all on family holidays—the Americans in America, the Europeans in rented seaside cottages in Sweden, or whitewashed villas in the mountains of Spain, or pastels with pools in UmbrKate walked around the old town, the familiar faces of the shopkeepers, the vendors in the Place Guillaume market, the waitresses on their cigarette breaks, the palace guards. All these people whose names she didn’t know, who were part of the texture of her life. She felt like she should say farewell to each and every one of them.

She wished her friends were here, now. She felt the urge to sit in a café with Claire and Cristina and Sophia, have a final round of coffee, a final round of hugs. But it was probably better this way. She hated goodbyes.

Kate returned to the apartment, a ham sandwich in a wax-paper bag, and resumed the task of sorting through the boys’ toys, picking out the discards, the donations, the keepers. They were with Dexter at the pirate-ship playground, for the last time.

It would be easier, Kate knew, the second time around. The hard parts would be less hard, the fun parts more fun. Like with the second kid, Ben: it would be less intimidating, less difficult, less bewildering, with the benefit of the prior experience.

Kate looked out the window at the expansive view, the broad swath of Europe in her sight line, this brief home of hers। Tears welled in her eyes। She felt a heavy weight of despair at the end of this. At the inexorable march of her life forward, toward its inevitable end.

the end is near

2009-11-19T21:19:00.002+01:00

The sun came out today, for what feels like the first time in weeks. The last of the golden leaves are still clinging to the trees, but every gust of wind releases fluttering waves of them, dropping to the wet sidewalks, sticking together in slick masses. Last weekend, Alex slipped in one of these, a cartoon spill, and came up damp and hurt and crying.

Christmas is being set up here in Luxembourg: a handful of wooden stalls for the market have been parked in the Place d'Armes--there will be dozens--and a couple of towering trees have been installed, but as yet they're undecorated. School has sent out an email that itemizes all the Christmas and St. Nicholas activities--there are 5 events--in between increasingly frantic missives about the outbreak of H1N1 (aka swine flu) with references to partial and full school closures, and vague allusions to doomsday.

The end seems to be hurtling toward us: the end of the school term and calendar year; hopefully not the end of the world; but definitely the end of this adventure. It's already been a month since we decided to go back to New York, lured by an exciting new job for Madeline (it's just like 18 months ago, in reverse). But it's not exciting, going home. Coming here was exciting. Going home is something else--it's comfortable. It's nice.

What's not nice is moving; moving is tedious. We've met with a relocation company, two movers, a cleaning service, and a painter; we've sent registered letters; started sorting through our possessions, yet again, trying to weed out at least as much as we've added. We've created "for sale" lists (with photos!), and have already collected (and spent!) some cash for our television. We've promised away our beloved stab mixer, which back in New York we will have to refer to by the much more pedestrian "immersion blender." I spent the better part of today hunting through our financial records and filling out forms for rental applications--we need to rent a place to live, in NYC, without being there! No, this isn't exciting.

And the thing of it is: it was just beginning to get fun here. We have friends, and something that resembles a social life. We travel all the time--Paris last weekend, Amsterdam next. We zip around in our big German car, crashing into stationary objects. (Does anyone want to buy a banged-up Audi?) We no longer have to learn how to do everything, except the new thing we need to learn, all of a sudden, how to do: leave.

a recipe: duck breast

One of the things I will miss is that magret du canard here costs about the same as chicken breast. I've always loved duck, and I've recruited Alex as an ally--"I want the duck!" he announces in brasseries--so I've been making a lot of duck breasts. But the other night, rushed, I didn't let the cooked pieces sit long enough before slicing them. Which meant that a lot of the juices escaped into the plate, forming pink pools. "What's this?" Alex asked. I told him that it was mostly blood. He looked at me like I'm crazy. "Blood!?" He looked down at his plate, then up at me. I thought he was about to flip out. "Blood is delicious!" he exclaimed.

A duck breast can be finished so many ways, but my favorites are sweet-tart combos: orange sauce (see my earlier entry); a spice-honey glaze; some reduced balsamic vinegar; or even just a heaping spoonful of well-made preserves. Or, as I made it for the children, finished with nothing at all.

duck breast

salt and pepper

Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Score the fat of the duck breast with a knife in a crosshatch pattern, which will allow it (the fat) to shrink during cooking without shriveling and disfiguring your whole operation; but be careful not to cut into the meat. Then do the normal thing with salt and pepper.

Put the breast in a nonstick pan, skin side down. Raise the heat to medium-high, and let cook for a couple of minutes, at which point there will be a pool of fat in the pan. Carefully--carefully! it's bubbling-hot spattering fat!!--pour this duck fat out of the pan and into something to allow it to cool before you throw it away (or before you strain it and keep it and use it for other things, like smearing on country bread before toasting). Let cook another couple of minutes, and again pour off the fat. Do this until the skin has become a deep caramel color, and crisped up, and looks irresistible.

Now flip the thing, and let the flesh side sear for just a minute. Move the whole shebang into your hot oven, and cook for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, and let sit at least 5 minutes for the juices to settle. Or if you want to see how your children react to a pool of duck blood, just slice and serve and hope for the best.

london

2009-10-15T21:27:00.000+02:00

We are astounded--maybe appalled?--to discover that our suite is huge: two bedrooms plus a large sitting room and a big superfluous kitchen and a voluminous hall, at the far end of which are little-boy-size doors that open onto the dumbwaiter, from whence room-service breakfast arrives. This might be the greatest thing the children have ever seen. "This," Alex says, "is our best hotel. Right, Daddy?" A Danish friend in Luxembourg, who's also in London this weekend, suggested we'd enjoy her favored hotel in Sloane Street, and she'd call and get us a good rate, and so here we are, enjoying our huge suite on a good rate.

It is a weekday; Madeline is working. So the boys and I walk around the corner to pristine, elegant Cadogan Square, with its matched-set facades of red brick presiding over the leafy park. We take quiet residential streets and poke down their serene mews to look at their neat little houses, more matched sets. We pass the painfully chic furnishing shops in Walton Street, and the tight clusters of inviting-looking restaurants that span the standard world-capital repertoire: the spare sushi temples, the cozy French cafes, the hyper-modern contemporary Italian trattorias. We emerge onto the broad panorama of Cromwell Road with the Victoria & Albert spread out on the right, and the Natural History Museum in front of the Science Museum on the left. We were at Science yesterday; this morning, the boys and I see the dinosaur fossils and stuffed birds of Natural History, not terribly different from the New York version.

After lunch we take the Tube to Notting Hill Gate, near the northwest corner of Kensington Gardens, to visit the Princess Diana Memorial Playground, which is anchored around a pirate ship, just like the central playground in Luxembourg. It is cool and windy and damp, occasionally drizzling; the cappuccino from the in-park cafe doesn't succeed in warming me up. We return Underground to Oxford Circus, then fight our way down Regent Street to Hamley's. Six stories of toys. Filled with salespeople whose job it is to demonstrate toys. One of them gets down onto the floor with Sam and Alex and an intimidating Star Wars vehicle. He explains that it's his JOB to play with toys ALL DAY. The boys are awed. Alex admits to me that he's afraid such a job would be too hard for him. "Because I'd want to take breaks," he explains, "so I could watch TV."

Then it's pouring. We dodge the damp pedestrian traffic and the terrifying vehicular traffic--too fast, and always coming from the wrong direction--down to Piccadilly Circus, for the subway back to Sloane Square and a huge-suite respite. Then at dusk we set out through the leafy streets of Chelsea. Each block varies the theme of restrained upscalery, modestly proportioned, in contrast to the immodest mansions on the other side of the hotel, in Belgravia. Everything in this city seems to come in matched sets. The Chelsea one looks like an idealized version of middle-class living, requiring upper-class income.

It is lightly drizzling now, maybe misting (do the English have dozens of words for rain, like Eskimos do for snow?) and streetlamps are lit, and half the vehicles seem to be taxis; it looks and feels very London to me. When we come out of Whiteheads Grove onto the semi-commercial Cale Street, I spot what I hope is our restaurant. There's a type of light--warm, glowing, soft--that seeps through the large windows of restaurants that I want to be in, and that's what's coming from the plate glass across the street. An attractive foursome of not-too-well-dressed people is hurrying in, out of the damp, the door held by a smiling hostess. Yes, I see the sign, this is Tom's Kitchen. Yes, I can see already, this is a place I want to be. Subway-tile walls, and tables that are slabs of warm wood, and soft linens, and that amber lighting, and a limitless number of staff who seem to be bringing things to us. And they're all speaking English.

This is my first visit to London. It surprises my friends, especially those from London, that I've never before been here. When I lived in New York (I say that as if it was brief and long ago, don't I? It was 40 years, until last), it didn't seem worth the effort and expense and expenditure of vacation days to cross the Atlantic just to visit another expensive cosmopolitan city where everyone spoke English and rode the subway, and it was cold half the year. I already had that. I wanted French, or a wintertime beach, or whatever--I wanted different.

Now, though? Now, I live different. Now, I want exactly what I didn't want from New York. I want a subway ride from one bustling neighborhood to another. I want crowded streets filled with conversations I can easily eavesdrop. I want chic shops with no communication barriers. I want Chinatown and hail-able taxis and a whiff--just a faint one, please--of street crime. I want the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what to expect, even though I've never seen it before. What I want is a different version of New York.

I love London.

year 2

2009-10-07T14:22:00.001+02:00

The maître d' from Bacchus is standing in the rue du Marché aux Herbes, a half-block away, smoking a cigarette. "Bonsoir!" he calls, waving. "Bonsoir!" I yell back, and continue walking Charlie Brown around the palace (which the boys and I finally have the chance to tour; the pic here is from the palace's yard). In the Place Guillaume market, the woman who sells the roast chickens asks if I've had a good summer; she says it's been too quiet in the mornings, too busy at noon. At the coffee store, as the machine grinds the beans, the counter-girl hands me some candies. "Pour les enfants," she explains, even though those children are not with me.

Sam and Alex have started a new school: we were not even on European soil for 48 hours when we dropped them off at their first day at the International School of Luxembourg; they are unfazed. There are familiar faces, of both the child and the grown-up variety, including some who defected from St. George's to ISL. There are also familiar faces at the other places I go: at the supermarkets and bakeries and butchers; on the shopping street of the Grand Rue and in the cafés of our own little rue de l'Eau; at the Just Move centre de fitness and at the Kockelscheuer tennis courts, where I shake the hands of not one or two but four different Swedish tennis coaches. I never imagined that one day I'd have such a broad acquaintance among Luxembourg-resident Swedish tennis coaches.

I need a haircut, and I know I must get to Coiffure Fred by mid-morning, before the appointment-only lunchtime hours. For good ricotta, I walk over to Galli y Galli, in the rue Beaumont, where I'm prepared for my interaction to involve pseudo-talking in French, Italian, and English. The boys learned to ride two-wheelers this summer, and the long, safe, flat bike path that we now need is going to be found in Bertrange, in a completely sign-less park that we'll access by walking through the parking lot of a small apartment building. None of these are things that I knew a year ago.

The car has come down with a minor ailment: the directional signals don't work. I'm never going to be someone who's comfortable at garages--I barely know where to put the gas--and the 100 percent absence of English chez le garagiste isn't exactly an enticement. (Plus, the guy who works the customer-service desk might want to pick up the thread of our previous conversation: how everything in Luxembourg is better than everything in the United States.) But I know roughly how to say what I need to say, and I've done this before. I've done most of it before. Because I live here.

a sub-recipe: sauce orange

It was 1983 or 1984 when I went on a dinner-and-a-movie date that involved duck à l'orange. The movie may have been that year's Woody Allen, or something along the lines of Terms of Endearment; I'm pretty sure we went to the Baronet and Coronet, though it could have been another of the big theaters that used to be clustered on Third Avenue, near Bloomingdale's. The French restaurant was on Lexington. When we left, it was snowing.

I remember this a quarter-century later because roast duck with orange sauce is a special-occasion dish, just as special as going on a date to a French restaurant when you're fifteen. Roasting a duck isn't something I want to do on a Wednesday night; actually, I'm fine with roasting the thing, but what I really don't want is any responsibility for the ensuing Superfund-worthy mess. Making orange sauce, however, is. In the past year, I've bought at least three dozen rotisserie chickens from the Wednesday-and-Saturday market in the Place Guillaume; it's a sort-of home-cooked meal that I don't have to actually cook. Though these chickens are delicious--especially the large poulets fermiers--even a great roast chicken can become boring. Enter orange sauce. For chicken. On a Wednesday night. It takes 5 minutes.

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 shallot, thinly sliced

1 garlic clove, minced

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons cider or sherry vinegar

2 tablespoons orange-flavored liqueur (Cointreau, Grand Marnier, or, in a pinch, triple sec)

1/4 cup orange preserves

1/4 cup orange juice

1/2 cup chicken or veal stock, or 1 tablespoon demi-glace dissolved in 2 tablespoons hot water

Salt and pepper to taste

In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter. Add the shallot, and sauté until golden. Add the garlic and cook another minute. Add the honey, vinegar, liqueur, preserves, juice, and stock. Raise the heat to high, bring to a simmer, and cook until reduced to a thick syrup, which will take a few minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper, remove from the heat, and stir in the remaining butter. Voilà!

I use the sauce thusly: I buy a rotisserie chicken. I preheat the broiler, cut up the chicken, put it in a roasting pan skin-side up, and brush it with the sauce. I broil it until the skin begins to blister and the sauce to burn just a little bit, then I flip it, slather on more sauce, and broil again until just before it burns. Remove it from the oven, brush on more sauce, and serve.

strasbourg

2009-05-19T09:33:00.000+02:00

It is 8:30 Saturday night. We have finished our Alsatian dinner at Chez Yvonne, a block away. Alex and his grandfather are doing pretend-karate--"Hi-yah!"--on the cobblestones in the gloaming, in the wide-open place in front of the gothic cathedral. The construction was begun in the 12th century; for more than 100 years, it was the tallest building in the world. We are staying in the aptly named Hotel Cathédral; we visit the also apt Musée de la Cathédral. It is a cathedral-intensive visit. During our circumambulation of the interior, Alex takes me by the hand. "Daddy, come with me, over to this cross. I have some questions about Jesus." Oy.

Strasbourg is stunning, looking and sounding and tasting like France and Germany at the same time. On this street, half-timber houses painted in the deep pigments of the Black Forest; on that square, the severe lines of Parisian hôtels particuliers. There are narrow cobblestone streets and the narrow river Ill with swimming ducklings and a spinning drawbridge and a canal lock. There are outdoor tables everywhere, serving every manner of pork--shoulders and chops, knuckles and feet, cheeks and bellies. The weather is absolutely perfect.

We take a ride in a tourist mini-train, listening through headphones to the English-version, British-accented guide. (Alex, shaking his head in awe: "She knows everything!") Sam, despite his broken arm, climbs to the observation deck halfway up the cathedral, and also climbs the jungle gym at a playground in an isle in the river. We don't accomplish all that much in the way of sightseeing--we never do--in our under-48-hours visit. We seem to be always heading toward, departing from, or in the midst of a meal or snack; it's especially noticeable while traveling just how frequently little boys must be fed.

Then we are back in the car, listening to the another British-accented voice, the GPS "map lady," directing us from the souterrain parking under the Place Gutenberg in Strasbourg to the souterrain parking under 22, rue de l'Eau, Luxembourg. Bourg to bourg, parking to parking, 2 hours exactly. Another successful weekend abroad.

broken arm!

2009-04-28T21:28:00.000+02:00

There were 3 possible expenditure categories for our E.R. visit: (1) parking, subterranean, 2 hours 15 minutes; (2) prescription painkillers, two types, one week's worth of each; and (3) doctor's fees and x-ray costs. And here are the actual expenditures: (1) €2,40 for parking; (2) €1,78 for medicine; and (3) €0 for the healthcare. I was fully aware that we live in a socialized-medicine type of place, but I still didn't see it coming that pocket change for parking would be the biggest expense.

Poor Sam. He fell out of a high climbing apparatus at a playground--a thing that, obviously, is meant to be fallen out of: it's a log suspended horizontally by rope, and it jiggles dangerously when you walk on it. It's Sam-trapment. He fell for it, and fell out of it, landing from 6 feet up on his arm, and then there we were, at the clinique pediatrique of the municipal hospital, an emergency room for children. We didn't fill out any forms. The receptionist took a 30-second Q&A and copied down Sam's social security number--the Luxembourg one, from a nicely laminated card--and sent us to the waiting room. Then a nurse, then a doctor, then the x-ray technician, then back to the doctor, all the while Sam quiet and morose and in a lot of pain, and Alex reminiscing proudly about his one and only hospital visit, back on Long Island, "when I cracked my eye open" (i.e., got a cut near his eye) and "needed surgery" (i.e., a few stitches).

If there's one thing that has filled me with dread about living abroad, it's this situation: my child is hurt, and I'm not understanding what's going on. Luckily, the only person we encountered at the hospital who spoke no English whatsoever was the x-ray technician; she was barking at Sam in Luxembourgeois, but he got the point. Throughout the experience, I had to use a lot more French than was ideal for all parties concerned. But we all muddled through, and I don't feel like I missed anything important.

But the doctors did: the x-rays of his humerus, where the pain was, were all clear, and we were sent away with a sling and painkillers and a return visit in 4 days. At which point we discovered that it's Sam's ulna that's fractured, at the elbow. Not a spot that was x-rayed during the first go-round. Ah well.

Sam is the first in our family to wear a cast; he can't remember anyone at school wearing one. So he's a celebrity, with everyone exclaiming, "Sam! What happened?!" He immediately tired of answering, but I think he likes the asking. He's also exhausted by lugging the heavy cast around, and it hurts his neck, but he's adapted quickly to having the use of only one arm: he can replace magic-marker caps, get his shoes on and off, pull up his pants. And at the playground in Strasbourg this weekend, he started climbing again, a mere two days after his plaster set. We were sort of hoping that the broken arm would teach him a lesson, but it hasn't. Or perhaps it has, but it's a different lesson than we were hoping for.

going dutch

2009-04-23T20:47:00.002+02:00

I was sipping a cappuccino in the kitchen of the split-level house, in a village near the Germany-Luxembourg border. Fifteen children were entertaining themselves at the birthday party in other rooms; I could hear Alex's unrestrained laugh of hilarity from somewhere. Here in the kitchen, a dozen adults were sipping and talking. In Dutch.

Somehow I've fallen in with a crowd from the Netherlands. When I'm around, they mostly speak English, and with barely any accent, much easier for me to understand than a lot of the native tongue I hear from England, Ireland, and Scotland. And it's from all these Dutch that I came to know about Keukenhof, supposedly the largest flower garden in the world, in Holland. (To clarify: the Netherlands is a country of 12 provinces, 2 of which are South Holland and North Holland, which contain most of the Netherlands cities that people like me have heard of. At some point in childhood, I was led to believe that the Netherlands=Holland, but it's simply not true. The language and the people are both Dutch, which I think I already knew, but the whole thing confused me--in particular, how did Denmark and Danes and Danish fit in? [answer: different place, different people, different language/pastry]--until very recently.) And what better place to go with my mother and her friend Harriet?

It was a long drive north through Belgium, skirting Brussels and Antwerp, then into the Netherlands, past Rotterdam and the Hague, heading toward Amsterdam on a road parallel to the North Sea beaches a few miles away--a lot of famous-but-unknown-to-me places. Windmills and canals everywhere, fields filled with cows and sheep and an immense population of fluffy little lambs, and of course with flowering bulbs--daffodils and hyacinths and tulips, all planted in long, straight rows on the flat-as-a-board earth. A color-block landscape painted by a pointillist.

The traffic was horrific--heading-to-the-Hamptons-Memorial-Day-weekend horrific, albeit without the SUVs. All of Europe seemed to be on Easter break this sunny day, heading to this famous garden at the height of tulip season. Teenagers wearing Day-Glo vests were directing traffic to park in fallow fields, like at an over-capacity-crowd championship game. The cost of the tickets was considerable; the scope of the gardens was impressive; the variety of tulips was staggering. But the boys were relatively unimpressed until we found the garden maze. I was compelled to wend through it ten times while Sam mastered every route and Alex never stopped talking.

We stayed two nights in Delft, from whence the blue-painted plates. Canals popping up (rather, under) like mad. Nearly every house made of brick, three or four stories high. They started building what they call the New Church in the fourteenth century; the Old Church is of course older. It's a lovely little old city. And, like Gouda a few miles away, I had no idea it was a city; just thought it was a thing in the kitchen.

a recipe: penne with white asparagus and fresh morels

Tulip season is also asparagus season, and asparagus is everywhere here in Luxembourg, especially the big thick stalks of white asparagus. I came across the first batch a few weeks ago at a tidy little primeur near our apartment, and bought a bunch. While the cashier was weighing them, I grabbed a blood orange, and she beamed at me. "Très bon, Monsieur," she said, congratulating me on my fruit. "Pour la sauce!"

She was correct, for that bunch. But this recipe is something different, a variation on what I used to have at a restaurant in the West Village in the early nineties, now gone. It had a bar on the ground floor and the dining tables downstairs, in a glass-roofed subterranean room in the courtyard. They served the asparagus cut in the same shape as the noodle, and in the same color--both green--and hence a confusing dish. That tickled me then, and it still tickles me now.

1 bunch white asparagus

1 bunch scallions, white and light green parts sliced thin, dark green parts reserved

1 small onion, quartered

1 carrot, quartered

1 herb sachet (I used parsley, thyme, a bay leaf, and a few peppercorns)

Salt

Olive oil

Butter

1 heaping handful fresh morels, cleaned

Freshly ground black pepper

Splash of white wine or vermouth

Penne

Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

The first thing to do is blanch the asparagus and make its stock. So bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil while you trim the asparagus, saving all trimmings: snap off and reserve the thickest part of the stalk, then peel the tough outer skin from the remainder. Cut the peeled stalks and heads into penne-sized pieces, keeping the head pieces separate from the stalk pieces.

When the water comes to a boil, drop in the stalk pieces and cook for a couple minutes, then add the head pieces. Let cook another 2 minutes, then try a piece--it should still be firm, but cooked through to edibility. When done, remove with a slotted spoon to an ice bath, allow to cool, then drain. With the water still aboil, dump in your asparagus trimmings, dark green parts of the scallion, quartered onion, chopped carrot, and herb sachet. Let boil away while you continue with the other steps.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil for the pasta. In a very large saucepan, heat a slick of oil and a tablespoon of butter over medium-high flame. Add the morels, season with salt and pepper, and saute for just a minute; remove with a slotted spoon to a large bowl. Replenish the oil and butter, add the scallion slices, season, saute until golden, then remove to the bowl with the morels. Replenish the oil and butter, add the reserved asparagus, and saute for a minute, until lightly golden, then remove to the bowl. Deglaze the pan with the wine, and empty the pan into the bowl. Don't wash this pan.

Cook the penne until a bit firmer than al dente, then drain, reserving the pasta cooking liquid.

By this point, your asparagus boiling water should have reduced down to a rich stock. Strain it from the medium pot into the big pan, and boil over high heat until reduced to 3/4 cup. Add the firm-ish pasta to this liquid, and finish cooking for another couple of minutes, giving the penne the opportunity to absorb all that asparagus flavor. When they're done, add the reserved asparagus, morels, scallions, and any liquid in that bowl, and stir around for a minute. Add salt and pepper to taste, and then a big handful of grated cheese. If the whole mixture has gotten too thick, mix in a bit of the pasta cooking water. Serve with more cheese on the side, and, in the middle of the table, tulips.

weekend in paris

2009-04-03T10:34:00.001+02:00

Explicit content advisory: If you haven't been to Paris recently, or you're not planning on going soon, this will be aggressively uninteresting.

As a Christmas present, Madeline sent me to Paris, by myself--no children, no cooking, no marching around a European capital in the cold, looking for a playground and a children's menu. So what I did was march around a European capital in the cold, looking for a grown-up's menu and some things to buy for children. Here's what I now have to offer:

A Book to Read if What You're After Is History of Parisian Personages: On the two-hour train ride from Lux, I read Edmund White's The Flâneur, which I was led to believe--by the title and subtitle (A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris) not to mention the jacket copy ("an exhilarating adventure")--would be about the exhilarating adventure of strolling through Paris. Now, I have to admit that I've written my fair share of book-jacket copy, which often involves a certain degree of, um, exaggeration, often consisting of appending effusive modifiers to anywhere they might possibly stick: to nouns, to verbs, to other modifiers, and even (if you're a real pro) to the occasional preposition. You name it, you can also name it better, livelier, lyrical, ground-breaking, downright brilliant. But The Flâneur's jacket is misleading on a whole different level: this book is simply not about what it claims to be about. What it's about is strolling through the history of Paris, which is a different thing. For some people, it might be a very interesting thing--a more interesting thing. But it's not the thing I wanted to read, before I set off on the exhilarating adventure of strolling through Paris.

A Place to Go for Sunday Brunch: Even though the book disappointed me, it did propose an intriguing question: what makes a place a big city? (Intriguing, though perhaps meaningless.) As soon as I got off the TGV in the Gare de l'Est, I realized one of the things a big city means to me: it's a place where everyone takes the subway. It was brutally cold, and windy, and it was noon and I was hungry. So instead of walking a half-hour, I took the Metro a few stops, to get myself to the Marché aux Enfants Rouges, a little covered market in the north Marais. We've now been to not a few European markets, and the territory is pretty familiar: the cheesemonger, the butcher, the fruits and vegetables, repeating themselves like the chain stores on Route 9 in north Jersey. But here in Paris, another big-city difference from the small-city markets: a Japanese stall, with fresh-cut sushi as well as hot dishes, cheap, people huddled at picnic tables inside big flaps of weather-resistant plastic.

But the Japanese stall was not where I was headed; I was going to l'Estimanet d'Arômes et Cépages, a little eatery in a corner of the market, far from any actual street. (And far from any bathroom: the restaurant's restroom is nothing more than the common facilities for the market.) It's a nice little place, with a laid-back atmosphere that feels more Seattle or East Village than Paris. My food was not extraordinary--a not-rich-enough mushroom soup, and a pig's foot that required a huge effort to get at the edible meat. But I passed this way again 48 hours later, on my way back to the gare, and noticed that it was pleasantly mobbed, and that Sunday brunch here means charcuterie, and that this is what the place is there for, and probably worth going to, because it looked like everybody knew they were in the place to be, for a Sunday brunch of charcuterie.

Charcuterie alone isn't enough for me; there's plenty of good ham in Europe. But at Sunday midday this market was bustling, and the street outside, rue de Bretagne, was fantastic: within the space of 50 yards, there were 3 separate shops--the butcher, the baker, and the maître volailleur ("master poulterer": what a spectacular claim!)--each with lines of dozens of people on the sidewalk. Everyone seemed to be carrying baguettes and cut flowers and two or three lit cigarettes plus a dog's leash, and talking to one another, and there was a catercorner face-off of packed cafés, and various wares to browse or buy, and as much as anyplace I've ever been in Paris, it felt like a little village in the middle of the city. This was a nice place to be.

A Place to Buy Antique Table Linens: Speaking of a little village, the Village St-Paul, just south of the rue de Rivoli at the St-Paul Metro, is another aspect of the big city that I miss, now that I don't live in one: a place where there are distinct neighborhoods for different retail specialties--one quarter for lighting, another for the garment trade, another for Korean restaurants. St-Paul is a pedestrian-only warren of a half-dozen connected courtyards, with perhaps a couple hundred antiques/brocante/crap dealers, a lot of which are open on Sunday, unlike most of the rest of the city. One of them, called Au Petit Bonheur la Chance on rue St-Paul, features stacks and stacks of those worn old off-white table linens that are so perfect, and sets of tins for pantry commodities (Sucre, Sel, etc.), and other stuff that if you're, say, me, you want to hoard.

A Great Place to Have Lunch in St-Germain: If there's anywhere in the world that doesn't need another good place to have lunch, it's got to be St-Germain. But still, you must choose, and a great place is preferable to a good one, and so: Le Comptoir de Relais, on the Carrefour de l'Odéon, just south of the boulevard. The carrefour (literally, "intersection") is a lively little corner, in exactly the center of the part of town where I've found myself practically every day I've ever been in Paris. And the Bar of the Inn (the inn being the hotel next-door) is somewhere close to an ideal lunch spot: agreeable service and a quick turnaround; not-devastating prices for great food (my cochon de lait, poché et roti, sitting on a bed of superb lentils, is one of the great plates of the year); and people-watching par excellence, in the perfect location.

I get there at about 1:30 on Saturday, a sunny and relatively un-freezing day--maybe it's gotten up to 35 degrees. The soldes are on, so the whole city is out, buying stuff, and then apparently walking through this carrefour. The tiny interior of the restaurant is crammed, and there are a good number of people waiting on the sidewalk, but there's one free table on the terrasse, and the harried hostess/waitress gives it to me, after an unclear exchange with other waiting would-be customers. The heaters are going full-blast, like a bank of stage lights suspended over the tables; there are thick fleece blankets for laps, in coordinating colors. A lot of the men in this part of town have refused on principal to wear proper outerwear, and instead they've got three or four layers under sport jackets, and of course scarves, all knotted identically. All the women are wearing hats--real hats, not ski caps or baseball caps. I feel like a leper because I'm not wearing sunglasses. Today, everyone in Paris is pretending it's not winter. Or, rather, pretending that the winterness of winter doesn't bother them. And so we're all sitting out here, in the cold and the struggling sunlight, watching one another watching the passersby, with a glass of wine in front of every single diner.

A Place to Have Dinner: Le Chateaubriand, on Avenue Parmentier in the 11th. No carte at all, just a five-course menu; the only choice you'll get is whether to have dessert or cheese. Some of the food was a little silly: one course was billed as a duo from South America, and it was a small bowl of decent chili and an unspecial ceviche, though I guess both could've been interesting to people from the east side of the Atlantic, who haven't spent the past 15 years getting barraged by ceviches. On the other hand, the meat course was extraordinary: a piece of Iberico pork--I think it was described as "un tranche"--that was cooked rare, and was by far the tenderest, tastiest (and reddest) piece of pork I've ever eaten. The staff were warm, and the room had that lively, chic buzz that is another hallmark of life in the big city, where people are not only waiting for tables at 11:30, but the crowd is still growing.

A Thing to Never, Ever Do: Go to a big department store for the soldes. It's one thing if the ship is actually going down, and you really do need to fight through such desperate crowds to get to a lifeboat; but not for a 40% discount on anything. Unless they start selling apartments.

A Place to Have a Drink, in the Middle of Nowhere: Mama Shelter was my hotel, way the hell out there in the 20th on rue de Bagnolet. I don't recommend staying here, because (a) it's way the hell out there, and (b) I saw no evidence that there's anything charming about the 20th, and it doesn't have any of the basics that make everywhere else in Paris so great, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was in the Bronx, and (c) the darkness of my room was laughable, and the whole aesthetic is much more acceptable to visit than to live in. But if you're having dinner anywhere in the northeast direction of town, and you want an actual mixed drink instead of a glass of wine, this is the place: everybody here is drinking real cocktails, made properly by bartenders who knew what they're doing. And it's physically a great bar, an under-lit rectangle surrounded by barstools, in the middle of a giant room with dozens of tables, very contemporary industrial-chic (something like Lot 22, but laid out better, and more upright). I don't know what the restaurant serves, but it's clearly a destination resto for people who don't live in the 20th. Plus there are taxis to be found outside, what with all the well-heeled people constantly arriving from the better arrondisements. (Yet another tic of the big city: fashionable people heading out to oases of chicness in des bas quartiers.)

A Place to Have Coffee, Heading Toward the Middle of Nowhere: If for some reason you find yourself east of the Bastille, tired and cold and maybe needing to pee, and you're in the vicinity of the Ledru Rollin station, then by all means glance around the intersection for a brasserie that might look a little down-at-the-heels. If it's winter, you'll need to push aside the semi-opaque plastic curtain that shelters the terrasse, where you don't want to sit, because that's not the point, not here. Go inside. Clamber up onto a barstool and order a cafe. Then let your eyes wander around at the walls, the bar, the ceiling . . . all a small Art Nouveau masterpiece, fluid forms carved from wood, surfaces painstakingly painted in now washed-out colors, then neglected for a century, not exactly in disrepair but certainly in need of at least a good cleaning. There's the clatter of spoons on saucers and the rustle of newspapers and the hushed tones of a low-key lover's quarrel in the corner; there's the surge of a small crowd coming in from the subway, familiar Bonjours all around. It's a remarkable little unremarkable little place.

in the alps

2009-03-06T21:58:00.002+01:00

"You have to beat the Belgians!" people say, seriously, hostilely, as if a bizarre conflagration has finally turned Belgium into the actual enemy, after so many wars in the crossfire. But it turns out that they're talking about getting on the southbound roads to the Alps before the Belgians arrive from the north. Since all the ski lodging on this continent seems to operate on the same schedule—weekly rentals that begin on Saturday afternoon and end the following Saturday morning (with presumably an explosion of frenetic cleaning in between)—everybody who’s skiing, in all of Europe, is also driving on Saturday. Ergo, you have to beat the Belgians.

Having done so with a wily move of spending the night at a rest area (!; more on this another time), here we are, in a village called Avoriaz in the Haute Savoie, 50 miles east and a long way into the sky from Geneva. The sunshine is brilliant. I am reclined in a canvas sling-back chair, sipping a pression—a tap beer—in the medium size, flatteringly called serieux. It is the last week of February, and this chair sits at an altitude of 5,000 feet; I have shed my jacket, my helmet and goggles, my gloves; I have pushed the sleeves of my thermal shirt up; the beer is cold. But despite all these presumably cooling factors, I am warm, from the sun, the snow’s reflections, the effort of skiing down the slopes. It is a better-feeling warmth than the beach's: a warm shot through with exertion and cold.

Everything about this place is fantastic. Avoriaz was manufactured from scratch in the 1960s in a preposterous location, perched on a plateau atop a massive cliff, towering over other ski resorts of the more normal type—that is, resorts that are actual towns—down in the surrounding valleys and canyons, in a sprawling series of interconnected ski areas called Portes du Soleil (the doors to the sun; indeed). Over the course of the week, we ski the pistes of maybe a half-dozen, hopping over the shoulders of a string of mountains into Switzerland, then back to France. The lift lines are short or nonexistent, the weather is perfect, the scenery is spectacular: these snow-blanketed Alps just go on and on, their summits cragged outcroppings with names like the White Teeth and the Giant's Head (not to mention, 20 miles south, Mont Blanc). The Alps are one of those European things (like Bavarian villages, like Paris) that look exactly as you'd imagine they should; they're caricatures of mountains, the mountains drawn by 5-year-olds.

To add to the imaginary scenery, there are no cars here: you get around on skis and in ski-lifts, or riding in sleighs, bells ringing, horses galloping through the snow, trailed by their aromas; literally, the taxis you hail are horse-drawn carriages. There are a few dozen buildings, many of them pointy and ten-ish stories tall, all clad in wood and draped snow, creating a jagged wooden skyline that looks like the Alps themselves. There are scores of restaurants. A couple supermarkets. A movie theater, a bowling alley, a skating rink. It is impossible to tell if any lodging is nicer than others, if any restaurant is better; Avoriaz seems completely egalitarian in its combination of luxury and lack thereof. There is no glitz, and there are no dives.

And there’s no one here except tourists and the people catering to them; the community is a wholesale fabrication. Yet it feels real; it's honest about its artifice. It’s a family place—the only people in their twenties seem to be the ski instructors and other staff—and fittingly the center 0f the village is the children's ski school, a football-field size bowl called the Village des Enfants. This is where we deposit Sam and Alex from 9:30 till 4:00 every day, and where, despite what appears to be endless standing around (we spy on them, whenever we can), they really do learn to ski from their abundantly pierced instructor, Vivien. Toward the end of the week, after school, I am skiing down the street beside Sam. He says to me, “Daddy, if you want to go faster”—and this is what Sam always wants—“you do this.” He leans forward, tucks his elbows into his body, rests his palms above his knees, and smiles. He is, as promised, going faster.

a savoyard recipe: croziflettes

I haven’t skied all that much in my life, and I’ve done none of it well. I don’t really know good slopes from bad, and I don’t care. Après-ski, as far as I’m concerned, should begin before noon, then recur regularly throughout the day.

France, of course, is more than welcoming to this ethic. Across from our apartment is a shop that sells 20 types of dried sausages, plus the other things you'd expect to find alongside 20 types of sausages. Almost none of the slope-side eateries are self-serve: you don’t stand around in your ski boots, carrying a tray and slopping chili into a plastic bowl. No. You sit at a cloth-topped table, and the staff who walk by say “Bon appétit.” You have wine or beer, then coffee and dessert. It is civilized.

At lunch in the sun one day, Madeline ordered a tartiflette, a potato-cheese mixture that’s widely available up in Luxembourg. But I was intrigued by the unfamiliar and unexplained croziflette variation. Turns out the potatoes are replaced by tiny squares of pasta—miniature dumplings, really—called crozes, layered (inevitably, one might say) with lardons, onion, and cheese, then baked, and utterly irresistible. I think crozes are probably impossible to find outside the Savoie; I certainly couldn’t find them in Lux. At an Italian specialty shop, I bought a small square pasta called quadrucci, but these lacked the luscious toothsomeness of the crozes. No matter what the pasta, though, this is a delicious plate of oozing richness—another heart-attack-with-every-spoonful (just look at this ingredient list!), as I hope you’ve come to expect from these missives.

Salt
½ pound crozes or any tiny pasta or dumpling that has some body to it
Black pepper
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ pound unsmoked lardons, pancetta, guanciale, or even good old ham, diced
1 medium onion, finely chopped
½ wheel Reblochon, rind grated, paste coarsely chopped
¼ pound Comté, Gruyère, or other sharp alpine cheese, grated
2 tablespoons crème fraiche, mascarpone, or heavy cream

Preheat the oven to whatever high temperature suits you. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil, cook your pasta or dumplings till al dente, drain, and season lightly with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, put a tablespoon of butter and your diced pork in a pan over medium-low heat and cook for 10 minutes, until the pork’s fat has rendered and the meat has firmed up. Add the onion and cook for 10 minutes. Season with pepper, and set aside.

Use the remaining tablespoon of butter to grease a gratin dish that’ll contain the eventual glorious mess. Pour half the pasta into this dish. Spread all the pork-onion mixture over the pasta (it’s going to be hidden between layers, a cholesterol variation on the girl who jumps out of the cake), then top with half the Reblochon and a quarter of the Comté. If you’re using crème fraiche or mascarpone, scatter a few small dollops around; for heavy cream, sprinkles. Pour the rest of the pasta over this layer, and top with the remaining half of the Reblochon and three-quarters of the Comté.

Slide this treasure into the oven. Let cook for 20 minutes, until the moist parts are bubbling and the top of the Comté is beginning to gratinize. Remove from the oven and let cool a few minutes before serving, ideally accompanied by either (a) a lot of crisp fresh vegetables, to be reasonable, or (b) a cold lager and peasant bread, to be Savoyard.

week 19: things i miss about nyc

2009-02-04T14:07:00.000+01:00

Being in New York last week--roaming the frigid yet crowded streets, seeing friends and family, stepping in and out of restaurants and cafes, of taxis and subways--heightened my awareness of things I miss about home. Above all is people; if you're reading this, I probably miss you. But even if every one of you moved here, I'd still miss:

Roast pork buns from a restaurant-bakery on Walker Street at Baxter Street (an intersection that to the untrained eye would appear to be on Canal Street, but, astoundingly, isn't) whose pork buns I've eaten in 4 different decades, but I've never had any idea of the name of the place.
Doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle at the Odeon.
A porchetta sandwich at Il Buco; fresh-from-the-oven bagels; salt-baked soft-shell crabs at New York Noodletown; good sushi pretty much everywhere; fennel-dusted sweetbreads at Babbo; breakfast at Balthazar; the fatty duck at Fatty Crab; a gooey, chewy slice from Ray's on 6th at 11th Street; chow fun from wherever.
Crowds everywhere, all the time.
The 8 minutes the separates the placement of an order with Excellent Dumpling House and those dumplings' arrival at the door.
The subway; unlimited-ride MetroCards; Sam's impersonation of a conductor, "Ladies and Gentlemen, there is a problem up ahead."
The West Village in the snow; Duane Park in the spring; the terrifying anarchy of playgrounds with water spraying willy-nilly in the summer; the Central Park Mall in the fall.
Soho House, aka Daddy's Office with the Swimming Pool.
The DVR; a virtually unlimited supply of syndicated sitcoms; and (I'm surprised to have discovered) the NY1 theme song.
Walking from TriBeCa through the civic center and then Chinatown and then the Lower East Side all the way to the absurd tennis courts under the Williamsburg Bridge.
The view of the skyline from the Kosciuszko Bridge.
Coffee bars where you can sit for a full day: Think Coffee in the Village; Cafe Cafe in SoHo; Pecan in TriBeCa; Grounded in the West Village.
Rampant casual profanity. (I'm in an Upper West Side hardware store, first thing last Monday morning, to buy a small screwdriver. "Whaddya need it for?" the guy asks me. So I can open the boys' new walkie-talkies, to insert batteries. The guy nods, purses his lips, says "Kids' shit" as a clarification, then shrugs.)
The spectator and participant sport (if you do it right, it can be a cardio workout) of celebrity-spotting.
Wallowing in my hypocrisy of loathing Duane Reade yet spending money there every other day.
Taking the boys on a post-dinner run to the Mr. Softee truck outside Washington Market Park.
Corner pizzerias (more on this follows).

a recipe: chicken parmesan

There are so many things that are great about corner pizzerias: the comforting reliability that you're never much farther than a block from one, and it's almost guaranteed to be open; the inexpensiveness of everything in the formica-clad shop; the uniformity of the experience; the portability of a slice (especially if you follow the Mike Carner custom of absolutely prohibiting the counterman from reheating it). All in all, bang for buck, it's tough to beat a slice of pizza.

Or a chicken parmesan hero. I miss chicken parm, whether it's an utterly unwieldy hero from Mariella's on 2nd Avenue, or a heaping paper-plate arrangement with pasta from Maffei's in Chelsea, or even the $25 entree at Patsy's (if someone other than myself is paying). But I haven't come across chicken parm here in Lux. To re-create that true pizzeria delicacy, I believe you have to (1) skimp on the Parmigiano--just a dusting, like an unpredicted snow flurry--because this should really be called Chicken Mozzarella; and (2) make a sweeter tomato sauce than feels natural (I believe that's how the pizzerias get the kids addicted). Of course, if you live in New York City, you'll probably never make chicken parm yourself. Why would you? Me, though, I have to.

olive oil

1 small onion, minced

tomato paste

1 small can of San Marzano tomatoes

salt and pepper

sugar, possibly

chicken cutlets

salt and pepper

flour

2 eggs, beaten

unseasoned breadcrumbs

grated Parmigano-Reggiano

mozzarella, sliced thin

First, make red sauce: heat a bit of oil in a small pot over medium flame. Add the onion and cook until wilted but not colored, just a few minutes. Stir in a couple tablespoons tomato paste and let cook for 1 minute. Pour in the can of tomatoes, bring to a vigorous simmer, and let cook for a half-hour or so. Taste for salt, which you probably don't need, and pepper, which you do, and sugar: remember, you want a sweeter-than-normal sauce, but don't add more than a teaspoon, tops; this is not dessert. Add some more tomato paste if you want it more tomato-y. Using a blender, a food processor, or an immersion blender, whiz this till mostly smooth. Return it to a low simmer until ready to use.

Preheat the oven to 350 (or, frankly, whatever the hell you want) and start to make the chicken, which is roughly the same as making schnitzel. In a large pan, heat a few tablespoons olive oil over medium flame. Season the chicken with salt and pepper. In 3 shallow bowls, put (1) flour, (2) the beaten eggs, and (3) breadcrumbs. Dip each chicken cutlet in the flour, then the egg, and finally the breadcrumbs, shaking off any excess of each coating. Place the coated cutlets in the hot oil, and cook for a couple minutes per side, until lightly golden; the chicken doesn't need to be cooked through, so don't try, or you may end up burning your coating unnecessarily. Replenish the oil as needed, between batches, and wipe out the pan of any fallen-off coating, which will burn if left in there; make sure the new oil you add gets hot before adding new cutlets.

Now, spread a film of tomato sauce on the bottom of a roasting pan that's big enough to hold all your chicken in a single layer, which you'll now arrange in that that single layer. Top with more tomato sauce, spreading some between the cutlets as well, but not utterly smothering them--you want some crispy breaded chicken to remain un-sauced. Sprinkle lightly with Parmigiano, then generously (but, again, not completely) with mozzarella. Slide the pan into the oven, and let cook until the mozzarella begins to bubble and ooze and the chicken is cooked through, about 20 minutes. Let cool for a couple minutes before serving, or, in the style of the pizzeria, serve it immediately with no warning and make everyone burn the roofs of their mouths in unison.

week 18: inauguration day

2009-01-20T16:10:00.002+01:00

Yesterday passed without any notice; Martin Luther King is not in the forefront of consciousness here. But Barack Obama is, and today is different. The inauguration is front-page news in Le Soir and Le Monde, the Luremburger Wort and the FrankfurterRundschau; there's a 20-page special section in Le Figaro. (The election itself was also huge news: this photo is from Rome, in November.) The bookstore window down the block features 9 titles by or about the Obamas, including the bizarre merchandising tactic of two different French editions--trade paper and mass-market--of Les Rêves de Mon Père.

Driving to school this morning, I was listening to Culture Français radio, as I've made a habit recently, to improve my French. CF is part of France's NPR network; this particular channel's focus is the arts, including performances. On Thursday evenings, when I'm driving to my weekly tennis club, they broadcast radio dramas, which are compelling with a surprising immediacy; it's like walking down a public hallway and overhearing an urgently whispered conversation from around a corner. You sort of have to listen.

On Culture Français there's a lot of debating--passionate and strident, but never yelling--about exactly the types of things you'd expect French intellectuals to debate on the radio: the human condition, the amorality of international trade, the fact that certain stars appear to have left the galaxy; ("Pourquoi?" "Ah, et voilà: la question, exactement: Pour. Quoi."). The word philosophie gets thrown around with a frequency matched only by the different forms of crises (la crise economique, la crise de la guerre, and, my personal favorite, la crise morale). It is from this radio station that I've begun to appreciate the crucial role played by the concept of jamais in French ideology; in America, we simply don't go around saying "never" all the time. But in France, it's apparently essential to stress that when something is not done, is not acceptable, is not moral or ethical, it is thusly jamais, jamais, jamais; the syllables are often drawn out as two distinct words, with an exaggerated pause between them: Ja . . . mais. I can feel the finger, transported over the radio waves, being jabbed in my chest.

This morning, they were discussing Obama. And George W. Bush. Not to mention: (a) George Washington, the père of les Etats-Unis; (b) the only discussion I've encountered of Andrew Jackson since Walter LaFeber's History of Foreign Relations class at Cornell, back in 1987; (c) in a cameo out of left field, Mikhail Gorbachev; and (d) of course, Nicolas Sarkozy; he is always mentioned, regardless of the subject, including those stars that are leaving the galaxy (the French verb is the more voluntary-sounding quitter), though I couldn't decipher how the French president is implicated in that astronomical scandal. The gist of this morning's conversation was that Obama is a true leader in the sense of being a remarkable man, not merely a common man who has been elevated to a position of leadership. The panel were grateful for this sensible shift in American politics, away from the catastrophe of recent years. They jointly lamented the recent American style of common-man leadership.

I'd expected to be touchy about these criticisms; I'd expected that Europeans would blanketly condemn all Americans for our egregious electoral decisions. But in person, I've encountered nothing with which I could take any umbrage; in the media, nothing with which I've disagreed. Mostly what I've encountered is enthusiasm for Obama, occasionally exuberant. In an epicerie in Paris last weekend, I fell into conversation with the proprietor, who was Middle Eastern. He asked me if I was English, and I shook my head. "Je suis americain." This guy then beamed at me, reached out, shook my hand. "Barack Obama," he said, ear-to-ear smile. "Barack Obama!" he reiterated, nodding. When I was halfway out the door, he called to me again, projecting his voice to the crowded sidewalk; people looked up at the shouted name, and smiled. It was as if this guy were thanking me for liberation in 1945.

And maybe that's what it is, for him; maybe today is a new type of V-Day, and not one merely--or even primarily--for Americans. I've no idea where that shopkeeper is from. But I realized, standing outside his tidy little store in a dicey quarter of Paris, that his mother, his brother, his children might live in a part of the world where the American inauguration has far more critical consequence than in America: perhaps life-or-death consequence. There are no bombs falling in New York or Texas or California that may cease to fall when someone new has settled into the Oval Office. American foreign policy is foreign only in America; in the rest of the world, it's simply American.

an american recipe: smoked ribs

We didn't end up going to the International Dinner last Friday night at St. George's School, because we, like many people, couldn't find a babysitter; it's a problem here. But I was somewhat relieved, because everyone at the dinner had to bring a homemade dish from their homeland. There'd be lots of chicken curries and pastas and I assume kidney pies, or whatever it is that British people eat. But what the hell is American food? Someone admitted she'd be bringing an apple pie, because she couldn't think of anything else; but I don't bake. (Alex, in the unapologetic sexism of little people, asserts that all cooks are men, and all bakers are women; Madeline does all the baking in our household.)

The only thing I cook that's American, as people in Orient know, is ribs. And I'm not ashamed to admit that two of the primary elements of my ribs are store-bought, and filled with I'm sure an ungodly array of horrific chemicals: jarred barbecue sauce and packaged spice rub. In the distant past, I used to produce home-made barbecue sauce, and mix up my own spice rubs. But I discovered that what I love about barbecue sauce is ketchup, whose ingredients label is depressing, combined with a bunch of other stuff that's not especially uplifting. So why bother? The same goes for the spice rub, which revolves around garlic powder, an ingredient that's otherwise not permitted in my pantry. So I've found packaged products that I like (Bone Suckin' jarred sauce, and some rub in a brown-paper bag that I buy at the Wayside Market in Southold) and I tell myself and anyone else who'll listen that it's the cooking method here that counts: a half-day of wood smoking.

pork ribs, baby-back or spare, dealer's choice

spice rub

hickory (or applewood, or whatever-wood) chunks or chips, for smoking

barbecue sauce

cider vinegar mixed with water, or a bottle or 2 of beer, for basting

First thing in the morning, prep the ribs. First, use pliers and a dry kitchen towel to remove the thin veil of silvery membrane that covers the bone side of most racks. If what you've got are spare ribs, they probably have a flap of meat on the underside, which you may want to trim off; I happen to like this meat, but apparently some people don't. Now wash the trimmed racks, pat them dry with paper towel, and cover with the rub, evenly coating everywhere and, of course, rubbing it in. Pile the racks in a platter, cover with foil, and let sit in the refrigerator until lunchtime.

Before you eat lunch, set your wood to soak, submerged in water. I do this in a stockpot, with a plate pushed in to keep the wood submerged. Wood chips need soaking for just 20 minutes or so; the bigger chunks could really use 45 minutes or more. I prefer the chunks, because they smolder for a longer period before they turn to ash, meaning you don't have to replace them as often, and also I can just rest them on the heating element of my grill (the chips, on the other hand, need to be enclosed in something); but chunks seem to be harder to find.

I use a gas grill. This, as well as my packaged sauce and rub, betrays me to be a rank amateur, which I don't deny. But I still contend that my ribs are good. So anyway, after lunch, place a handful of wood chunks clustered together on the heating element of the grill, under the grate; alternatively, for the chips, use a small disposable baking pan, folded over to enclose the chips, then poked with holes using a sharp knife, to allow the smoke to escape. Set the heat to high, so the wood gets hot enough to start smoking. Then reduce the temperature, keeping the flame only directly under the wood, to maintain smoke; I find that 225 degrees is the lowest temp that will maintain continuous smoke. Place the ribs on the grate away from the flame; the ribs can be piled atop each other and rotated occasionally, but they should not be cooked directly over the flame. From time to time, baste the meat with the vinegar-water mixture or beer, and move them around the grill, so you feel like you're doing something (and, more important, so other people notice you doing something, thus making this appear to be more work than it actually is).

Let this go on for 3 or 4 or even 5 hours; the longer you smoke it, the more smoky and cured the meat will get, eventually tending toward ham. When the wood has burnt away and is no longer smoking, replace it with new soaked wood. Finally, 30 minutes before you want to eat, use a basting brush to cover the ribs in sauce. Let cook for 10 minutes, then apply another coat, and cook for another 10 minutes. Then spend some time to carve the ribs: separate the racks into 3- or 4-rib portions, then run the knife 75 percent through the meat that separates each rib, to make them easier to pull apart; these are not fall-off-the-bone ribs, but are firm, chewy, smoky, and flavorful.

week 17, part ii: holiday in bavaria

2009-01-13T10:33:00.000+01:00

I now know why Germans make all those high-performance cars: they drive fast. The average highway speed seems to be 150 kph, aka 93 mph. It took me a couple days to adjust, at first barely accelerating past the recommended 130; at this, 80 mph, I felt like an old lady on her way to church. When I eventually settled on 155--pretty arbitrarily--I was still being passed willy-nilly, and these passers weren't merely inching by me. And when Germans are not on highways, they're on hilly, winding, insanely narrow roads--old horse paths, now paved. On either type, they need good cars. What I no longer understand is why people buy them in the U.S., where, let's face it, these cars really don't do much good.

Other things I learned over our week-long Christmas-break trip:

The people who work in hotels and restaurants in Germany are extravagantly nice. If I were working at the desk, and I saw my family arrive with our mountain of luggage and our unruly little boys and what has become the shaggiest dog in Europe, I think I might say, "Sorry, no record of your reservation, we're fully booked." But everyone welcomed not only the children but also the dog warmly. In Munich, the woman who served breakfast greeted Sam with a long, tight, surreal hug. And then brought hot chocolate. And then handed out candy. All the while prattling in German, cheerfully unfazed by our total lack of response or comprehension. Plus, no one batted an eye when we walked into restaurants with Charlie. In fact, it would have seemed silly to even ask permission; hunds are clearly expected.
The restaurants were fantastic, especially in Munich: the Osterwaldgarten, across the street from our hotel in the Park Slope-y neighborhood of Schwabing, where the goulash was rich and spicy, the schnitzel light and crunchy, the room convivial, the clientele chic; and Spatenhaus an der Oper, facing the opera house, in of course the ritzy part of town where the opera house always is, where they served a fantastic house beer and an equally fantastic sauerbraten with horseradish cream; and Augustiner Großgaststätten in the pedestrian zone, for cakes and a drink at a site where monks started brewing beer in the 14th century, and which now seats up to 1,000 people. When we walked in after the boys' first-ever ice-skating attempt in the Karlsplatz, at 4:00 in the afternoon, almost every seat was taken. Perfect.
The downside to German dining was that the only green thing at almost every meal was a sprinkling of parsley; I heretofore did not know that I could ever want a salad so badly.
Two of the most beautiful places I've ever seen were were a medieval walled village called Rothenberg ob-der-Tauber, and a small city called Bamberg. Both spectacular. And before this trip, I'd heard of neither.

Germany was never on my list of places I've wanted to visit. Maybe because of starting all those wars, and editing all the fun out of the book-publishing business, and my lack of interest in high-performance automobiles, and my suspicion that it's really cold there, and an apparently eternal fashion for eyeglasses that I don't like. I was right about the cold. But I noticed that it doesn't stop Germans from walking all over the place. You see droves of them strolling across open fields when it's 20 degrees, using those ski-pole type things they like to use, pushing strollers, and then probably ending up in superb restaurants in stunning towns, drinking exceptional beer, being friendly to strangers and children and other people's dogs, and in general making me feel like an idiot for not particularly wanting to go to Germany in the first place.

a recipe: schnitzel

When Sam will agree to eat any type of protein, a certain gauntlet is laid down, because that kid would happily subsist on a diet of exclusively plain, unadorned noodles. With maybe an occasional plate of spaetzle (or, as he calls it, "speckles"). So it was with a combination of surprise, delight, and trepidation that I heard him ask for seconds of Anne's schintzel, at her house in Munich. The trepidation is because I've had problems with sautéing breaded things here; I'm still not used to the electric cooktop, so there's more burning going on than I'd like to admit. But with fresh advice from an experienced schnitzel-maker--thin thin thin cutlets, plus clarified butter--and my own realization that I should just try a lower temp, I've gone at it again, a few times. Not only because I myself love a good schnitzel, but because I really want to keep Sam alive. And now I've come to the right formula:

butter

veal scallopine or pork medallions, pounded uniformly thin (I use a rolling pin)

salt and pepper

flour

2 eggs, beaten

1 tablespoon heavy cream

breadcrumbs

lemon wedges, for serving

First, clarify butter: put a stick of it in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, and melt it, skimming any foam from the surface. Turn off the heat and let the melted butter sit for a couple minutes, and the solids will sink to the bottom. Before the butter recongeals, slowly and carefully pour off the melted butter from the top, leaving the solids at the bottom; discard the solids. You now have 3/4 stick of clarified butter. Heat a couple tablespoons of it in a skillet over medium flame.

Season the meat with salt and pepper. In 3 shallow bowls, put (1) some flour, (2) the eggs beaten with the cream, and (3) breadcrumbs. Dip each veal slice in the flour, then the egg, and finally the breadcrumbs, shaking off any excess of each coating. Place the coated veal in the hot butter, and cook for a couple minutes per side, until golden. This will probably have to be done in batches: pounded cutlets take up a lot of surface area in the pan. So replenish the butter as needed, between batches, and wipe out the pan of any fallen-off coating, which will burn if left in there; make sure the new butter you add gets hot before adding new cutlets. Keep the finished cutlets warm in a low oven while you finish the others. Serve with lemon wedges.

week 17, part i: pictures of little boys in germany

2009-01-12T12:46:00.001+01:00

Christmas Vacation (top to bottom) outside the castle Neuschwanstein, in Bamberg, in a beer hall, ice-skating in Munich, and warming up with hot chocolate mountain-side.

week 16: christmas in luxembourg

2009-01-03T16:43:00.011+01:00

At first I avoided Auchan, which is a breed of store called, fantastically, a hypermarket. I was intimidated and somewhat revolted by the Wal-Mart-esque proportions of the place, its associations with economy-size bins of Doritos and the economy-size people who consume same. Plus, I was confused about the parking situation, worried that what I was driving into would turn out to be the private garage of an accounting firm. And it's in a mall.

But then I discovered that at Auchan's terrine counter there are 30 choices; it might be the only store in this country that stocks passionfruit puree; they sell Bresse chickens. I still don't much like shopping there--too big, too much of a production, too distracting. But when I need something at all specialty--a turkey, prosecco, whatever--I head to the centre commercial, park on the -2 parking level, and bite the bullet. As I did on the morning of Christmas Eve, to ensure that I could find (a) the proper accompaniments for foie gras, and (b) frozen corn and baking powder, both to make corn pudding, to serve with a standing rib roast instead of Yorkshire pudding, which is too last-minute-y and I think somewhat pointless.

Boy what a mistake. I sensed trouble when I could barely find a spot in the garage, but I assumed these were last-minute gift-shoppers, madly grabbing toys and electronics on Auchan's second floor; I was headed to the food, on the first. But I was wrong: it was a goddamned feeding frenzy. In Seafood, the staff were handing out freshly shucked oysters; dozens of men were gathered round, slurping away, while their wives waited at the counter to buy crates full of French coast oysters. In Wines--the size of a large Manhattan shop--the crowd was three deep in Champagnes. It was impossible to get your cart into Produce, so people left their carts around the perimeter, much like a park-and-ride commuter situation. There were three different sections in the store with large displays of foie gras and its accessories, including special knives, toasts, jams, salts, and dozens of choices of the engorged livers; people were grabbing half-pounds hunks willy-nilly. It was like a whole country desperately laying in supplies for Martha Stewart's house arrest. Hypermarket indeed.

But none of these people was Martha Stewart. Rather, there's a certain type of woman in Luxembourg who at any given moment seems to constitute an impossibly large percentage of the overall supermarket crowd: she's sixty years old, grim-faced, bespectacled, and built like a linebacker. She's got her elbows out and her dander up, and this battle ax looks like she will happily ram you with her shopping cart filled with 100 pounds worth of pork and potatoes. Wherever I turned, there she was, daring me to try to navigate around her.

Back at home, I found little boys chomping at the bit for tomorrow. I never before realized how much Christmas Day is nirvana for little boys; I certainly don't remember feeling the way they clearly do. But it was still the eve, grownup time, so I preheated the oven for the giant hunk of roast beast, and put the foie gras and its wine in the fridge, modulating temperatures all over the place.

a recipe-assemblage: foie gras

Of course, foie gras is not for everyone. Our dinner guests had never had it before, and one of them, I suspect, will not have it again. But I love it, and served it thusly:

The foie gras: chilled, then removed from the fridge 30 minutes before eating. Sliced 1/4 inch thick with a sharp knife that's wiped clean in between slices.
The bread: rounds of brioche, toasted.
The sweet: a wine jelly such as confit de Monbazillac, spread on the toast before topping with foie gras.
The garnish: a few grains of coarse sea salt.
The wine: Sauternes, chilled and thawed on the same schedule as the liver.

Et voilà!

week 15: winter solstice

2008-12-21T12:02:00.000+01:00

I understand it has already been quite cold in New York this season, and some snow has fallen; people have complained about the brevity of daylight. Yes, yes, yes. But let me tell you this: in Luxembourg today, the sun rose at 8:29, and will set at 4:37; a scant 8 hours and 8 minutes of daytime, while I see that New York will have 9 and 15. The disparity is not, I assure you, inconsequential.

And snow? It has snowed here a dozen times. It has sleeted, it has hailed; frozen rain has pelted me, frequently. Every few days, a dense fog settles over everything, then freezes the whole landscape white. When I climbed out of the car on Thursday, to go wait for school to let out, the thermometer read -1°C, and for good measure it was raining. Hard. And it was windy. You don't know what lovely is until you've stood in a gusting below-freezing rain at 3:00 p.m. with the sun barely above the horizon.

Alex asked, "Daddy, when is the sun going to shine again?" I looked at the kid, his eyes all wide with innocence; I didn't have the heart to say "May," so I feigned ignorance. He was silent for a minute, then he said, not for the first time in his life, "Remember, Daddy, I was the first in our family to talk to Katherine, in Orient." Katherine has a nice swimming pool, which she's kind enough to allow the boys to use. It didn't take me long to figure out how Alex got from Question A to Comment B, nor what the imminent C would be: "When we get to Orient next summer," he began, "do you think we should go to Katherine's pool right away? Or should we call her first?" This question was 100% earnest. I told him we should call. Then his follow-up floored me: "From the airport?" I almost crashed the car.

But then late Friday morning, despite a forecast that called for the usual rain, it became partly sunny, and the temperature rose above 40, where it hadn't been for weeks. Then the sun became brilliant. I walked out into the streets of the vielle ville, to wander around, to Christmas-shop. The whole city seemed to be with me, having laid down their umbrellas, dusted off their sunglasses and even their smiles; in general, this isn't a terribly smiley place. I don't think 40 and sunny had ever felt so warm.

a recipe: risotto aux crevettes et petits pois

In honor of the balmy weather, I felt like I should give us a break from my relentless stewing, from the heavy meats and hearty casseroles that seem like requirements when it's -1°C and raining; also a break from what may have become my pathological habit of including bacon lardons in every meal. But it's not as if I could grill some corn and mix an heirloom tomato salad; we're still where we are, when we are. So I bought these tiny freshwater shrimp that are sold all over the place, inexpensively, and a packet of arborio. The petits pois, I have to admit, are frozen. And I further have to admit that even if we were living next to a pea farm, at harvest time, I think the peas in my pot would still be frozen; there are some conveniences that are simply too convenient to resist. Plus nearly all the frozen peas I've ever eaten have been better than nearly all the fresh peas I've shelled.

Serves 2, generously

Olive oil

1/2 pound of the smallest, sweetest shrimp you can find, shelled

Salt and pepper

Butter

1 medium onion or large shallot, minced

1 cup arborio rice, or whatever rice type you prefer

Dry white wine

3 cups chicken stock, heated in a saucepan to a simmer, ready for action

3/4 cup frozen peas

Crème fraîche or heavy cream or butter, all optional

Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Put some oil in a small casserole or a deep pan over high heat. Season the shrimp with salt and pepper. Sauté them aggressively for at most a minute, then get them out of that pan quickly, before they turn to rubber. Toss some water into the hot pan and deglaze, then dump any scant liquid into the bowl with the shrimp. Replenish the pan with a slick of new oil and a tablespoon of butter. Add the onion and cook over medium heat for a couple minutes, until soft and translucent but not brown. Raise the heat to medium-high and add the rice. Toss the rice in the oil and onion, and let toast for a couple of minutes, until just barely coloring. Pour in 1/2 cup wine, which should evaporate almost entirely in a minute, while you stir. Add 1 cup of the hot stock, stir, and let cook for a few minutes. (This is really the only break you'll have when simmering the risotto--which will take a total of more than 15 minutes--so if you need to make a quick phone call or clean up some big mess you made, do it now, quickly.)

Once that 1 cup of stock has evaporated, add another 1/2 cup of it, stirring, and then another 1/2 cup, and so on, stirring with greater frequency and urgency as the cooking progresses, and the rice releases its starch and becomes more prone to sticking/burning/ruining if you're not vigilant. Once the rice has been cooking for 12 minutes, stir in the peas, and keep at the stirring and moistening. The risotto is done when (a) the rice still has the tiniest bit of firmness to it, and (b) it seems moist in there, but when you push the rice to the side, no pool of liquid forms, and (c) you may not have used quite all of your stock. Stir in the reserved shrimp and whatever liquid is in their bowl.

Remove from the heat (which means not merely switching off the burner, but actually moving the pot off the heat, or you'll risk having sticking issues). If you've got some crème fraîche lying around (because maybe you made blanquette de veau the other night), then stir in a tablespoon of it; some heavy cream would also do, or just butter. Or an absence of utterly gratuitous dairy would also be fine. But the cheese is not gratuitous; I think you need something to hold it all together, and to add tang, and salt. So stir in a handful of Parmigiano-Reggiano, at a minimum. Place the cover on this pot, and let it sit for a couple of minutes. Uncover, stir, and taste; at this point, unless you were profligate with the Parmesan, you'll probably want to add more cheese, and maybe salt and pepper too, all of which you should also put on the table with this pot, right this instant, because the perfection of risotto is fleeting.

week 11: mit frites?

2008-11-28T20:05:00.001+01:00

It was cooler than we'd expected for September 2nd, our first full day in Luxembourg. Nevertheless we sat outside, at a café facing the grand duke's palace (pictured), tired and chilled. We ordered sandwiches. The waitress asked, "Mit frites?" a quick little hodgepodge of Europe in one compact package. Which can also be said of Luxembourg.

We are doing our small part to stir the melange. I take French classes and Madeline takes German, both at Berlitz; once a week, the boys go there too, for French, which they also learn daily at St. George's (along with no small number of Britishisms). Admittedly, none of us is attempting to learn Luxembourgeois, although the other day Alex happily sang, like an aria, "Moyen, moyen, moyen!" when the supermarket cashier bestowed him with the local greeting. She rewarded his enthusiasm with a tweak on the nose.

Outside the classroom, I no longer begin every single interaction with the humiliating "Parlez-vous anglais?" The answer is invariably, "A little," overly modest, and so then there I am, living in Europe and talking in American with someone who probably speaks five languages. So now I've begun to forge ahead in bad French, then rarely understand what people say to me in return. Sometimes, that doesn't matter much; I end up buying a bit more cheese than I'd wanted. At a furniture store, I thought I'd be walking out with a rug, and even had a shopping cart, otherwise empty, for this rug. It wasn't until the transaction had apparently ended, and the clerk and I were exchanging confounded looks--he thinking I should leave, me thinking I should have a rug in my cart--that I realized I'd ordered the rug, which will arrive who-the-hell-knows-when; whilst I was trying to translate something, he blithely pushed on, and I never again caught the thread. Instead, I just smiled and left, empty-handed; this is not unusual.

On the other hand, at a play-date last week, I spoke French most of the time. This was at the house of Alex's so-called best friend, Lorenzo (how can Alex's best friend not be Sam? If ever there were a best friend, it's Sam, to Alex). Lorenzo's mother Sonia speaks passable English, but I suspect she doesn't understand anything I say (much as I can speak a little French, but can't comprehend nearly any of it). Sonia speaks Italian, which is not in my repertoire, and also some French. So we settled on this: she spoke in English, and I spoke in French. Our conversations ended up being far less sophisticated than the four-year-olds'. But we managed.

an american recipe: chestnut stuffing

When I began cooking in the early nineties, I worked as a copy editor at Doubleday, and so I used the recipes from the manuscripts that crossed my work desk. A book called Backroad Bistros, Farmhouse Fare by Jane Sigal was my go-to source, then later Alfred Portale's tall-food-oriented Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook, which was also a favorite restaurant; it's where Madeline and I dined the night we got the keys to our first apartment together, the rickety place over the wine shop on Hudson Street. When we began to have people over for dinner, I started making ridiculous multi-component entrees from Gotham, often involving duck. For side dishes, I'd scour other books from the office, such as Michael Lomanaco's '21' Cookbook, where I discovered non-Pepperidge Farm stuffings. I think there are four stuffing recipes in that book (I can't check, because '21' didn't make the trip to Luxembourg), and I tried each, a number of times. But never on Thanksgiving Day. For thirty-nine years, cooking Thanksgiving supper was the job of other people in my family, or Madeline's. My job, as I understood it, was to show up and eat.

Until yesterday. No one on this continent is going to cook a turkey for my family, if not I. So I found some cranberries, and a small dinde (about six pounds, the size of a big chicken), and mixed up a stuffing for the first time in maybe a decade. After my 21/Gotham phase in the mid-nineties, I spent nearly all my cooking energy on European food--Italian, French, Spanish--and ignored American. Now that I live in Europe, though, I think I'll start making stuffings again, tossing a little something foreign into the cultural hodgepodge around here.

Bread, preferably 1 or 2 days old, sliced

1/4 pound slab bacon, cut into lardons, optional

Unsalted butter

2 medium onions, diced

4 ribs celery, diced

1/2 pound button mushrooms, diced

1/2 pound (or more, if you like) peeled chestnuts, diced

Salt and pepper

3 eggs

1 cup chicken stock

Coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley

Set the oven on as low as possible. Cut the crusts off the bread slices, then cut the slices into 1/4-inch or 1/2-inch cubes. Spread on a couple of baking sheets, and let sit in the warm oven until completely dried-out, which will take just a few minutes if the bread was old, but maybe as much as a half-hour if not. You want to end up with 3 or 4 cups of bread cubes. (Stuffing, as much as anything, is an inexact science.)

Meanwhile, in a sauté pan over medium-low heat, cook the bacon until firmed up. Remove from the pan, leaving the fat behind in the pan, to which you should add some butter. Toss in the onion and celery and sauté until wilted, but still some crunch to the celery. Remove from the pan, and replace with the mushrooms. Cook over high heat, adding some more butter if needed, until browned. Add the chestnuts and toss. Then merge all the sautéed stuff together with good doses of salt and pepper.

Increase the oven to 350°, or whatever it is for whatever else you're cooking; I don't think it matters much. At this point, your bread should be dried, and out of the oven. In a large bowl, beat the eggs with the chicken stock. Add the dried bread cubes, toss to coat, and let sit for 10 minutes. Then, if excess egg/stock has collected in the bottom of the bowl, toss it out; if the bread doesn't seem moist enough--utter judgment call--sprinkle with some more stock. Add the sautéed vegetables, a fistful of chopped parsley, and stir everything together. Pack it into a Dutch oven, and spread a few pats of butter over the top. Cover and bake for 30 or so minutes, until cooked through but not dried-out. If you want a brown crust, turn up the heat, remove the cover, and cook for a few minutes to crisp the top, but don't let this go on too long, or you'll end up with dry stuffing.

week 10: a snapshot of winter's arrival

2008-11-23T19:20:00.009+01:00

"It's a-snowing!" Sam announced, first thing yesterday morning, pointing at the window. It's the week before Thanksgiving, and big fat flakes were fluttering, nesting into the needles of the evergreens, into the brown leaves that still remain in the deciduous trees (how often do you see snow in leaves?). But then the sun came out, and the temperature rose to the high thirties, and Saturday's snow melted.

Sunday is cold and windy, the sky a steely flat gray, the temperature struggling to break freezing, and losing. In the afternoon, the boys and I drive across town to the Bertrange neighborhood, to visit an indoor playground. I read in the cafe area, where half the parents are drinking beer or wine; one guy has a carafe of red, a plate of pasta, and a laptop in front of him. When we head home at four, the sky is already beginning to darken and flurry. I build a fire, return the pot roast to the oven. By five, the flakes are being blown horizontal, the tree limbs swaying. We have an early dinner, then the boys have a bath, and get into their cozy pajamas, and all the while the snow continues to fall. I put on a ski jacket and chunky gloves, and go for a walk.

Luxembourg is, everyone agrees, fairy-tale. In the snow, it's doubly so. The steeply pitched roofs with their dormer windows, the wrought-iron street lamps, the tiny plateaus and ravines of the cobblestones, all collecting their own dustings and piles. The deep gorges are cut hundreds of feet down to the little streams, with sweeps of blanketed lawns that are dotted with trees and bordered by thick woods; tonight they have the aspect of ski slopes, a bonsai-size resort. The gorges allow for a profusion of long-distance vistas, vast sky-fulls of swirling white. There's never much in the way of automobile traffic, especially here in the centre, where half the streets are pedestrian-only. In this little blizzard, cars are even fewer and farther between, the streets unplowed and -salted. It could be the nineteenth century, or earlier.

At the Place Guillame, two minutes from home, a cluster of Christmas-market stands have already opened, in anticipation of what's clearly going to be a city-consuming market; scores of log-cabin stalls have been arriving all week, filling the Place d'Armes, spilling eastward in the rue de Curé, colonizing the Guillame, along with a basketball-sized tent garishly adorned with color-gelled lights. The half-dozen stands surround an outdoor fire in a big drum and a teepee filled with picnic benches. They are selling Nordic nicknacks, sweaters, glogg, plates of poached salmon with dill sauce. Some of the girls who work the stands are throwing snowballs; a big fluffy dog peers out the flap of the teepee; a handful of people warm themselves at the fire, drinking glogg. In the open plaza, a toddler is wearing her snowsuit for the very first time, slipping and falling in the fluffy two inches. I head home. The whole town smells like burning firewood, smoke pouring out of every chimney. Including my own.

an incredibly short recipe: radishes

Dinner is a non-notable pot roast with carrots, turnips, purple potatoes, and red onions; the meat and vegetables are great, but the sauce just isn't, and that's something I'll need to work on. We have a crisp salad on the side, and a small plate of bright pink oblong radishes, white at the very bottom of the bulb and its long, stringy tail. I bought these at the farmer's market yesterday, for no good reason other than they were there right in front of me as I was requesting my other fruits and vegetables--you don't handle and choose your own, but request, say, "Deux cents grams des haricots verts, s'il vous plait, madame," and get what you get. The seller first assesses the buyer, then she chooses a quality of produce commensurate with her assessment of the buyer. I have no idea what I rate.

Astoundingly, Alex is willing to try the a radish. He dips it in salt, takes a bite, considers it while he chews, his brow furrowed. "I like it," he says, nodding. He takes another bite. "Even without the salt, I like it." Sam is thus encouraged to take a bite, but grimaces and shakes his head; Alex wants us to add radishes into his school-snack rotation. If I'd been challenged to a wager beforehand, I would've bet a lot of money against this outcome.

Radishes

Coarse sea salt

Good butter

You can dip them in the salt. You can cut a slit lengthwise, and slip into it a sliver of butter. You can do both. If you prefer an Italian version to this French style, you can dip them in good extra-virgin olive oil, maybe a little bowl of it that's been liberally seasoned with salt and pepper. And by all means, I guess, try it on a four-year-old; you never know.

week 9: the automotive life

2008-11-17T21:05:00.003+01:00

In our defense, it's a very tight squeeze at the entrance to the sous-sol parking: a narrow passageway that bends a sharp 90 degrees, on a steep incline. That may not justify the three separate incidents on two rental cars of scraping the cars' sides against the walls; nor the dozen times we've allowed trunk doors to slam against the ceiling.

On the other hand, the damages could've been much worse; the driving here is treacherous. I'm not saying it's like Rome, where it's hard to believe that the whole city isn't lying around on the cobblestones, bleeding. The traffic here is not anarchic; it's orderly, and calm. When stoplights turn yellow, drivers come to a controlled halt; people don't engage in high-speed car-to-Vespa conversations; there's no yelling. The hazards here are not driver-borne. Our challenges are created by the topography, the architecture, the climate. There are an awful lot of close-quarter turns circumscribed by walls--stone walls rising from narrow streets with absolutely no shoulders, sidewalks, or anything to separate the horizontal driving plane from the vertical crashing/scraping/sideview-mirror-wrenching planes. There are "streets" the width of modest alleys; some of these passages are two-way. There are medieval walls whose narrow arches one must drive through (such as the one in this picture, which we drive through every day); there are mountain switchbacks, right in the middle of the city. There are hills and gorges and pea-soup-dense fog; on most days, there's precipitation; when the sun is out, it hangs low in the sky, blinding.

Plus, to be honest, neither Madeline nor I understand what most of the traffic signs mean. And there's a wigged-out law called Priority Right, which Madeline has point-blank refused to entertain. (It may come as a surprise to you--it certainly came as a surprise to me--that there are two distinct madwoman qualities to my wife's driving: 1, she's inexplicably eager to ignore traffic laws; and 2, she engages in tactics that I can only fairly describe as evasive maneuvers.) Priority Right means you have to yield at intersections to any vehicle approaching from the right--i.e., you yield to traffic that's aimed at a side-impact collision with the passenger. Priority Right's role is amplified by the general absence of traffic lights: on the eight-minute drive from our apartment in the heart of centre to the boys' school, we don't encounter a single light. So there are a lot of judgment-call intersections. Which makes it fun sitting over there on the right, at semi-blind intersections in the fog.

And to ensure that the automotive life remains interesting, we just bought a bigger car--bigger than the Volvo we were renting, and indeed bigger than the Volvo we own in the United States of Absurdly-Large-Cars. (This might be related to my moving to Europe to not smoke cigarettes.) We returned the rental to the airport, which is the only place to rent cars here; what with the scrapes on the sides, and the fallen flakes from two months' after-school pastries in the backseat, and the pervasive smell of apples--we left a half-bushel in the trunk, for a month--I imagine Hertz was overjoyed to see this vehicle reinstated to their fleet.

Our new car is a used Audi, which seems to be the sponsoring brand for the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg--the grand duke and his entourage drive around in a fleet of blue ones, and today at school pick-up, I parked between two other Audi wagons. Alex, not particularly paying attention, tried to get into the wrong one. Then in the correct car, parking at the bakery to buy today's pastries and begin the process of filling this clean backseat with pastry droppings, he announced, "I don't want to get out of this new car." He played with the ashtray, which the boys call their garbage cans. "It's so lovely." Yes, it is; for now.

a recipe: agneau aux haricots

One morning last week, the dashboard thermometer announced that it was an even 0 degrees. Granted, that's Celsius; but still, not balmy. It's stew weather, is what it is, and I've been making a lot of them, filling big heavy Le Cruesets, sliding them into the low oven for whole afternoons, the aromas of slow-cooking meats permeating the apartment, the common hallway, the stairwells. And then taking the lid off, the steam billowing out, maybe some hot liquid slopping over the side as I stir up the delicious mess . . .

The best of my recent efforts was this dish, lamb with beans. For the lamb, I found a nice-looking hunk of epaule, with bone. This big piece of shoulder isn't something I remember coming across in New York, but it will now be something I look/ask for: gristle-free but still fatty enough to be juicy, tasting very lamb-y yet without gaminess. For the beans, I used a big can of flageolets, because (1) I live in a place where you can buy that sort of thing, and (2) as I've mentioned before (and will surely mention again), I'm none too good at day-before planning, which you sort of need to do if you're going to cook dried beans. I imagine that good dried beans, properly prepared, would make a better dish. Especially if they were those wonderful Tarbais beans I found at Kalustyan's last spring, and used to make Madeline's birthday cassoulet. But this dish was pretty damn good with the canned beans, if I may say so myself.

3+ pounds lamb shoulder, cut into large chunks, or stew meat

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

2 onions, coarsely chopped

2 stalks celery, coarsely chopped

4 carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped

4 cloves garlic, peeled

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 small can Italian plum tomatoes and their juices

1 pound dried white beans, soaked and boiled as per convention; or 1 big can of 'em

Dry but robust white wine

Bouquet garni

Generously season the lamb with salt and pepper. Heat a slick of oil in big Dutch oven over medium-high flame. Add the lamb, leaving plenty of room, and brown all over; this took me two batches, about 10 minutes total per batch. When all the lamb is browned, and set aside in a bowl, pour off all but a light coating of the fat/oil that remains in the pot. Add the onion, celery, carrot, and garlic, and cook for 5 minutes, till the vegetables are lightly browned. Push everything to the sides of the pan, spread the tomato paste into the empty space, and let it cook for 1 minute. Pour in the tomatoes and break them up with your wooden spoon. Add the beans. Pour in 1/2 bottle of wine; the liquid should just about cover everything. If it doesn't, add more wine. Put the lamb back into the pot, and tuck the bouquet garni in there too. The lamb should be entirely (or almost entirely) submerged; if it isn't, add water, stock, or wine until it is.

Now comes the big braising choice: stovetop or oven. This is a personal matter, and, as with religion, I'm loath to get into any arguments. But I now semi-understand my oven: I translated every setting, writing the English on a Post-It affixed to the oven door, along with a little Celsius-Fahrenheit conversion chart. So I now know, for example, that Heißluft plus at 150°C. = convection oven at 300°F. Which is a great setting for a stew, speeding up the process vastly while still working at a tenderizing, safe temperature. This isn't a situation I can confidently set on my electric cooktop.

Anyway, however you're doing it, cook until the lamb is as ultra-tender, stirring it around from time to time. In the convection oven, this took about 2 hours; on the stovetop over very low heat, I'd be prepared for nearly twice that. When the lamb is ready, the rest of the contents of the pot might still be a little watery. Set it on the stovetop over high heat and reduce until it's thickened; I also whirred an immersion blender (the straight translation from the German is the much more colorful "stabmixer") in there for a half-minute, pulverizing some beans into a thickening agent; before you do this, I'd find and discard the bouquet garni.

week 8, part ii: mrs. duxbury goes to rome

2008-11-07T19:42:00.026+01:00

There are two Mrs. Duxburys. One is a normal-sized Englishwoman whose job title is headteacher at St. George's School; she's the principal. When children are very bad, they are sent to Mrs. Duxbury's office; when they're very good, they are presented with a certificate signed by her. Alex received one for "being very helpful"; Sam's was for--and I quote verbatim--"careful and accurate measuring of a shoe with cubes" (?!).

The other Mrs. Duxbury, we recently learned from Sam, is much smaller. She's about three inches tall and made out of plastic, manufactured by the German toy company Playmobil; she might be Native American, or an Alpine milkmaiden, it's tough to say. She has son who's a motorcycle-ambulance driver (I can't wrap my mind around out how a motorcycle ambulance is helpful to society, and might have to go visit a large German city, to see how it works), and a husband who's a motorcycle policeman. The three of them and their two motorcycles, along with a wooden step-stool and something that seems to be a dais, accompany Sam everywhere during our four days in Rome. Wherever we arrive, Sam asks, "Can I play?" Then he unzips his backpack and unloads the Duxburys. He stands up the Mrs. on her stool, behind her dais; sometimes he gives her a megaphone; sometimes he also arranges a tiny plastic painting on a tiny plastic easel, off to the side, beyond the motorcycles.

Sam sets up this tableau in the Piazza San Pietro (bottom photo), while we await the pope for his Wednesday-morning blessing (we've come to see the interior of Saint Peter's, but, apparently, you can't do that on Wednesday mornings, so we hang around in the fantastic plaza, in a surreally a-religious soccer-match atmosphere). Sam sets it up in a trattoria in Trastevere, where the amatriciana is superb (middle), and on the Spanish Steps (top), where we rest after our unsuccessful quest to find a playground (if there are any playgrounds here, the Romans are certainly hiding them well). He sets it up inside the Colosseum, and at the foot of the Trevi Fountain; in the Piazza Farnese cafe where we breakfast, and in the wine bar near the Campo de Fiori where we have a glass of rosso with other celebrating Americans, Wednesday night. Mrs. Duxbury constantly supervises the boys, allowing us to finish our meals (sometimes not just one but two courses!) without having to flee in a flurry of antsiness. What more can you ask from a head teacher?

a recipe from rome: bucatini alla carbonara

Unsurprisingly, the pasta in Rome is sublime. And it's not just the sauces that are superlative, it's the noodles themselves, whether dried or fresh, which are universally cooked less than I'm accustomed to for a run-of-the-mill al dente: firmer, chewier, more substantial in the mouth. This seems particularly true of my favorite noodle, the gloriously thick strands called bucatini; it's tough to go back to spaghetti after you've had bucatini.

Bucatini seems particularly perfect for carbonara, which, I can't help thinking every time I see a plate of it, is the opposite of diet food: pasta with fatty chunks of pork and whole eggs and also additional egg yolk, not to mention cheese. I think the extra yolk might be gratuitous, and I've skipped it once or twice when I didn't have enough eggs on-hand. But it's ridiculous to skip it for dietary reasons; if you're making diet-conscious decisions, you're clearly eating something else.

Salt

Olive oil

1/2 pound sliced guanciale, if you can find it, or use pancetta or other unsmoked lardons

Eggs and egg yolks (see below)

Freshly, coarsely ground black pepper

Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, or Pecorino Romano, or both

1 pound bucatini or perciatelli

First things first: put a pot of salted water on to boil; the sauce preparation happens quickly. Heat a slick of oil in a very large saucepan over medium-low flame, then add whatever pork product you're using. Guanciale is the traditional choice, but I haven't found these pork cheeks here in Luxembourg (and they weren't terribly easy to come by in NYC either); on the other hand, as you may remember from past postings, it's practically easier here to find pre-cut lardons than bottled water; they're even available in gas stations. Anyway, when the fat has rendered and the pork is firm, turn off the heat, but leave everything in the pan.

In a very large bowl, beat 3 whole eggs with your choice of (a) 1 egg yolk, (b) 2 egg yolks, (c) a 4th whole egg, or (d) nothing. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt and then grind a lot of black pepper into the mixture. When you're tired of grinding, take a rest, then grind some more pepper. This is what I learned in Rome: this dish is better with a lot of pepper. Then beat in a few tablespoons of grated cheese.

By this point, your water should be boiling and your pasta should be in it. When the pasta is on the shy side of al dente, drain. Add it to the pan with the oil and pork, and toss over low heat until the bucatini are coated. Then pour all this into the beaten eggs, scraping out the pan. Mix quickly but thoroughly, toss in some more cheese, and mix some more. Serve with all due haste, in reasonably sized portions.

week 8, part i: pictures of little boys in rome

2008-11-06T16:38:00.018+01:00

From the top: with the post-election newspaper; Alex with his own gladiator in front of the Colosseum; finishing off some gelato; Sam on the Spanish Steps; Alex having spaghetti on the Piazza Farnese; in front of the Pantheon; Alex on the Ponte Umberto I, St. Peter's in the distance; and everyone inside the Colosseum.

week 7: cheap tickets to ireland

2008-10-23T17:23:00.016+02:00

The Frankfurt-Hahn Airport sits humbly in mild decrepitude in the German countryside, looking like an aging Cold Warrior, someone who was secretly important in the mid-sixties but has been slipping into oblivion for four decades, and now ekes out a living teaching Mandarin to American MBAs. We park in the short-term lot, along with no more than a dozen other cars, and walk past an inexplicably fallow 5 acres that separates the garage from the terminal. We climb steps to enter the terminal, further enhancing the convenience of the arrival experience, especially for anyone with strollers, or advanced age, or luggage. A blonde hustles up these steps in front of us, head to toe in black leather; she's not quite young enough to pull this off, but she looks correct here in the gray and drizzle of Rheinland-Pfalz.

It took ninety minutes to get to this airport from our apartment, half of it on winding two-lane roads in a thick blanket of fog, passing beside tight little villages with their houses huddling against the dense forests. Frankfurt-Hahn is not in Frankfurt the City You've Heard Of; it's about 120 kilometers from there, and the same distance from Luxembourg, or Bonn, or Saarbrucken. We are here because flying to Shannon, Ireland, from Luxembourg, whose brand-new luxurious airport is a mere 15 minutes from our apartment, would've been the most expensive flight I've ever taken. On the other hand, the Ryanair ticket for the first leg of our journey, from Hahn to London-Stansted, cost just shy of €20 before the taxes and fees. Which included:

A fee for not checking in online, which you can do only if you're an EU passport holder, so we were essentially fined €10 apiece for not being European, at every check-in. Of which we had four in our round-trip, because Ryanair doesn't do transfers: if you need to transfer planes to get where you're going, as we do, you need to buy separate tickets, and check-in separately, and be on your separate own if there are any missed connections or such. But the good news about airport check-in is that we get to learn that the guy handing out thermal-paper boarding passes at ticketing will also become the guy collecting those same flimsy passes at the gate, a few hundred yards away.
Another €10 apiece for "priority boarding." I had only the broadest idea what this meant when I was paying for it, but it sounded promising. Now I know it means you get to board the plane first, and, because there's no assigned seating, you then get to sit wherever you want. Unless you were really dense with the previous prerogative, you thus get to deplane first, shortening your trip by untold minutes, jostles, and annoyances. Worth every penny.

More Ryanair high/low-lights:

As we exited a gate onto the tarmac, a flight attendant wearing a long blue overcoat over her long blue skirt was crossing the tarmac riding a bicycle.
You're allowed to pretty much wander around the tarmac. At one airport, we realized we were being led to the plane by the passenger at the head of the queue, who was maybe eight years old.
They pipe in advertisements to the cabin of things you can buy on the plane--not even water is free on a Ryanair flight--accompanied by a relentlessly upbeat pop tune that, two days later, is still torturing me from within. Some of these ads are for booze, which they sell in little metallic pouches such as enclose Wet-Naps, and--get this--all the liquor is "buy one, get one free."
There are no pockets on seat-backs, which from my point of view, I missed. But from their point of view, I couldn't leave any garbage behind, so they don't have to clean their planes between flights. Also, they don't let you keep the in-flight magazine; the attendants collect the magazines before descent.
If the plane lands on-time, the P.A. system pipes in a trumpet fanfare while you're still bouncing down the runway, and the announcer brags about "another on-time arrival," which Ryanair claims happens 90% of the time, the best record in Europe. We were on four flights, and heard only one fanfare; karmically, I guess we have a lot of on-time arrivals due to us, so we can consider flying Ryanair with the boys. This time, they were not with us: they stayed behind in Luxembourg, with Grandpa Cake, so we could fly to Shannon, have dinner with Brian and Amy at Dromoland Castle (pictured above), sleep, then turn around and come home.

a quick and arbitrary recipe: chicken piccata

I didn't have the energy to do my French devoirs Sunday night, so I stay behind to do them Monday morning while Madeline and Grandpa Cake take the boys to school. On her way out, Madeline announces that she's going to the market after drop-off, and asks if I want anything.

I've never really been able to plan nightly dinners in advance. I know many people can, and in a way their lives are probably better than mine. But unless it's for a special occasion, I just can't visualize tomorrow's dinner today; I often can't visualize today's dinner today, except when I'm in the market staring at vegetable bins. So when Madeline asks, I glance at a fruit bowl that includes a couple of over-ripe lemons. I panic, and the only thing I can think of involves these lemons. I ask for chicken breasts and capers.

When we get home at 5:00 from school followed by the bakery followed by the playground, and I start to cook, I realize that the jar of little green orbs that came home contains peppercorns, not capers. So this piccata is without capers, which no one misses a bit, and saves me the trouble of brushing them away from the boys' servings. If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that my children don't want capers. However, they do both enjoy squeezing lemon wedges onto pieces of baguette, and then sucking on the moistened bread, which I'd never have guessed.

Chicken cutlets

Salt and pepper

Flour

Olive oil

Dry white wine

Chicken broth, optional

Juice of 2 lemons, plus lemon wedges

Capers, previously thought essential, now known to be optional

Season the chicken with salt and pepper, then coat in flour, shaking off any excess. Heat a slick of oil over high flame and add the chicken breasts; it's fine to do this in batches. Brown, flip, and brown the other side. Remove the browned chicken.

Pour in 3/4 cup white wine, scraping up the browned bits, and let bubble away for a couple of minutes. Pour in 1/2 cup of chicken broth, if you have it and want to; it'll make a smoother, richer sauce, while omitting it will make for a tarter, more lemon-y one. I skipped it this time. Add all but 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice. Add a tablespoon of butter and the capers, and cook for a minute to combine; taste and season with salt and pepper. If your chicken isn't cooked through from the browning, add it to the pan and simmer in the sauce until finished; if it is cooked through, just keep reducing the sauce until nice and thick. During the final few seconds of cooking, add the last tablespoon of lemon juice, and serve with the wedges on the side.

week 6: our container full of stuff

2008-10-20T20:15:00.014+02:00

“Maintenant,” one of the movers said to me, “on attend le camion.” He watched the last load of rental furniture and furnishings descend on the crane, then he popped a cigarette in his mouth, and walked out the door.

Sam and Alex were in the mini-England of St. George's School; Madeline was in the full-size version, working. I was sitting on the floor of the empty apartment, on the cheap Ikea rug that sheds like a sickly cat, spewing red tubleweeds all over the place (up a flight of stairs, then down a hallway, then around a corner, and under the bathroom vanity, I find red fur). It was just a month earlier that I was sitting on the floor in TriBeCa, watching the last of our furniture go out that door. I am spending a lot of time alone, on the floor of my empty apartments; it's a melancholy pastime.

Then after school, the orange container arrived. It had been released in the late morning from customs at the port of Antwerp, which (1) I didn't even know was on water, and (2) has an oddly compelling website (www.portofantwerp.com) complete with broad, unattributed pull-quotes ("The Chinese know that Antwerp is also accessible for big ships" [which at first glance makes sense, and then really just doesn't]). The movers discovered that the container was locked. "Avez-vous le clef?" one of them asked me. I tried to smile, probably unsuccessfully, and put my hands in the "what are you kidding?" gesture combined with a beseeching "please don't tell me you can't open this goddamned thing, because I have two children and NO furniture here" look on my face. He shrugged.

That's why the police showed up. Because at that point, the four movers started taking turns beating on the thing with wrenches, hammers, and pry-bars. They were making an unbearable racket--and possibly committing a crime--right beside the grand duke's palace (those trees in the picture? In the palace's yard). Alex needed to cover his ears (the other picture). The motorcycle cop--a woman, unexpectedly--showed up, and started asking questions without much conviction. Then she lit a cigarette and watched, half-amused.

The lock finally fell apart, the container pulled open, the crane restarted; the furniture began coming through the window at 4:30. The movers left at 5:59 and 59 seconds. Everything was inside the apartment, but nothing--NOTHING--was unpacked. Couches were standing on end; boxes were piled to the ceiling. It was anarchic and dark, and horrible.

It was three weeks ago. Then this Monday, after a daily, unremitting, thoroughly tedious effort of unpacking, and moving furniture around, and buying/carrying/unpacking/assembling crap from Ikea, and the endless shopping for everything, and the constant toting of packing materials to the poubelles room in S3 and of luggage and useless belongings to our storage in S2, it was done: for the first time since we moved, I didn't have to go buy a piece of furniture or hardware, or open a cardboard carton or suitcase.

So I grabbed a notebook, and walked the eight minutes it takes to cross to the other side of the centre ville, and climbed to the first floor. "Bonjour," I said to the receptionist. "Je commence mes cours aujourd'hui." I was back at Berlitz, restarting French classes for the first time since all the packing began, back in late July. I've finally come out the other side of it.

a recipe: escalopes a la marsala

At the market, about 25% of the refrigerated meat case is devoted to veal, roughly 0% to chopped beef. Veal is the thing to have. And for a quick weeknight dinner, the escalopes cry out with their promiscuous promises of being edible after just 5 minutes of heat. It's tough to walk away from that, so I don't.

On our preview trip to Luxembourg, when we found ourselves in the Zurich airport, Madeline was disappointed to not find schnitzel. This, I believe, is related to her penchant for muttering in the wrong language when flustered: if you confound her in German, she will mumble at you in Spanish; if you ask her a question in Spanish, she will respond in Italian. And if you make her hang around in a Swiss airport, she will expect Austrian food. But here in Luxembourg, I will serve her an Italian version.

This dish is typically made with button mushrooms. But although Sam and Alex actually like the meat and sauce, they don't care for mushrooms: you may remember that in Babar, the king of the elephants died from eating a mushroom. Even if you don't remember it, the boys do, and it scarred them. I will not sacrifice a kids-and-grown-ups-eating-the-same-thing meal for the sake of culinary integrity, so I omit the mushrooms. And I don't tell them that it's wine that makes the sauce so sweet. They wouldn't go for that either.

Veal scaloppine, the thinner the better, pounded to an even svelteness

Salt and pepper

Butter

Olive oil

Sweet Marsala

Beef or chicken broth, or just water

Season the veal slices with salt and pepper. Heat a large nonstick pan, then melt a tablespoon of butter in a tablespoon of oil. Add the veal, but don't crowd the pan--you want to brown quickly, then flip and brown the other side, in 5 or 6 minutes; don't overcook veal scaloppine.

Remove the browned meat to a plate. Add 1/2 cup each of Marsala and broth (or water), and cook over high heat, scraping up the brown bits, until reduced and thickened; this should take a mere minute or two. If you're in the mood for extra-richness, stir in some butter. Taste for seasoning. Return the veal and any accumulated juices to the pan, and let each side cook in the sauce for a few seconds, just to coat. Slide the veal directly onto plates and serve while there's still steam rising.

week 5: seemingly minor accomplishments

2008-10-06T11:46:00.023+02:00

1. taking out the trash

"Good luck," Madeline says. I grunt, and leave the apartment carrying two bags of garbage; I don't want to be doing this. I keep the hallway light off as I wait for the elevator, then descend to level RC (rez de chaussee, the ground floor). I creep through the short hallway--again, in darkness--to the sidewalk. Poke my head out to survey the action on rue de l'Eau: a couple is smoking in front of the Chinese restaurant to the south; a man is walking out of Le P.M, the bar to the north; across the street, the guard at the back entrance to the Palais Grand Ducal mans his gate; a shiny Mercedes taxi idles in front of the tapas restaurant.

What I am planning to do is to take these two bags of garbage, and walk nonchalantly past Le P.M., then turn down the slender cobblestone street/alley in the picture, called Rue de la Loge, which descends steeply for 30 yards and then turns 90 degrees, at which turn, tonight, are two large trash bins; I scoped it out earlier, like a burglar casing the joint. This is where I will deposit my bags as if I have every conceivable right. I definitely don't. But nevertheless I will walk with chin high, striding confidently, inviting any challengers.

I take a deep breath, and . . . and lose my nerve. I slink back through the hall, retreat to the elevator. I already have garbage stowed (a) in an unmarked, unlocked door in basement level sous-sol 1, chosen because it was unlocked and in the basement, plus it's clearly a utility-type room, what with some old furniture and a bucket, but no garbage bins, so it's decidedly not where my garbage belongs, (b) in a locked storage room in S2, which is otherwise empty, and (c) in the guest bedroom, which is obviously not ideal, so that's just where I keep the "fresh" garbage, until it smells too badly, when I have to go secrete it away somewhere. Which is what I'm doing now. Not my proudest moment.

Our relocation coordinator has asked the real-estate agent to ask the management company, who have responded to our "Where do we put garbage?" with their "The room in the basement." There are maybe 50 "rooms" in "the basement." Because there are three basement levels under each of three separate buildings--18, 20, and 22 rue de l'Eau, collectively called Hôtel du Luxembourg--connected by two levels of parking garages. Meaning that depending on how you define "basement," there are at least 9 of them, containing hallways both long and short, some with as many as a dozen doors. I believe I have tried to open the fifty-plus doors in the buildings, and not just the unlocked ones, which any amateur creeper-in-the-basement can attempt, but the locked ones as well; it was by trying to open random doors with random keys that I discovered that we had a storage room on S2, which I now use to store garbage.

This is how we lived for a month. And then finally word came, via an email that began, "We just got the update of the person in charge"---the person in charge!--and directed us to a far corner of the S3 parking garage--not in a "basement," according to my now-outdated definition of the word--under a building two addresses away, where it had never occurred to me to look, to deposit our poubelles. I can now dispose of my garbage whenever I want, with impunity, and I feel the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders.

2. mailing letters

My wife finds this hard to believe, but for my first 5 minutes in the post office, I could've sworn I was in a bank, and thus spent 5 minutes considering all the ways it could be vastly humiliating--or even dangerous, like I could get shot, by the armed guard in the corner (which was one of the clues that it was a bank, not a post office)--to walk up to a bank teller and wordlessly, nervously hand her an envelope. And beyond the bank/P.O. lack of clarity, to get a numbered ticket to wait your turn for a teller/window, you first have to choose between "toutes transactions sauf coulis" or "coulis," which I had just no idea, and again I had no dictionary, and my 50-50 odds of guessing correctly toggled between rosy and gloomy, depending on what I imagined coulis might be (stamps? cash? b0xes? bank-robbery notes?), and hence how ridiculously wrong or understandably wrong I stood to be. As it turns out: package is the translation, and my stab-in-the-dark of sauf was correct.

3. getting gas

Years ago, a half-hour out of St-Emilion, we put regular gas in a car that needed diesel, and the car totally broke down 5 miles later--totally--and we spent a whole afternoon in a countryside garage. So now we are on our way to Trier, Germany, and we need gas. (We're going to Trier to buy a television, because some guy in some store told Madeline to go to Trier to buy electronics. But as it will turn out, Trier is far too beautiful--the oldest city north of the Alps, is what a brochure claims, as well as the birthplace of Karl Marx--for us to spend our time wandering in and out of stores, looking for televisions. So we won't.) Not only does the idiot-light tell me I have no gas, but a little screen on the dashboard is blinking at me "vous avez 1 message," and that message is "you need gas maintenant." I speed up to like 140, racing to get to the next exit where I hope there will be gas. But no exit comes, and boy am I getting nervous.

Apparently the only thing that's cheaper in Luxembourg than elsewhere is gas. But we will save no euros toady: it's right over the German border--by a few yards--that the gas station presents itself. I glance between the "Diesel!" sign on the car and the "Diesel" sign on the pump a good half-dozen times--once bitten, six times shy--before agreeing that Madeline can pull the trigger. (How many Americans does it take to pump gas from a German pump into a Swedish car rented in Luxembourg? A minimum of two. I would've been much more comfortable with a third.) And five miles later, the car is still running, thank God, and we are crossing the Mosel into Trier, to not buy a television.

4. lighting a fire

I go shopping every day. For groceries, drill bits, floor lamps, chests of drawers, extension cords, pain au chocolat. I have shopped in a Home Depot-type place, a handful of malls, and a dozen supermarkets; I have shopped in four countries. And I have bought firewood, kindling, fire-starters. But now that I no longer smoke cigarettes, and the cooking range is electric, and I was never a Boy Scout, I have no way to light a fire. So with the firewood stacked, the flue opened, and the whole thing ready for sparks to fly, I take the boys out to find flame, preferably one of those long wands that people use for igniting charcoal grills. The tabac has nothing suitable; the electronics store also. On the far side of town--we've been gone now a half-hour--we stumble across a real tobacconist, with pipes and whatnot. A cornucopia of choices. But here also is the one shopgirl in the city who doesn't speak a single word of English, and the items I want are behind glass amid a lot of other shiny items, and so I can't point with any accuracy, and this is not something I know how to succinctly identify in English let alone in French, and it's going to be years before I'm ready to translate "one of those long wands that people use for igniting charcoal grills." So I begin a halfhearted pantomime that for all anyone knows might again be some type of bizarrely ill-conceived holdup--I'm making a gesture, I realize, that's not dissimilar to shooting a gun--while I see my children losing long-term-damaging amounts of respect for me with every passing second. Then thankfully a pair of words--"longues allumettes"--occurs to me. And so I buy long matches, because it's something I know how to say. Which also explains quite a bit of what I order in restaurants.

a recipe: abbreviated boeuf à la bourguignonne

Case in point: I know what this means, and my assumption is that you can't go wrong ordering beef stew in this part of the world--it's wet and chilly, and there are a lot of cows. People who know my habits know that there's nothing I enjoy so much as a good long braise, and this predeliction is not going to diminish here in Luxembourg, where autumn set in sometime in late August, and winter arrived in mid-September. (Hence the priority of finding firewood before a television; hence beef stew.)

Now, a purist might bully you that boeuf bourgignon needs to be garnished with pearl onions. And I'd have to counsel telling that purist to either shut the fuck up, or peel the things himself. My friend Kathryn insists that there will always be a place in her heart and kitchen for pearl onions, but not me; if there's one thing I hate doing, it's peeling squirmy pearl onions, chasing them as they bounce and roll around the floor before Charlie gets to them--I really don't want the dog to either eat or choke on blanched semi-peeled half-raw onions. Maybe it's because I have poor paring-knife skills (I also can't whistle properly; I attribute both shortcomings vaguely and admittedly unfairly to parenting failures, and I really can't explain why); maybe this is just where I draw the tedium line. In either case, there are no pearl onions in my stew, which saves a lot of time. Time that I then lose by incessant deglazing, after browning each batch of meat. But unlike the onions, this is important: if you don't deglaze after browning flour-coated beef, then flour will adhere to the pan, and burn, and turn everything bitter, and pretty much ruined.

Purists will go on to tell you that you must marinate the meat in red wine for a day before cooking; and you must garnish with sauteed button mushrooms and garlic toasts; maybe even that you're supposed to light the thing on fire with cognac. All of which are excellent augmentations--far superior to the pearl onions--and well worth it if you have the time. But if what you want to do is cook for a few minutes, then let something sit on a low flame for a few hours while you do other things, then eat, this shortened version is the way to go. In lieu of all the garnishes, just serve with a baguette, torn into chunks with your bare hands.

Flour

Salt and pepper

Stewing beef

Olive oil

Full bottle of red wine, preferably (obviously) a Burgundy

Bacon lardons

Onions cut into rough dice

Carrots cut into rough dice

Bouquet garni, or just a few sprigs of thyme

Beef stock, optional

Pearl onions, blanched and peeled, if you're nuts, plus button mushrooms sauteed in butter, and garlic toasts, if you've got the time

Put flour in a shallow bowl, and season with a lot of salt and pepper. Dredge the beef in the flour, shaking off excess.

In a large Dutch oven, heat a slick of oil over medium-high flame. Add a batch of beef pieces, giving them plenty of room; cover no more than 2/3 of the pot's surface. Brown on at least two sides, more if you have the patience. Remove the browned pieces to a mixing bowl. Pour in a splash of red wine, and scrape up the pan with a wooden spoon. Pour the wine/scrapings into the bowl with the beef. Wipe out anything that remains in the pan with a swipe of paper towel, and start again with more oil and beef.

When all the beef has browned, heat another slick of oil, then cook the bacon until it firms up. Add the onions and carrots, and brown them. Pour in the remainder of the bottle of Burgundy and the herb(s). If you've got a some beef broth lying around, add this is well--I happen to think this stew is better with a little more boeuf against the bourgignon, but this is probably another argument I'd need to have with any purist who was looking over my shoulder. Add the contents of the beef bowl, and bring to a simmer. Turn the heat down to low, cover, and let it cook for a minimum of 2 hours, but preferably 3 or 4.

Finally: turn off the flame. Keep the cover on. Let this sit for at least 30 minutes before reheating if necessary and serving. I'm somewhat convinced--say, 80%--that this resting period tenderizes the meat. I haven't been totally scientific about this (to tell the truth, I haven't been scientific at all), but I'm pretty sure that stews that sit for a bit are more tender.

Add the pearl onions, if you're that type of person, and remove the herbs, no matter what type of person you are; stir in the mushrooms and serve with the toasts, if you've done that, or merely with a baguette alongside.

week 4: st. george's international school

2008-09-28T07:44:00.023+02:00

We take the elevator down to the garage, buckle into the long-term-rental Volvo wagon, drive ten minutes out to the suburb of Hamm, and march the boys onto the small, tidy campus at the top of a hill. Their lunches have been fretted-over and packed into shiny new hard-plastic boxes that are packed into new nylon lunch-bags that are packed into new backpacks, which also contain the new indoor shoes--high-top heavy-felt slippers--that we bought the previous weekend at Le Bon Marché in Paris. We enter the assigned door at the end of the corridor, find the assigned classrooms; we say hello to the teachers, exchange final hugs and kisses. Then the little boys turn away and launch into their new worlds, barely a glance back at us; I am suddenly overcome by my irrelevance.

Alex's teacher is Mrs. Fyfe, Sam's is Mrs. Foulds; these are pronounced Fife and Folds, like a medieval-music-themed laundromat. Within a week, the boys start saying things like "rubbish bin"; Alex compliments his brother, "Well done, Sam, well done." This is what happens when the American school, here called International School of Luxembourg, has no room for your Ecuadorean-accented-Spanish-speaking New Yorkers: they attend a St.-Somebody's school and quickly become little Englishmen.

I collect the boys at the end of that first day, and they greet each other with relieved smiles--this is really the first time that they've been apart in school, and the first full schoolday they've ever experienced--but initially no talking. After a minute, Alex breaks the silence. "Sam," he says, without looking at his brother, "do you have any friends yet?" Sam glances at Alex, shakes his head, and keeps walking. "I have one," Alex says, nodding in agreement with himself. "But I don't know his name."

a recipe: macaroni and cheese

I ask Madeline if she wants anything from the farmer's market. "Yes," she says, "there's a guy who looks like he specializes in Comté." I walk over to the square, where this guy isn't hard to find: his sign says, "Ici on spécialise dans le Comté," and he's standing beside an intimidating round of Alpine-looking cheese that must be 2 feet across and approaching 100 pounds. He also has a few baskets of bread, and a refrigerated case that holds a handful of other, neglected cheeses; but the big Comté is out in the open, on a board, ready for action. "Moyen," he says to me, which is "hello" in Luxembourgeois or "middle" in French.

"Moyen," I answer. "Le Comté?" I keep my Luxembourgeois-French sentences pretty brief and straightforward; and perhaps "sentences" isn't entirely accurate.

He nods, picks up his guillotine--a long, curved blade with handles on either side--and places it on the cheese. "Ça?" He counters my five syllables with one.

And I respond with no syllables--a mere nod and a smile--without really considering the question, until he leans onto his guillotine and slices off a gigantic section of cheese. I assumed his Ça? meant that he was asking me to confirm which cheese I wanted, but now I realize that my assumption was asinine; in actuality he was asking me if I wanted him to cut the thing where he'd placed the blade. And this is how I came to buy 2-plus pounds of Comté.

So when that first week of school rolled around, and I felt like making the most comforting of all comfort foods, I had a decent supply of Comté. But I didn't think Comté alone would make a good mac-and-cheese--too nutty, not sharp enough, and, as far as the boys are concerned, too white--so I combined it with aged Mimolette, whose butterscotch assertiveness and deep orange color create the flavor I want and the appearance my kids prefer. There are no boxes of Annie's here in Luxembourg; there's not even Kraft. So the boys will have to settle for farmstand Comté combined with vieille Mimolette.

1/4 cup unsalted butter

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

Milk

Powdered mustard, optional

3/4 pound cheese (see below), grated

Salt and pepper

1 pound small pasta

1/2 cup bacon lardons, for gilding the lily, and breadcrumbs plus butter plus grated Parmesan, for yet more ornamentation

In a large pot, melt the butter over medium-low heat. When the foam dissipates, throw in the flour. Whisk for a minute. Add a splash of milk and whisk for a few seconds; add another splash and whisk some more. Add 1/2 cup and continue to whisk. And now make a decision: thick cheese sauce, thin cheese sauce, or in the middle? For thick, you need about 2 cups milk total; for thin, use an entire litre, as they'd spell it here at St. George's. Whichever amount you use, whisk all the milk for a couple of minutes, until hot and slightly thickened; don't let it boil.

Now, if the cheeses you're using are relatively mild--like Comté or Gruyère combined with an American Cheddar--then you might want to use some mustard for a bit of kick: a teaspoon of mustard powder, dissolved in a teaspoon of warm water and then dumped into the thickened milk. But if you've got a salty, assertive Mimolette or a farmstead English Cheddar or an aged Gouda, you don't need the mustard. I usually use a combination of cheeses: one nutty Alpine with a lot of butter content, and one salty cheese with tang and sweetness. Whatever you're using, add the shredded cheese into the hot milk, and stir until all the cheese has melted and the mixture is smooth. Taste, and add salt and pepper if you want (but skip the salt if you're going to add the bacon). Keep the cheese sauce warm over very low flame, stirring frequently.

Boil and drain the pasta. Pour it into the cheese sauce, stir until well-combined, et voilà!

If you want to make this extra-decadent, and if you have bacon lardons lying around (as do I, and everyone else in Luxembourg; see Week 2), fry them over medium heat in a small dry skillet until firmed-up and the fat has rendered. Drain on paper towels, then stir into the cheesed pasta. To go really nuts, pour this mixture into a casserole. Then toast a handful of breadcrumbs with a pat of butter in a skillet, tossing around for a minute or two, till golden (but be careful: golden breadcrumbs quickly turn to burnt ones). Top the noodles with the toasted breadcrumbs, then sprinkle the whole outfit with Parmesan. Broil till the topping is lightly browned, and preschedule a week's worth of green salads to follow.

week 3, part i: pictures of little boys in paris

2008-09-28T07:34:00.009+02:00

week 3, part ii: paris

2008-09-19T14:10:00.030+02:00

"You're right in the middle of everything!" "You can get anywhere so quickly!!" "You'll see all of Europe!!!" These were the encouraging things we heard from friends—from ourselves—when we announced that we were leaving NYC for a place that might be a city in Germany, or perhaps in Switzerland; or was that Liechtenstein? Whatever Luxembourg was, everyone agreed, it's certainly smack in the middle of Europe, somewhere. Maybe close to Paris?

We now know: it's two hours on the TGV. So our second weekend in Luxembourg, we went to Paris. Highlights:

The best playground we found is in the Jardins du Luxembourg (irony!). You have to pay to enter the aire de jeu, but you're not in Paris to save money, are you? Of course not.
Astoundingly and I must say tragically, there are no real playgrounds in the greenery along the Champs d'Elysees.
Sam insists that Orangina is "too spicy."
Stores that specialize in comic books and action figures are on rue Dante, in the 5eme. This too is probably not why you're in Paris, but you're a grown-up; if you were a non-grown-up, this might be exactly why you're in Paris.
There's nothing as great as being able to control the subway doors BY YOURSELF!
You wait a long time to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower; you climb a lot of stairs to get to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Both are worth it. The aquarium at Trocadéro, on the other hand, is decidedly not, unless you're obsessed with undersea-themed feature films, because, oddly enough, the Paris aquarium seems to be mainly a half-assed museum of genre cinema.

Not similar to our last visit. Then, we wandered around the Marais, we bought brocante at the flea market, we went to the one-guy museums (Picasso, Rodin, etc.), we had a six-course, four-hour dinner. This time, we barely glanced at the museums as we cruised by them on the Batobus; we had a lunch in a chain restaurant where Alex refused to relinquish the plastic hippopotamus-shaped toothpicks that came inserted in his hamburger.

So by the time Monday morning rolled around (toothpicks still in Alex's possession), and Madeline was off to the "future of" conference that was our excuse to be in Paris, we hadn't yet had a truly good meal. I wanted one. And I remembered sitting in a SoHo brasserie with its owner, meeting about his cookbook. We’d finished discussing our business, but there was still coffee on the table, and neither of us was in a rush. Madeline and I were going to Paris a few weeks later, so I asked his advice on where we should eat. His face lit up. “There’s a little brasserie on the Île St-Louis,” he said, “called, I think, the Brasserie Île St-Louis. It was one of my models for this place.” He looked around his restaurant. “You must go there.”

That was seven years ago. So now, Monday evening, the boys and I get to Île St-Louis on foot from “the superhero store," where after much debate (about 30 minutes, no exaggeration) we bought a Superman for Sam (because of initials) and a Batman for Alex (because five of them were not enough). Madeline hasn’t arrived at the restaurant, and I don't want to squander any well-behaved-in-a-public-place time until we're ready to put food in our mouths, so I forego a table. I tell the boys to just plop down and play with their new toys on the sidewalk, right there at the foot of the Pont St-Louis, across the little slip of Seine from Notre Dame. They start enacting some type of drama, during which I learn that Batman is Superman’s father. At one point, the two superheroes are separating, turning in for the night. Sam is using the high falsetto that means he's speaking in a non-Sam role; this is how he talks about a quarter of the time. “Good night, Dad,” Sam says as Superman. “I love you.”

Batman is walking away. Alex pauses Batman, turns the action figure around to address Superman: “I love you too."

The river is shimmering silver in the gloaming, and warm windows pop up in the endless procession of stone buildings that line the banks; Paris is as breathtaking as ever. Madeline and I ate better, as a rule, the last time we were here. But back then, I had no idea that Batman and Superman exchanged I-love-you's before bed, which is ample compensation for the loss of Michelin stars.

a recipe: slow-roasted rosemary-garlic pork shoulder with applesauce

We are shown to a table—a little RESERVÉ placard in the middle of the red-checkered cloth—by a familiar-looking waiter, in a room full of other familiar-looking waiters. Our first priority is to scour the menu for something the boys will eat. The most likely possibility seems to be pork with applesauce. But I'm a little worried that I can't translate the words that surround porc, which, as it turns out when the dish arrives, signify that what we've ordered is a cured hock, with a creamy gravy as well as the applesauce. The boys consider it warily, then don’t much enjoy it, eating only as much as they think they must to be rewarded with ice cream, from the renowned Berthillon across the street. As they grimace at the delicious pink meat sitting regally in its ramekin, it occurs to me that I make a roast pork that the boys eat with gusto. So I'll make it this week, back in Luxembourg (back home? can I call it that, yet?), and we’ll be able to enjoy one of those rare meals at which all four of us eat the same thing.

Rosemary, minced
Garlic, minced
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Pork shoulder, trimmed of any ridiculously thick deposits of fat, but still left well-larded
Onions, sliced thin
Apples, peeled, cored, and cut into chunks

Combine equal amounts of rosemary and garlic with generous portions of salt and pepper, along with a drizzle of olive oil, and mash into a paste. Rub it all over the pork, and set aside to marinate for as long as you can spare.

Line a roasting pan with the sliced onions, place the pork on top, and pop it into a low oven; I like to do this at 200 or 225 F, which means it's going to take somewhere like a full workday to cook. This is the point of this dish. The lower the temperature, I think, the juicier the end result. Turn the thing every few hours, to crisp up the outside uniformly. Although I'm typically a stickler for measuring internal meat temperatures, I don't bother with this cut and method, and it has worked out fine; but if you're worried about erring too much in either direction, take out the meat when the center hits 150 F.

Meanwhile, put the apple chunks in a saucepan with a drizzle of water. Set over low heat and cook until the apples break down completely, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. I happen to think that applesauce isn't particularly improved by cinnamon, salt, or pepper, but nor have I ever really harmed it this way; sometimes, though, it could definitely use a few pinches of sugar, especially for tart apples like Granny Smiths. Whatever you add, mash up the apples when they're mashable, and there you go.

Take the finished pork out of the pan, and remove the onions with a slotted spoon; save the onions for serving. If you want to make gravy: set the pan atop one or two burners over high high heat, add a cup of water or stock, and scape up the browned bits with a wooden spoon. Cook until reduced and thickened; if you're the type to add butter, then add butter. Season with salt and pepper, then strain to remove any large, charred pieces of rosemary and garlic. This pan gravy only works hot, but the meat with applesauce is good at any temperature, especially if the pork is sliced very thin.

week 2: the swimming pool

2008-09-19T13:20:00.009+02:00

On Monday, I take the boys to the municipal swimming pool. My mother-in-law Suzy has returned to Pittsburgh; Madeline has started full-time work; school has not yet begun. So I am alone with Sam and Alex most of every day, here in this foreign place. We go to playgrounds and markets, to cafés and gelaterias. When we buy things in small shops, the women at the caisses give candy to the boys.

When we get to the pool, we find out, amid tears, that Monday is the hebdomadaire closing. So we return on Tuesday. We pay our fee, use our paper tickets to pass through a turnstile, and start to wander through what I realize--just a second too late--is the women’s locker room. We find a gender-appropriate changing room. We figure out that we must use a ticket to release a key to secure a locker. Later, we will have to use the same tickets to exit. These multifunctional tickets are what Alex will later describe to Madeline as the highlight of the adventure; he calls them “credit cards.”

Off to one side of the big pool, there's exercise equipment, and more up on a balcony. I need exercise, but I’m not sure how to go about finding a gym. Perhaps this swimming-pool setup will do. A few days later, I hightail it back to the pool, for a test. An unmistakable sign (pictogram as well as words) forbids shoes, so I carry my sneakers to the machines, where I assume I will be able to wear them. But the three people I see exercising are barefoot. Damn. I step barefoot into an elliptical machine and start the Sisyphean climb, my soles immediately, painfully imprinted with the bubbled Braille of the footpads. The other barefoot exercisers trickle away; two new women show up. I watch them closely, carrying their sneakers. They pull on footwear! Joy. I will be able to wear mine, as soon as I work up the courage to dismount and lace up.

But then a lifeguard shows up, literally wagging his finger. He engages the women in a spirited conversation that begins in German, then turns to French, and fluctuates between simmering resentment and withering hostility. At one point, the lifeguard gestures at me, and says something about what Monsieur is doing, and they all look at me, the women with suspicion and a hint of anger, as if I'd betrayed them. I give a weak smile, trying ridiculously to communicate to the women that I'm on their side, but without signaling to the lifeguard that I'm against him, at least not personally, it's just that I too would rather wear sneakers. That's a lot to pack into a single smirk; I probably look like I'm experiencing intestinal discomfort.

Upstairs, then. The strengthening machines are a bewildering hydraulic system. The disappointed shoeless women join me. Then two guys. All of us are trying to figure out these machines, and not succeeding to anyone’s satisfaction. After I use a stomach-torturing contraption, one of the men asks me a question in rapid-fire French, the gist of which seems to be whether it's supérieur or antérieur. I feel my own stomach to see where it hurts. “Supérieur,” I answer. "Merci," he says, but I think my answer wasn't what he'd hoped.

In the shower room, I can’t figure out how to get the hot water on. So I assume that there isn't hot water here, and I take a quick cold shower. As I’m toweling off, a female lifeguard comes into the male shower room. “C’est chaud, ou non?” she asks, without apology or prelude.

I’m pretty naked. I shake my head. “Non.”

“Froid? Seulement?”

I nod. She shakes her head, frustrated. Just as abruptly as she arrived, she hurries away.

This was not the ideal workout experience, but it could've been worse. Now I’m dressed and standing on the rue des Bains, around the corner from the supermarket. I have my gym bag as a sac, thank god; you need a sac when you go to the market, because they don't give away bags, and buying the disposable plastic ones is clearly akin to slapping children, and the big recycled sacs are expensive. So it's a constant struggle to remember to bring a sac whenever you think you might want to buy something, which is always, and half the time I don't have a sac. But now I do. And I don’t have any little boys' hands that I must hold for the walk home, and I have enough time before Madeline has to return to the office, and I know where I am, where to go, without needing to consult a tattering map. This feels a little bit like real life, like I’m leaving the Equinox on Prince Street and going to Dean & Deluca, hair wet, a small duffel on my shoulder. This, I’ve done hundreds of times in New York; I can do this here too. So I go buy the ingredients to make something I’ve made hundreds of times.

a recipe: tagliatelle with ragoût de haché mélange et tomates

The Alima market is on the far side of the centre shopping district, in the courtyard of a building on the avenue de la Porte Neuve, ten minutes from our apartment. The courtyard entrance is flanked by a leather-goods store and an eyeglass boutique, and no sign; if you didn’t know a supermarket was in there, you wouldn’t find it.

All the supermarkets here offer a stupefyingly wide selection of packaged precut pork-belly, in lardons or cubes, smoked or un-. I'd never considered dicing slab bacon to be a task that needed shortcutting, but then again I'd never used them for every meal, which I suspect is what goes on in this part of the world. But despite all the diced bacon, what the butcher counter does not have, equally mystifying, is ground pork or veal. It does have something called “Haché Mélange,” whose label claims “boeuf, porc, sel, epices.” This combo suggests upscale dog food, but at €7.80 per kilo, I think--I hope--it's too expensive for that. So I buy it.

I'd rather have the pork and veal, but I'm too intimidated to walk into a real butcher. I’ve looked through the big windows of the boucheries on the Grand Rue: they're intimate shops. Once I get started, I will visit one of these every few days, for who knows how long. I'm not yet prepared to begin those long-term relationships with strangers.

Extra-virgin olive oil
¼ pound slab bacon or pancetta, cut into lardons, or bought that way, if you live in Luxembourg
1 pound ground veal, pork, beef, or combination
1 medium onion, small-diced
2 carrots, small-diced
2 celery stalks, small-diced
2 bay leaves
½ cup dry white wine
1 cup chicken stock
3 cups Italian plum tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, and their juices
Salt and pepper
1 pound fresh tagliatelle
Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

In a Dutch oven, heat a slick of the oil. Add the bacon and cook until firmed up and the fat has rendered. Remove to a large bowl, leaving the fat behind. Increase the heat to high, add the meat, and cook until lightly browned, breaking it up with your spoon. Remove to the bowl, again leaving whatever fat remains. Reduce the heat to medium. Add another slick of oil, then the onion, carrots, celery, and bay leaves. Cook until wilted. Pour in the wine, and scrape up the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon. When most of the wine has evaporated, pour in the stock and the tomatoes. Bring to a vigorous simmer.

Return the bacon and ground meat to the pot, along with any juices in their bowl. Adjust the heat to maintain a low simmer, and cook for at least an hour, preferably two. If the sauce gets too thick, add water. If you need to leave home, just turn off the stove and put a lid on the pot. In New York, where I knew how to control my oven, I’d set it at 225°F., shove the pot in there, and go out for the afternoon. Here, though, I don’t know how the damn thing works; so when the boys and I go out to buy a baguette and the inevitable pastry-bribe, I turn off the heat. When you're nearing dinnertime, add salt and pepper, let cook a few minutes, and taste again for seasoning.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook the noodles until they’re on the firm side of al dente. Drain. Return to the big pot over low heat, and sauce. Cook for a minute, stirring, so the pasta can absorb some sauce and finish cooking; add a splash of the cooking water if it all gets too thick. Stir in the cheese.

week 1: new kitchen

2008-09-19T11:07:00.021+02:00

I am confronting the oven. It has no numbers. In TriBeCa, the oven offered a wide choice of numbers, in Fahrenheit. I knew things would be different here in Luxembourg; I wanted things to be different here. I am fully prepared—eager!—to do my cooking in Celsius. I have long admired the roundness of water boiling at 100°. But this dial offers no Celsius numbers. What this dial offers are Beleuchtung, Ober-Unterhitze, Unterhitze, Grill, Grill klein, Auftauen, Intesivbacken, Umluftgrill, Heißluft plus (inexplicably, there's no plain-old Heißluft, without the plus), and Schnellaufheizen. I speak no German, and I keep forgetting to buy a German dictionary. Sometimes, I bring the laptop into the kitchen to use online dictionaries. But I often mistype—especially the likes of ß and anything with an umlaut—and end up with the vastly unsatisfying, “Your search term yielded no results,” which sounds like the recap to a pathetic night of unsuccessful carousing.

I ponder my choices. I like the sound of Intesivbacken, which, like so many German words, seems to have a built-in exclamation point. But something called Intesivbacken is probably too strong for the minor task at hand, which is reheating a chicken. The chicken is a little one, bought from a truck at the farmer’s market that sold three things: little rotisserie chickens, big rotisserie chickens, and sliced roast potatoes. I choose Grill, for what I know even as I’m setting the dial is an idiotic reason: it’s the most familiar of the words. I am actually thinking to myself, while turning the knob: you are being an idiot.

All the appliances in this slender, hypermodern kitchen are made by Miele, as are the cabinets, which include those humongous pot-and-pan-sized drawers I’ve always lusted after, and a shallow spice rack behind a door above the cooktop. Every square inch—make that centimeter—is utilized. I slouch against the counter, admiring the kitchen and the view out its window (picture above). Then I catch a whiff of something. I glance at the oven, from which smoke has begun to slink. I open the door, and the liberated smoke billows out. My head darts around in a panic, looking for the smoke detector, because what I don’t want is to infuriate the neighbors, who we haven’t met yet. There's no smoke detector in here. And if there's none in the kitchen, I’m guessing there is none anywhere. Whew.

The chicken is now extra crispy, but salvageable. I tentatively lean my head into the oven, and see that the coils on top are glowing bright red. Grill, I have now discovered, is broiler. I will learn, one mistake at a time.

a recipe: haricots verts with caramelized onions

On our first morning in the apartment on rue de l’Eau, all five of us—the boys, Madeline and her mother, myself—walked a couple of minutes through the misty drizzle to the Place Guillame II. The boys played semi-supervised in a small playground while the grown-ups wandered around, seeing what was what. There were a half-dozen green grocers of varying size and popularity. An unvisited fishmonger, a wildly popular butcher, two stands each for cheeses and olives.

When I wasn’t paying attention, Madeline and Suzy bought a jar of jelly. And apparently the guy at the jelly stand—or near the jelly stand, the precise proximity is not clear—was also selling onions, which is not your typical one-two farm-stand punch. Not regular round Spanish onions, nor red ones, but rather long ovoids. Big, dense ovoids, with thick yellow skin. If I understand their story correctly, the guy seems to have lured them with slivers of raw onion with a taste of jelly, maybe on bread, maybe not; again, I wasn’t there. But the upshot is they bought what I think is a kilo of these onions, and a jar of jelly. I now feel obliged to do something--something simple, because I don't have much in the way staples--with at least a token portion of the 2.2 pounds of odd-looking onions.

Butter
Yellow onion, sliced thin
Haricots verts, washed and trimmed
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a medium skillet. Add the onion and cook over medium-low heat for at least 30 minutes, but more if there’s time, until the onions are deeply golden and very sweet. When the pan dries out, which it will do every 10 minutes or so, sprinkle it with water and stir.

Meanwhile, blanch the haricots verts until easily pierced with a fork but not soggy. Drain, run under cold water to halt the cooking, and drain again. Set aside. When it’s time to eat, raise the heat on the onions to medium-high. Add the green beans to the skillet, toss with the onions until reheated, and season salt and pepper.