week 7: cheap tickets to ireland

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

“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

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

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

 

week 3, part ii: paris

"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

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.