Final Week of Classes

So this is my last week of classes and I haven’t done a lot of exploring. After getting back late on Saturday from Strasbourg, I slept in on Sunday and just hung out at the Christmas markets in Luxembourg. On Monday, it was pouring rain, so I thought I’d get on a train and get out of town for the day, but everywhere is at least a 3 hour train ride, not really a day trip. I probably should have stayed Saturday night in Strasbourg and gone somewhere from there on Sunday, but after being sick last week, I just didn’t plan my weekend very thoroughly. I’ve just been tired from being sick, a little bummed about not going to Bulgaria, and perhaps a bit lazy. When I was sick, I couldn’t focus on anything, and was terribly bored. WoW was so complicated and involved a lot of reading. I just didn’t have the patience for it. So I downloaded MineCraft, which was a blessing. Just the serene peaceful music while I mindlessly build things. So soothing.

I’ve also been studying and doing practice tests because today was my final part of the Sproochentest, the listening part. I do not feel confident that I did well on this part, so we’ll just have to wait for the scores to come in. :/ 

So this should be a brief post because I have done nothing but lounge around Luxembourg City and eat all the delicious food I can handle. I’ve hit the street foods at the Christmas market hard. And I’ve checked out some restaurants that aren’t traditional Luxembourgish. So here’s my food blog for the week. 

Sunday

Sunday for lunch, I stopped at one of the chalets at the Christmas market. Lots of the stalls are just walk-up stands with food. A few, however, actually have indoor seating and you can go inside and eat. So today, I am at an Austrian themed chalet. I ordered the Tirolean Gröstl. This is a dish of fried potatoes, beef, and onions, topped with a fried egg. It was… ok. It was super dry. Needed a sauce or some cheese or something. The couple next to me both ordered a Wiener Schnitzel that is baked with cheese on top. That looked amazing. I enjoyed an aperol spritz with my meal, which is a new thing for me that I quite like. Very bitter. 

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Outside at the Christmas market, I happened upon a blacksmithing demonstration, which was super cool. 

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For dinner Sunday night, I came back to the markets and had a gromperekichelchen for dinner followed by a Dampfnudel for dessert. I had never heard of such a thing but it looked super interesting so I had to try it. It’s a steamed bread dumpling stuffed with fruits. The options for flavors were poppyseed or cherry. I love sour cherries so much, so of course I went with that one. I had expected it to be dry or doughy, but I was pleasantly surprised. They ladled a vanilla sauce over the top and more sour cherries, so in the end, the mix of sauce made the very bread-y dessert quite delicious. And it’s huge. Like the size of a softball. 

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Monday

Monday I walked to the markets for lunch.  It was raining outside and pretty cold and miserable, but a girl’s gotta eat. So, as with the rest of the photos for the week, I’m not wearing make-up. My hair is a mess (blaming the rain and wind), and even my glasses are spritzed with water. Whatever, I’m just out here standing in the rain eating some Luxembourgish food and drinking a beer. Today I tried the kniddelen booth. They take the plain kniddelen out of boiling water, put them into a plastic tray, scoop a giant wad of bacon on top, then pour heaving cream over the top. Not a cream sauce, just a carton of heavy cream. It’s fun to try the stuff at the Christmas market, but it’s definitely not gourmet. Anyway, the bacon is delicious and salty, and the kniddelen and cream are actually really good. They’re warm and filling on a cold rainy day.  I paired the kniddelen with a Diekirch de Noel, the Christmas version of Diekirch beer. 

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For dinner, I went to the Big Beer Company.  This is a place that we visited when we were here in April and really enjoyed. They serve huge portions of traditional Luxembourgish food and beer by the half liter (most places serve 0.25 or 0.3 liter beers). It was a Monday night, so it was pretty quite and I sat by myself and enjoyed the wainsaucisse. I still demand to know why it isn’t wainwurst. But whatever. These are skinny little Luxembourgish sausages covered in a delicious and delicate mustard cream sauce. The mashed potatoes at this restaurant are also shockingly good. You never hear that… mashed potatoes are not something to be remarked over. They’re just a thing that exists. But these are exceptional. I had 2 0.5 liter beers and only finished 2 of my 3 sausages, but I enjoyed my leisurely 2 hour dinner very much. 

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Tuesday

This is the day I ate everything that Joe wanted me to try. He really wants to know the fast food situation here, so he’s been pushing me to try the Pizza Hut. So I went there for lunch today and it was absolutely freaking delicious. Like, I was shocked. They have a lunch prix fixe menu with choice of soup, salad, or crostinis and a personal sized pizza, either pan or “Italian” style crust. Their special for this month is raclette, so I ordered the raclette crostinis and a ‘Montana’ pizza. I’m assuming it’s Montana as in “mountains” and not as in the state of Montana. The crostinis were great. Raclette is such a delicious, lightly flavored cheese, and putting bacon on top is always delicious. The pizza was also amazing. It had mozzarella cheese and raw red onions, then topped with bacon and goat cheese. No tomato sauce, just the cheese. So good. The herbs in the goat cheese really made this pizza. And they have a “spicy oil” for dipping the crust in. It was also delicious and maybe I need to find some of this magical oil. I paired all of this with an Erdinger weissbier because I’m really getting tired of the Bofferding helles/pilsner.

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Tuesday night I went out after class for some Mexican food. This place came highly recommended, and I have seen on their facebook page that they make chilaquiles, so I am very excited. They even let you make reservations through messaging their Facebook page. Anyway, I started off with a blue margarita. I’m usually a salty margarita kind of girl, but something tonight just called to me with the blue one. I did not regret this decision as it was sweet (had a sugar rim instead of salt) but also still very tangy and lime-y. Of course, I ordered the chilaquiles. The chilaquiles are served as a sort of deconstructed version. The chips and red sauce with cheese are on one side. The guac is in the middle. Beans on the side. The egg is on the side. And the meat is on the side. The strangest choice of this presentation is that the chips are tossed in the red sauce, rendering them soggy. Like, put the egg in a little dish of red sauce and leave the chips crunchy…. but whatever. It was all still delicious. Very very salty, but still good. There was no salsa though, and nothing in this dish had any spiciness to it. I asked for hot sauce, expecting to be handed some Tobasco, which is everywhere here. But no, the guy came back with a red chili oil and said ‘very spicy’, before gently putting it down and backing away. They weren’t kidding. This is not salsa. This isn’t even a normal hot sauce. This is red chili oil and it is made of fire. Just a tiny smear of it over the carne asada was all I needed. Another wonderful meal in Luxembourg. 

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Wednesday 

And that brings us to today. I spent the morning taking the second part of the Sproochentest. This was stressful and challenging. For the listening part, there’s a big auditorium. Everyone’s name is on a paper on a desk, and you go sit there, listen to the recording, answer the questions, and then it’s over. It’s so echo-y in there, though.  It’s very difficult to understand what is being said. They read the instructions very clearly and slowly and then the actual texts you’re supposed to listen to are super fast and often garbled with background noises. 

After the test, I decided to go out again for some very traditional Luxembourgish food. Problem is, I’ve already eaten at most of the super traditional restaurants. So I found this restaurant on Tripadvisor, and it has just the worst reviews. Terrible service. Portions served to foreigners are smaller than portions served to locals. Pork is inedible, hard on the outside, once you peel off the hard outside, not much meat left. But then I look at the photos of the food and I’m like… this looks so good. It’s super common for Americans to complain about the service in European restaurants, as the customs are different here and most of the time it’s just that Americans have expectations that don’t align with what the Europeans expect. I read a review where someone was incensed that they had to ask for the check at the end of the meal. So I generally ignore all complaints about service because our restaurant culture is just very different. Also, everything I’ve eaten here has been a huge portion, even by American standards. So I would be perfectly ok if they gave me the smaller ‘foreigner’ sized meal. But I also think that it’s unlikely and actually would be quite challenging for a restaurant to serve different size portions based on nationality.  And then there’s the crunchy pork. Oh man, I want to just personally message that guy or shake him by the shoulders. Eat that. That crunchy part is delicious. It’s really hard to get it all crunchy like that and that’s the best part. My dude, you have missed out.

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So I call the Mousel’s Cantin and make a reservation. I speak to them in Luxembourgish. I walk the 30 minute walk to the restaurant. The waiter is a jovial white haired man who greets me in French, but gladly changes to Luxembourgish when I respond with it. There are only a few other tables of people, but they are all speaking Luxembourgish. Maybe the tripadvisor reviews do keep the tourists out. So I order the schwenghax (Luxembourgish for schweinhax in German).  This is one of my favorite German dishes, but having seen the photos online, I want to try the Luxembourgish version. Let me tell you these people know what they are doing. I have no idea how they cook the pork knuckle to get the skin on the outside rock-hard and crunchy, but the meat on the inside is soft and falling apart. The crunchy skin has a layer of fat inside so that when you chew it, it turns to a kind of rubbery paste. This is like the pork version of Peking duck. Delicate crispy skin, salty layer of fat underneath, tender meat inside. Ugh, I can’t even begin to describe how perfectly prepared this was. The sauerkraut was fantastic, a sort of golden brown color from being cooked for a long time and with lots of pork. There were also roasted potatoes and a little bacon-wrapped bundle of green beans, but they were nothing to get excited about, just fiber for your diet I suppose. I had the Clausel gezwickelt (unfiltered) beer, which is a nice change from all the helles beers.

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I ate most of the pork. I was so full. And then the waiter brought me the dessert menu. There’s an option for ‘Cafe Gourmand’ that says: a selection of accompaniments with coffee (eclairs, cheesecake, macaron, etc). I thought this was going to be a case where they bring out a dessert tray or cart and I make a selection of one of those things. But no. This meant that I got one of each of those things with a cup of coffee. I’m already bursting with delicious pork skin, but now that I’ve ordered it, I guess I’ll have to enjoy this giant plate of desserts. There’s cheesecake, which was very dry. I didn’t finish it. There was a chocolate brownie with crisped rice in it, which was a great texture. There were 2 mini eclairs, one chocolate and one caramel. And there was a weird pseudo-macaron. It was 2 pieces of meringue with strawberry sorbet in the middle. The sorbet was amazing, tart and refreshing after all that heavy food. I didn’t even know I needed a palate cleanser until I tasted that. And the little meringues with it were nice and dry and crunchy. This was really one of the best meals I’ve had here and I’ve been eating a ton of great food. 

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