Eating my way across Europe: Rotterdam

Now don't laugh. But I love Dutch food and I love going to the Netherlands for work.

My love for Dutch food goes beyond the famous fries in a paper cone served with mayo. My love of Dutch cuisine is a deep love of fusion food...and great service, since the Dutch are the kings (and queens) of trade which seems to have carried through into their service-oriented ways.

Last week, I went to Rotterdam with three things in mind: cheese, pie and rijstafel. I guess I also had some professional stuff mixed in there, but it was definitely secondary.

When we got there, we had lunch at Café Sijf, a nice little café in the center of the city. The sandwich was nice, the bar was very cool and the pie was decent.

After our meeting the second day, I dragged my co-worker to Café Dudok for the best apple pie in the world (my husband calls it the kick ass apple pie). I promise to share my recipe for it in my new food blog (coming soon!).
Anyway, the restaurant has a cool industrial style and the most amazing pie. And don't forget the slagroom (whipped cream).

I then dragged him to Indonesia Restaurant for rijstafel, the original fusion food and my absolute favorite thing to eat. EVER. We had an assortment of 23 dishes, a mix of Dutch and Indonesian. It was delicious, spicy and just plain amazing.

We rolled ourselves back to the Hotel Emma (decent, central and good breakfast).

After our meeting the next day, we hit the cheese shop. The French are too proud of their cheese to admit that their northern neighbors also have an amazing cheese tradition. I brought back a chunk of goat cheese with nettles and aged cheese with cumin. Normally, I would have bought more, but I already had some italian and english cheese in my fridge...a girl has to be reasonable sometimes!

Before boarding the train, I managed to grab a few packs of stroopwafels and hagelslaag (which the Dutch put on their buttered toast in the morning) for the kids.

The one thing I didn't manage to escape was the bad lunch replete with skimpy sandwiches and the traditional glass of buttermilk. I can tell you that when you're having that kind of lunch at an international meeting - English, Irish, French, etc - every one is a bit shocked and concerned by the pitcher of milk placed in the center of the table.

And here I am, sitting in the snow back in Lille looking forward to a big steak with stinky cheese for lunch. Yum.

Avions, treno en auto

After all this time in Europe, I still get so excited about country hopping. Last week, we drove to Belgium to take a plane to Italy where we spent 4 amazing days with a childhood friend who's there with her family for a year. On Sunday, we flew back over four countries - Italy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium - and drove back to France. And on Monday morning, I got on a train coming from Southern France, got off in Brussels, changed tracks and got on a train to Rotterdam.

And although I'm tired and totally stuffed from eating pizza, pasta, rijstaffel and the most amazing apple pie in the world, I am happy.

During our time in Italy, words kept coming to me in Dutch when I wanted to speak Italian (which I don't  do but I speak some Spanish); now that I'm in the Netherlands, I keep looking for words in Italian (which I still don't speak). Language is a funny thing. My kids were a little thrown by the 4 days of being very American with an American family in Italy. Max tried to speak French to everyone outside the house, but Suzanne seems to understand that people speak different languages in different countries.

But neither of them quite grasps geography yet. Suzanne asked if we were Belgium as we stepped off he plane in Pisa. And Max asked if we were in New York.

And now, here I am in a hotel room in Rotterdam where I've spent the past two days with a project partially funded by Europe.

So tomorrow, I head back home to France with a couple slices of apple pie in my bag and an extra kilo or two on my bones.

Réalville : Tree house fun

This summer will go down in history as the summer that saw no summer. We spent an incredibly rainy week in the Tarn et Garonne at my in-law's summer house. Since we couldn't really go in the pool, we were lucky there were donkeys and cows around the house and plenty of puddles to jump in. And there was a surprise for my treehouse loving husband.

J is an architect and has become increasingly interested in treehouses and cabins. He built one out of cardboard that's been in our house for almost 5 years and is the best toy any kid can have: it's cheap, easy to repair and packs flat (ok, that's for the parents). He should copyright the plans. But I degress...

So to celebrate our anniversary this summer, I booked us into a treehouse for a night. (At first, I was trying to find a family treehouse for a week or so, like Swiss Family Robinson style but everything was booked).

What I found, by going through the Bienvenue à la Ferme site - my favorite site for all things farm and fun- was an amazing treehouse in a 200 year old oak tree on a truffle far, surrounded by rolling green hills and vineyards. The farmer, George Delcasse, is warm and welcoming. The treehouse - cabane perchée - is amazing : it has a kitchen, a shower, a pull out sofa, a terrasse equipped with plancha to cook your dinner, an outhouse at the base of the tree. He lends you a tandem bike and provides tons of information about things to do. Unfortunately, it poured rained and was windy the night we stayed in the treehouse - which swayed back and forth which I guess added to the effect of sleeping in a tree - but we able to drink apero and eat our breakfast out on the deck, which makes you feel like you are on top of the world.

To get to the tree house, you have to climb up a set of stairs, duck under a large branch, climb more stores and then lift the trap door. Once you're inside, with the trap door closed, you feel like you're cut off from the world and that you're sitting on top of it.

I highly recommend it if you're ever in Réalville in the Tarn et Garonne.

les quatre coins de la France

Being a hexagone, I guess France really has 5 corners. And technically, we didn't really go to all 5 of them but it sure felt like it...

We left Lille on July 28th caravaning with some friends; we decided to make the trip to the Tarn-et-Garonne in 2 days. We really believed we'd get there so early that we'd be able to visit the Chaterau de Chambord in the evening thus saving us precious travel time the next day. I know it's against our better judgement to feed the whole princess obsession, but how can your resist? After an interminable drive and a terrible lunch, we arrived in the beautiful chambre d'hote well after 5pm due to a couple GPS snafus (ie our friends entered the wrong village into their GPS. Oops!) and a lot of Parisian traffic.

I highly recommend the Logis du Bois Renard in Nouan-sur-loire (near Chambord) which is a recently renovated stable, part of a family owned chateau (the owner's parents live in the chateau accross the field). There is a pool, a donkey and some chickens. The property was lovely and we almost got Suzanne and Marlow to believe this was the chateau we planned on visiting before we hit traffic...After we got the kids to sleep, we had a lovely meal at the table d'hôtes.

The next day, we decided to go see the outside of Chambord anyway - how can you pass it up when you're only 10 minutes away? We ate sandwiches on the grass outside the chateau and then hit the road. Everything instantly went pear shape. We had to get out of the cars to pay for the parking which we'd forgotten to do, we got twisted around leaving the chateau grounds, hit a number of dead ends...once the GPS finally got us on course, I was allowed to sleep an hour or so while the friends drove both cars (I am the only driver in our family so I needed a rest to be able to make it through the rest of the drive down south). I woke up with a start when we were completely stopped on the highway not even an hour away from our starting point. After 2 hours of waiting, we finally got to an exit and pulled off the highway. We turned the GPS off - and the traffic radio on to learn that there'd been a huge accident 30 kms away which meant 60 km of bouchon and it wasn't even on the highway we were on! Jerome studied the atlas and got us across the Loire valley by local roads. We finally arrived in the South at midnight...

Our time in Septfonds was marked by Max's firsth birthday, Suzanne falling in the pool and Jerome jumping in after her and some delicious local food. We also had lice, intestinal worms and strep throat.

After 2 lovely - albeit not very sunny weeks in the Southwest where I found some of the most lovely running paths through the woods- we headed to Burgundy where we (Jerome but me by extension) inherited a house from Jerome's grandmother. The house has been empty for 4 years. It was cold. It was musty. We had to light the fireplace and buy winter pyjamas.

The 5 hour drive to Burgundy took 8 hours thanks to the traffic jam only an hour from our starting point. After a lengthy stop at McDonald's (which exists exactly for this purpose!), we decided to take some back roads to Brugundy. We drove past the Puy de Dome, through Vichy and had a late afternoon snack at the Chateau in Lapalisse.

On the first morning in Burgundy, Jerome and I had a visit to the local ER. Max used his legs to push his highchair from the table and fell on his head; he was kind of scary looking and started to vomit. After the most harrowing 30 minute drive of my life, we got to the hospital in Paray-le-Monial (a scarily Catholic town - I have nothing against Catholics, but all the people I saw in Paray seemed to have a glazed look in their eyes. Apparently there was a conference going on for reborn Catholic youth.) The people at the hospital were great and Max was fine; but he and I had to stay overnight. At least we were warm.

On the third day, I went running and got lost in the woods. Jerome's GPS told me I was 20 kms away from where I actually was. I turned around and picked blackberries as I made my way home (I did get home without a problem).

After a week being woken by cows echoing in the valley, we decided to make the trip back North in 2 stages. We spent the night in Troyes - where all the women are rather short and stocky and have brown hair. People don't seem to smile much in Troyes, but we stayed at a really friendly hotel that I highly recommend - Hotel Arlequin in Troyes

When we left Troyes, we decided to stop in Reims for lunch. We found a nice table on the terrace at Edgar Bistrot where the food was great and the service was excellent. The waiters were all joking and even mocking some annoying customers. It was so nice, that Suzanne's precious doudou decided he wanted to stay there. After a moment of panic last night, I realized Suz had left "nana" sleeping on the window ledge. Luckily, they didn't throw nana in the trash. They are actually sending him to us today. Phew.

We had an uneventful drive back from Reims. Just like in the movie Bienvenue chez les chti, as we crossed passed the sign "Departement du Nord", it began raining and it didn't really stop until a few minutes ago.

So what are the conclusions of the past 3 weeks

1. vacationing with 2 kids under 5 cannot really be called vacation.
2. always know your local Emergency Rooms.
3. always check window ledges before leaving a restaurant
4. Atlas is more reliable than GPS.
5. always pack an extra set of warm pyjamas
6. always travel with anti-bacterial ointment, lice shampoo and fluvermal.
7. ...sleep....