Chocomania! A visit to the Neuhaus factory shop

I have been ghosting you again, dear readers. Not much has been going on here, just struggling through the gloom of a Brussels winter. It got cold for a little bit, snowed a tiny amount, and now has gone back to quite warm, but rainy gloom has replaced the frosty sunshine we had in January. And it's still so dark all the time!

But not for much longer... We are almost in the final countdown to the NZ trip, less than two weeks to go. On the one hand, I kind of regret that we will be enduring most of the winter here anyway, but on the other hand, I didn't want to use up such a big chunk of holidays so early in the year, and when we come back, hopefully spring will be here. Plus, NZ in February is much nicer than January. At least, I hope so. Every time I check the weather forecast, it seems to be sunny but with rain predicted for the coming days. Not sure whether that means it has actually been sunny all the time or not...

Couple of quick things before I probably go into hibernation again and then hit you with an unending stream of posts from New Zealand. (Eeeeee!)

Our joint Christmas present to ourselves was a shiny new Magimix food processor. Points to note: my god, it takes up space! I knew the size of the processor itself (we bought online, but had seen it in a shop). What I didn't know was how much room all the blades and other accessories take up! It's true, by the time you fit the blade and clean the machine afterwards, half the time you could have just chopped the carrot yourself, but it's a lot of fun. And we've made some things like pommes de terre dauphinoise or sliced leeks or julienned carrots where I definitely wouldn't get the things as thin or uniform. And it does come into its own when you're making a big batch of whatever. We made soup yesterday with 2 cups each of diced carrot, celery and onion, and that saved a lot of grief. If you have any recipes that require a lot of chopping/slicing, send them my way!

Plus it's so shiny and red, and looking at it gives me a smug middle-class sense of self-satisfaction

About the only other noteworthy thing I've done this year is also food-related (surprise, surprise). I wanted to take some Belgian chocolates back home to friends and family, but the good ones (not cheap and nasty bulk-buy seashells) cost an absolute fortune. Like at least 25€ per box that you see in the photo below. Times it by maybe 10 people and you're looking at a cool 250€. (Geez, thanks for the maths help, Einstein.)

Luckily, I was talking to a colleague who let me in on a little Brussels secret - the Neuhaus factory shop! Neuhaus is already one of my favourites, so I was super excited to visit, especially when I heard you can eat as many free samples as you like. Basically, the boxed chocolates are not so much cheaper than what you get in the retail stores, but the real bargains come in plain, single-variety cardboard cartons. I picked up three kilos of chocolate for 40€.

You can eat as much as you want from the open boxes

And then splash the cash on the plain packaging

As far as I'm aware, the plain boxes aren't "seconds' in the sense of being defective or whatever. We were looking for later expiry dates on the boxes we bought, and they all expired by like the end of April, so I'm guessing that's more the reason why they are in the factory shop. Apart from that (I'll just assume my family will eat their chocolates quickly!) the only downside is that there's only three different varieties of chocolate in the three kilos and I'll have to fiddle around in NZ packing them into individual portions. On the plus side, it will be a lot easier to transport them than the equivalent in 10 different boxes. 

I suppose I've lifted the veil of mystery for anyone who may be reading the blog and also getting chocolates from me, but oh well. I figure most people would rather more chocolates in a less fancy package (and also that I don't bankrupt myself).

We went by car, but apparently you can take the metro to the last stop and walk a short way, so definitely an option if you're ever visiting Brussels. Beware though, we didn't have breakfast, and I would have thought I could eat basically endless quantities of chocolate, but I got sick pretty quickly! If you're coming on a mission, e.g. for the bulk-buy chocolates, make sure you taste those first, because by the end I horrified myself by having to take a bite of different chocolates and then throw the rest away. (A dark day for humanity.)

You can drink your wine and eat it too

I've had quite a busy week (for an unemployed bum. And I apologise to anyone seething with rage at posts filled with fun and frivolous purchases. I assure you I spend most of the time weeping and self-flagellating, but I save that sort of thing for my BDSM blog).

We had a picnic in the park on Sunday to celebrate someone getting her PhD approved, which was very nice. It wasn't sunny, but at least it didn't start raining until that evening (and then all day Monday). Then I went home and watched delayed coverage of the Grand Prix, which, contrary to all expectations, was actually very exciting (although I'm still a bit upset over what happened to Hamilton).

Since then, I've been running around going to the gym and working on my CV and other such scintillating stuff. I walked all the way to the Pôle Emploi the other day because I thought "right, I'm going to go there and work on writing cover letters in French without distractions and see if someone can help me with the French" only to find that there is only one computer there with a chair, all the rest you have to stand up at, and all you can do on them is look up job notices on the Pôle Emploi's own website. And when I asked if I could get help writing in French, they gave me a pamphlet designed for French people who can't read and write well (and I don't mean to sound snarky, but examples of people applying for factory jobs in very simple French are not much good to me) and enrolled me in a general workshop in like a fortnight. And told me that the job I wanted to apply for was only open to disabled applicants (which, of course, is a noble initiative, but it's just discouraging every time you come across something else that you don't understand about how the system works here). I know that sounds very whiny, and I know no-one forced me to move to a non-English-speaking country, but it helps everyone if you help us dirty immigants to speak better French and get jobs. And blogging about it helps to vent some of those frustrations.

Wednesday was hot hot hot, with actual sunshine. I went to a garden party, if you can call 20 or so people having drinks and nibbles in a garden a "garden party" (the Queen wasn't there, let's put it that way), which was nice. I spilled red wine on my new dress and had to wash it with detergent in the kitchen sink, but along with washing it properly when I got home, that did the trick, yay. (I'm a big believer in acting immediately, no matter what stain-busting equipment you have at hand, to get rid of stains.) In a brave move, since there will often be sudden thunderstorms in the evening after a hot day here, they set up a TV in the garden so I was able to happily ignore the football until it got to the penalty shootout after an undoubtedly exciting 2 hours of play without a goal.

On Thursday night it was my turn to have Liz and Charlie around for dinner. We have a sort of 'supper club' where we meet up at irregular intervals at each other's houses for dinner. It's a bit tricky because there's a ton of stuff Charlie won't eat, starting with onions and garlic!! This time, I made spinach, feta and chicken pasties and for dessert, the pièce de resistance:

That's no ordinary glass of wine, that's rosé jelly (jello to our American friends)! Basically, you simmer rosé with sugar, add gelatine and pour it into a glass with berries in it and voilà, hours later you have yourself a wobbly paen to the noble art of finding new ways to consume wine.

Cheers!

I didn't want to give the game away, because I think half the fun is bringing out a glass of "wine" and then the big reveal that it's jelly, but I ran the idea of a jelly-based dessert past Liz, who begged me not to do it, because as Canedolia mentioned recently, the French for some reason think the English can't get enough of eating jelly. And, indeed, Charlie found it hilarious to the point of making a video of it wobbling. But I thought a rosé dessert was too cool not to do! So, how did it taste? I did a little test pot of it and thought it was just okay when I ate some on Thursday morning, but maybe my palate just wasn't ready for wine first thing in the morning, because I actually thought it was very nice when we had it in the evening. Just the right amount of sugar and a nice flavour. The frozen berries were a bit seedy, but oh well.

After dinner, Liz went home and Charlie and I met up with Marion and went to a bar and then a club. Tomorrow is Marion's last day in Tours, boohooooo! Now I will (probably) be back to being the only Kiwi in the village. She doesn't yet know where she'll be living, her boyfriend is looking for an internship and in the meantime she'll be going between London and his family's place in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. They're leaving some stuff in storage here, so I'll probably see her again, but it's still sad to have a friend leave.

We ended up partying with some cute French and Belgian pilots

I also bought these super-cute fold-up ballet pumps from Redfoot shoes in the UK, after Liz sent me a coupon code for their half-price summer sale (which may be still on, let me know if anyone wants the code, because they are really quite expensive). I haven't worn them yet, but it does seem you get what you pay for - the uppers are real, soft leather, and they have a gel sole, so they seem like they'd be much more comfortable for walking than the cheap pair I bought at H&M, which had basically no sole, so it was like walking on the pavement in your socks or something (plus they were too big and fell off all the time, so I gave them to Liz).

In case anyone doesn't know, the idea is you wear them out of an evening and then switch to your high heels when you get wherever you're going, and they fold up as shown and go in a little pouch in your handbag. I look forward to actually wearing heels some time, because with having to walk everywhere and the cobblestones and so on, I never do any more!

Girl Gone Mild

Just posting about "Going Wild" - as Keith from the highly addictive A Taste of Garlic blog puts it - evidently exhausted me, since last week was very quiet. I did go out on Friday, but only round to a mate's where we drank wine and ate blinis and no-one Went Wild in the slightest. Is there possibly a "Girls Gone Mild" section I haven't noticed?

Actually (and this is 100% true) the most exciting event in my life last week was that I finally bought a dressing gown after discovering that Auchan sells ones that don't cost 40 €. Last night it was finally dry and ready to wear and I have therefore vowed to spend my winter thusly: 60% in bed, 30% in my dressing gown, 10% in my dressing gown making soup. Work may have something to say about me turning up in a giant blue dressing gown, but honestly it would be NO WORSE than what half of my colleagues actually do wear. So much for the French being chic.

As for the soup, I bought a big soup pot and a stick blender and I have decided I am going to spend the winter living off soup and beans and hot chocolate with Baileys in it (it's been a heady time for making decisions on how to spend the winter, I tells ya). I was going to start last night with the soup, but I forgot to buy onions and hence I was forced to eat a can of beans which were meant to go in the soup for dinner and they were surprisingly delicious. Hence why beans make the cut for my winter menu. I also had what I've decided to call une baguette éventrée, because everything sounds so much classier in French. This consists of fisting a baguette in order to extract its fluffy inner goodness, and then throwing the crust away. I confess this under conditions of strict anonymity, since I'm quite sure that if the French catch you in the act it's 10 years' imprisonment on Fort Boyard for you!

(By the way, if you think me talking about soup and dressing gowns and beans is too exciting for words, pity my poor mother who also got a whole email of me talking about soup and dressing gowns and beans.)

If you're anything like me, this weekend you failed to care that New Zealand won the Rugby World Cup. It did, however, give me the chance to smirk at some rugby-loving Frenchies, which is better than having rugby-loving Frenchies smirk at me, so it's all good. I did actually try to go and watch the final (and by 'watch', I mean 'not watch' while seizing the opportunity to drink cider at 10 am in the morning without people judging me). I was meant to meet up with some friends at The Pale, an Irish pub near the cathedral, but when I got there it was so packed that there were lines out both the doors with people standing on chairs in the street to try and get a view of the TVs. I hung around outside for a bit until I got a text that the people I was meant to meet had decided to go to Place Plumereau instead, which is about 10 minutes away. When I got there, however, I got another message saying everywhere was too full and they might be going to around the train station (in totally ANOTHER direction) but would text when they had found somewhere. I hung about for a bit then decided to walk towards the station, mostly because there is a place there that sells the best brioches in town and I thought I might have one for breakfast. When I got there, the brioche place was closed, I'd been wandering about for 45 minutes and still hadn't received a text, and so I decided to go home. Where I proceeded to not care about the rugby some more. (Actually, I was chatting to my friend Rick, who is American, on Skype, and he informed me of some of the rules of rugby – I thought you could only kick after a try, apparently this is incorrect. We mutually decided that an American explaining rugby to a New Zealander is probably a Portent of the Apocalypse, so if your week is disturbed by plague and pestilence and horsemen, you probably know who to blame.)

Then I had a nap with Bob (the cat) and woke up feeling like I had a hangover. Which is even Not Fairer than when I feel like I have a hangover after only a couple of glasses of wine, since not only had I not been drinking, I had in fact been THWARTED in my plans to drink before noon, which only goes to show that you may as well just get pissed in the morning and not care who's going to judge!

Soup!

Oops, it would appear I haven't posted in over a month, sorry 'faithful readers'. I will get around to my Christmas trip to the UK & subsequent visit of my parents over here at some point. I also still have a ton of photos from Venice.

However, today I will share with you my foray into the world of soup-making, mostly to prove to my Dad that I actually followed through! I don't want to say that cooking more is a 'New Year's Resolution' per se, it's more just something that I want to do in general, but it kind of is.

My first effort, made with the help of the Kindle I got for my birthday & fresh veg from the Sunday market, was minestrone soup. Herein follows a photographic record of my soup -

Eep! Perhaps I *dont* have suitable onions in the cupboard after all...


A selection of the ingredients - onion, carrots, turnip, cabbage, pasta and beans amongst other things:




Bubbling away:

Result!

Verdict? Tasty, although it ended up a bit closer to a wet ratatouille-type consistency than a very liquidy soup, I might adjust quantities in future, although it is of course good to pack so much vegetable in. Extremely filling too, and should be able to get a few meals out of it, maybe I can freeze it. Cheap too - not sure how much since I bought stuff at the supermarket and the markets, and had some stuff already at home, but I reckon under 5 euros for everything (and obviously I didn't use the whole bag of pasta etc. etc.) First of many, hopefully!