Monday = Empty Cupboards

We generally do our big grocery shop every Monday afternoon, so Sundays and Monday mornings can be a bit of a scavenge for food. We're always out of cheese and crackers after Saturday's binges, and the loaf of bread is down to the ends, we've long shared the last banana, and the only veggie left in the fridge is half an onion. This week, though, I discovered that the yogurt I bought is both fat and sugar free, leaving it pumped full of aspartame and artificial color and rendering it borderline inedible. Yogurt being my Monday morning breakfast/lunch/snack of last resort, I was particularly disgusted by my choices yesterday.

Breakfast: The plainest cornflakes imaginable. Bill toasted the last shrivelled end of bread.

Lunch: I was starving (like, how I sometimes feel like I'm going to pass out if I don't eat immediately) as well as late, expected to meet Bill at 1pm for the 5th grade's St. Nicholas Day party. I threw 2 of the 3 remaining eggs in a pan and the last of the gouda on a tortilla (from our refrigerated tortilla stockpile) and ate the resulting breakfast burrito in less than two minutes. I felt sick. So I grabbed my coat and walked 25 minutes to the Katharina-Peters-Schule (Bill's school).

Second Lunch: I arrived and was employed by Frau Teacher (I couldn't understand her name) in carrying tins of cookies and bags of candy to the 5th grade classroom. We filled three double desks in the center of the room with two crates of lemonade, hundreds of cookies, many bags of candy, peanuts, clementines, fruit and chocolate kabobs, potato salad, cucumber salad (doused with vinegar and sprinkled with a ton of dill--I don't like the way Germans treat their vegetables), "muffins" (which Bill was completely excited for, as "muffin" is what Germans call cupcakes. But then the cupcakes were as dry as poorly-made muffins and we were terribly disappointed), chocolate covered pretzels which turned out to be not pretzels at all (another particular disappointment for Bill, though he couldn't describe for me what was under the chocolate that was so un-pretzel-like), and tubs of mustard and ketchup for Bill's true German love, sausage.

There were probably 50 foot-long sausages of hot dog width, all piled into an enormous pasta pot. Every kid (including Bill) ate at least two, often three. They did smell delicious. But further investigation revealed that they also tasted just like hotdogs. Luckily, after my eggs-on-the-go, I wasn't particularly hungry. What astonished me was that before the sausage/hotdogs had been brought from the cafeteria, where they'd been heating (Bill was afraid they'd be served cold and straight from the package, something we'd seen Germans do on several occasions), the teacher had students hand around the cupcakes (some kids took two) and the fruit and chocolate kabobs and a few tins of cookies.

Now I know many things in Germany are, understandably, different from the way we do things in America. But. To give kids cupcakes, chocolate and cookies-essentially, an overload of dessert-before they'd had the main part of their lunch? To let a kid take two cupcakes before you knew if there were enough for everyone? To let the kids demonstrate their skill with a bottle opener and not supervise while they opened every bottle of lemonade in the crate and handed them around the class (though it was amusing to see one kid miming opening one bottle with the top of another, and with the edge of the desk-German drinking culture is pervasive, I guess)? And, I suppose, in wake of the American fight against obesity and allergies, to heap a table with home-made goodies full of sugar and butter and the threat of food poisoning (potato salad? seriously?), not to mention the big dish of unshelled peanuts out on the table for any little punk to hide in the peanut butter sandwich of the poor geek with a peanut allergy and send him to the hospital where his friends think he's going to die and the punk comes to apologize and reveals he's actually jealous of how much fun the geek and his geeky friends have.

Despite my instinctual indignation at the chaos of this party, it was way more fun than I imagine class parties in America are today. And it totally reminded me of being a Y counselor, except that these kids were fascinated by me and couldn't understand a word I said, while my campers at the Y resented my authority and preferred to ignore what I said. There was a craft, just like at the Y, and just like at the Y the glitter first went all over the table, then all over a boy, then he rubbed some in his hair to make the other kids laugh, then it got all down the just-mopped hallway when, right in front of the janitors, the kid ran out of the class and slipped and then slid stomach-down across the wet floor. And Bill and I played hangman with this nifty hangman board game. Notable words: pontiff, ennui, salutary and (Bill stumped me with this) aporia.

Dinner: No snack this afternoon after the sugar orgy of the party. For our late dinner we sauteed the two sausages left from lentil stew last week, then cooked pasta, then combined the two with a tomato-mozzarella sauce from the store. It was terribly rich, in a good way. Could have used some vegetables, Bill said (what?! I know. Bill's starting to care about nutrition). So next time we'll add mushrooms. Thoughts on other additions?

PS, I don't know that I've mentioned that our only cooking surface, besides the microwave and the toaster, is a single-burner stove. And it doesn't really have a medium heat--we boil the hell out of stuff or we warm it very slowly. There's no oven. We can't boil pasta while sauteeing the sausage and heating the sauce. Every meal is made in several stages. I try to cook a couple meals worth of chicken breast in one afternoon to make dinner a more manageable process.

Meal suggestions? One-pot wonders? I'd love to hear from you all.
Choooss (as the Germans say--I hear it as a sort of mangled version of "cheers", but I can't remember what it actually comes from).