Only a Fool.....in April

APRIL FOOLS!!! The History: In the 16th century, France celebrated the New Year just like we do today, except they partied on April 1st. In 1562, Pope Gregory changed the calendar to the one we use today and from then on, the New Year began on January 1st.

Lots of people didn't know about the new calendar, or they ignored the new calendar and kept celebrating on April 1st. Everyone else called them April fools and played tricks on them.

In France today, April 1st is called Poisson d'Avril, which means April Fish. Children tape paper fish to their friends' backs and when the young "fool" finds out, the prankster yells "Poisson d'Avril!" If you go to your local boulangerie right before april, you will find pastry shaped FISH. It is really rather clever.

Now that my daughter is older, she thinks this day is really fun and gets on the internet to find ideas to play on me/us. Last year she froze my car keys in a glass of water that I usually drink out of and then put water in it. I didn't realize that my keys were in there until after I finished my water.

This year she locked me out of the house. What this little 13 year old prankster realizes is that she is messing with the King. When you mess with the Bull....well you know the rest. So, I needed to put her in her place. She had just finished a 3 page paper on the computer and has a bad habit of not saving it. So when she went up to change her clothes, I saved the paper in an odd location she would never look on the computer and then erased all the word so just the title was left. When she went to print it out tonight she found it was gone and began her series of "freaking out." When I told her where it was and I yelled, "April Fools," she was so wanting to kill me. I said, just remember, the only Fool is the one in April that messes with The King....ME!!!!

I Am......Dough Boy

I learn new things here, maybe not everyday, but often enough that I am proud of me. That isn't a pride thing, it is just being proud of how far I have come. So one night I wanted to experiment with baking. Now, those that know me, know that I don't bake, I cook. Baking involves putting exactly measured ingredients together to come up with a product. Cooking involves throwing stuff together in whatever measure you want, or not measuring at all to create great meals. But back to baking. This creation would involve having to use bread dough. Now here in france, you can buy pre-made pizza dough, pastry shell dough, but nothing that "rises." So I was sitting here on my couch saturday night so wanting to do this and not wanting to have to make dough from scratch. Now all you bakers out there are going to say, "Making dough is so easy." And I am sure it is, but I just didn't feel like attempting to make bread dough the first time and it come out successful so that I can continue on with the rest of the experiment.

So as I am watching Glee on Apple TV, and it hits me. If my butcher will rotisserie my Thanksgiving turkey, could I get dough at a bakery. Hey, bakers make dough to make bread, I wonder if they would sell me some dough. So every Sunday before church, I go to the market and then I visit my favorite Boulanger. I walk into the Boulanger and my favorite ladies are there and the one lady that does speak some english was there. I began to ask her if she sold the dough used to make bread. She looked at me very strange and said, "what is dough" in her french accent. I explained, dough is what you use to make bread. She looked at me again strangely pronouncing the word dough trying to figure out what that was. I pulled out the google translate and put in dough and it came up pate, which is the same translation for pasta. But once I told her this, she smiled, went to the back and came back with a ball of dough. I said, "Yes, that is it. Do you sell it?" She said yes, it is 1 Euro. !!!!1 euro? I couldn't make dough for 1 euro, so I took 2.

So the moral of the story, ask, what can it hurt? As long as we are here, I know where to get my dough on!!!!

Happy Baking and now on to experimentation.

Moi parler francais?.....Oh La La!!!!

I remember taking french in 8th grade, that is about all I remember about that french class. If I had only paid more attention and could have seen into the future... With that said, I CANNOT SPEAK FRENCH, but I am amazed what I can do. I know enough french words and phrases that I can string a few words together to communicate to people what I want or need. That is amazing to me. Considering I have been taking french lessons off and on for a year now. I HAVE THE BEST FRENCH TEACHER; Gaelle. She is very patient with me. She has to be, because I am her worst student. I know it and admit it. I am bad about doing my homework, but I learn new stuff every week. I never would have thought that I could actually go to the sunday market and get across to the people some of the things I would like to buy. I also love the fact that most of the people I deal with will help me with learn new words, or fix my mispronunciations.

Now, I still struggle terribly to hear what they are saying back. And I can hopefully get them to slow it down and repeat it again. If I look like a deer in the headlights, they feel bad for me and try and speak english and we make it work. I don't know if I will every be fluent, probably not, but I hope to continue to learn more words and phrases and be able to communicate more with the locals who here have made life more bearable.

So here is to more french words and wine. Viva la France! Oh La La!

Father of an International Swimmer

As I sit here tonight, I think of the things that I hope my daughter will some day absorb. She as been swimming on a french swim now going on her second year and this year added the school swim team to the program. She has learned so much this year from her new french swim team in Versailles. She has a great coach (Coach Franck) and he has been very accommodating speaking english to her, but also teaching her the french terminology in swimming. She also has a few friends from school on this team which helps spark her interest a little more. She is still trying to figure out what the "eye of the tiger" means, or that "killer instinct." She has qualified in 7 events for the France finals in May, and I don't know if she really knows what kind of accomplishment that means. Hopefully there will be that "spark" that takes her to the next level which will show her how good I know she really is.

One of the next things that I hope she realizes that she truly is an international swimmer. By the time she leaves here, she will have swam in the Netherlands, Paris, Brussels, London and the U.S. That is not a very large club to be a part of. I hope she sees how cool that is, cause I think it is not only cool, but amazing. All I want for her is to shine like the diamond I know she is. To take every experience and make it more amazing than the next. To know that she has lived a life few get to experience and take advantage of.

So, I think it is cool and I am proud to be her father and the father of an international swimmer. Katherine I love you and I am very proud of you.

Cafe de Krueger - A Little Taste of Thanksgiving

This year a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, my wife comes to me and says, "Hey, I would like to invite some people from work over and show them our American Thanksgiving. Would you cook a Thanksgiving feast for them to taste?" John: "Baby, I would love to do that for you, how many people are you thinking?" Liz: "I was thinking about 12-16 people." John: "Whew, that is a lot of people."

Now some of you are thinking, "John, that is nothing, you have thrown parties at your house for many more than that. What are you worried about? " I would agree with you for the most part, but we are not in the US where I have my giant kitchen with double ovens, warming drawers and a dining room that I can fit 30 people. But nonetheless, I say, "I will do whatever you need me to do, I think giving your french co-workers a taste of American Thanksgiving is a great idea."

So for a couple of days, I came up with a menu and then we started to talk logistics. Some expats here are lucky enough to have a place where they can entertain. We are also lucky to have a house rather than an apartment, but this house is compartmentalized. There is no room for moving things around to make space, so in order to get that many people, we will need to add a second table in our living room and get some chairs as well. Then there is the decision as to who do you put at which table and which table she sits at (something we learned when we spent 2 weeks in China). You don't want to insult anyone by not sitting with them. So we talked with family and finally came up with a great idea of appetizers (canapes) and desserts based on Thanksgiving.

So, I created a new menu based around thanksgiving ingredients, but with a french flair. So my menu was: 1. Crostini with a blue cheese spread, piece of turkey and topped with cranberry sauce; 2. Turkey salad sandwiches (with walnuts and celery); 3. Brioche sweet potato cups; 4. Stuffing balls; 5. Cucumber cups stuffed with shrimp salad; 6. Green beans wrapped in prosciutto. I had to make around 60 of each appetizer. Liz then made 6 desserts which included Chocolate chip bundt cake with chocolate ganache, apple spiced cake, pumpkin cookies with brown sugar icing, pumpkin cheesecake and cinnamon apple bars with brown sugar icing and chocolate ganache. We also purchased French champagne to go with it.

We set the part for 4pm and set it up in the cafeteria at her work. We had the help of our friend Kristin Bell, a co-worker and another french co-worker. By 3:55 we were ready to begin feeding. At 4:15, no one had shown yet, you get nervous and forget that this is france, that everyone is always late. About 5 minutes later people came flooding in. Liz welcomed everyone and described what was on the menu and how thanksgiving started and what it means to us; Americans.

Everyone began to eat, sample and try all the food. I think they were amazed at the array of food and that they were able to understand what Thanksgiving tasted like. it lasted till about 5:30 and everyone went back to work or went home. We had some food left and Liz left most of it at work and was going to take it to a meeting the next day to be finished. The next day the meeting was the highlight as the food was gone. You never know how well the event goes, but the next day, she was presented with beautiful flowers and a thanks for putting it on. Her boss asked if we could do that every week it was so good. I told her once a month might be a cool thing, but you only get 1 for free, the rest you gotta pay for. it took a lot of time and energy and I want paid.

It did make me realize I like creating something from nothing and experimenting and coming up with my own creations. So maybe I will try harder at cooking new and better dishes for my family.

My Butcher........My Friend

Last year, the school my kids go to sold fresh turkey's for our American holiday celebration..Thanksgiving. We already had plans to go to London since we needed a change of scenery after arriving 3 months prior. So I froze our turkey in our american size refrig/freeze in our cave for another time.

Here we are a year later and it is time to do this turkey. So, I have my smoker and was going to throw it in and smoke up my 9kilo turkey and see what happened. As the day got closer, it got colder and my small smoker would be hard to keep warm. I didn't want to put it in my oven because I would really have to babysit it. Then a light dawned in my head (I felt like a lightbulb over my head just came on for all to see). My butcher has these massive rotisserie's.

So I had taken my turkey out 3 days prior but it was still frozen. I decided to take it to him anyway and see what he could do. I went down early on a sunday morning around 8:30 because I knew very few french people would be there and I could take my time with him. I get down there and Peter (a young man who speaks english at the butcher) and the man he calls "the boss" was there and both greeted me with a, "Bonjour John." I told Peter I needed to talk to him and the boss. I told him my dilemma and was wondering if he would truss up the turkey and put it on the rotisserie. I had written up my request on Google Translate, translated it to french and printed it out. As they both read it, they got this frown across their face and I knew what they were curious about. Once I had translated it to french, I had it translated back to english. Well, the translation for trussing up the turkey literally translated to "wire the bird to me." I explained that I wanted the bird tied up so that the legs and wings didn't flop everywhere and they both smiled and said, "d'accord." He then took the turkey out and found it to be frozen still and he was like, "merde." They talked and they said they could thaw on top of the rotisserie. Before I left, he asked if he could season the turkey and I said, he was the Chef du Cuisine and he could do what he wanted. He said I could come back at 1:30 and pick it up.

I returned after church feeling joyous for I knew that it had to be good because all of their food is good. I walked up to their booth at the market and saw my bird on the spit all alone (market starts closing around 2) but there was a crowd of french people with their kids just staring at it. The butcher came over and took it off the spit and brought it over to the table and was taking out the center spike holder. As he did, the french kids were just going on and on pointing to it and talking to their parents and the parents were jabbering away. It was causing quite a fuss as they had never seen anything that big before.

I stood there in awe of how beautiful it looked. As I saw him take off the bar that held it, I asked what he had done to it. Peter explained that to keep the breast moist, he covered the turkey in bacon, trussed it all up and put in on. Can I tell you how awesome that turkey was? I know just by the description and photo that you KNOW it was good. It is a technique that I will tuck away for when I return to the states and I am looking into commercial type rotisseries now. So as they packaged it up for me to take home, I asked, "combien je vous dois?" He said that I didn't owe him anything, that he was happy to do it for me because I was such a good and loyal customer. I told him that I feel I should pay him for his time, but he refused to take my money. I couldn't have been more proud of this frenchman because this is not the norm that I have run into. For the service he has provided, I will be forever grateful.

This is why the butcher is my friend, he produces great product and also has great service. I will miss him

Live life like there is no tomorrow......

To some, the titles sounds awfully selfish. But this has been a hard week for me. A friend of mine was in a bicycle accident. Not one that you would think would be horrible like being hit by a car running into something at high speed. No, a world class athlete (been pro biker since he was a teenager), who watches what he eats, is incredibly in tune with his body and it's limitations, passed out on a rigorous ride. He doesn't remember anything (because he hit his head and his helmet broke giving him a concussion) and he can't remember the 15 minutes or so before that. His doctors aren't 100% sure what is wrong with him and still doing more tests. As I have been praying for him and his family, it has made me think of what is important and am I doing enough to further HIS Kingdom.

If we (I) lived each day like it was our last, we would ___________? I know I am not the first person to ask this question, nor will I be the last. Am I working hard enough on myself to make sure I am healthy and around for my children as they grow up? Am I doing my part to instill in them right and wrong, giving it your best and nothing less, being respectful and mindful? So many other things they will need as they grow up into strong independent adults.

The other day, I happen to look over and starring back at me was a photo of the kids when they were 2 and 6 respectively (taken by Don at Lakewood Photography). I started to get a little misty eyed as I thought about how much better a father I could have been in those early years. I could have been more compassionate, caring, nurturing. Was I living at that time like their was no tomorrow? Was I doing everything I could for my kids? Was I doing HIS will and everything for HIM so I could show my kids God's love?

I realize that life is a dance. You need to do what makes you happy and pursuit it. Next you need to devote just enough time to it so that it doesn't interfere in being with your family and their pursuits. You need to make sure that their pursuits are being met and they do their best and finally you need a little down time. Lastly, make sure they know the Lord our God will always be there in good times and in bad and HIS will for their lives is the right path. Now this dance has music, atmosphere, and multiple partners and they all must work together to not trip over each others feet, yet flow seamlessly to the choreography.

I know that I am not your typical blogger, my thoughts may stray back and forth zig zagging like many levels of a Metro station. Anyway, life is too short to live like you will live forever, rather, pursuit your passion, make sure your family is pursuing theirs and just enjoy each other for as long as you can. Love your family and Love God.