Fricadelles and war machines

Occassionally, when I'm in a rush and on my way to class I'll run into Carrefour (fun fact: means crossroads), one of the larger grocery store chains, in search of something to stop the continous rumbling coming from my gut. I hate it when absolute silence in a room full of people is pierced by the sound of my stomach begging for sustenance. That's when I regret not having the bowl of cereal or whatever.

Alas, I am your typical carnivore-style male and I prefer the protein punch to give me the energy in the morning instead. I still sometimes wistfully dream of the Irish breakfasts I've had that kept me full of energy... and presumably cholesterol. (See this for an example...) Anyway, I can't stand eating sweet things in the morning, which is what the French race seems to run on. Lots of dairy and cookies or bread or whatever. My wife seems to love speculoos cookies, for instance. So of course I walked near the fresh baked bread and pastries and what did I spy wrapped in flakey bread? MEAT. Or as I would later find out, a fricadelle (frikandel for the dutch).

If that looks too appetizing, here it is without bread.

There are a lot of sausages from a lot of different places, so that didn't raise my eyebrows or anything, but I shoulda known better when my wife told me once "we don't know what meat is in there". By we, she seemed to mean everyone else in the country. But I love the things, they're quick and easy and taste good. Outside, it's the consistency of a regular sausage and inside it's sort of... grey. The appearance threw me off cause I thought it was breakfast food; silly me... I'm in Belgium, meat for breakfast? Course not. It's meat for lunch, that's why it was sitting next to the mini-pizzas!

You can even find them in kebab shops. Usually I eat them as they are while walking to class, but apparently in the Netherlands and Germany people will eat them sans-bread with mayo, ketchup, onions, etc. Sounds sorta familiar, right?

I think you see where I'm going with this: it turns out that the fricadelle is pretty much the euro equivalent of the hot dog, and I've been happily eating them for breakfast for like a month now. The frightening part being, they are rumored to have the same quality of meat in them as some of the shadier hot dogs in the States except the horse, as I have pointed out before, is still eaten over here. Yep, a growin' boy gotta eat his recycled mystery meat! The fact that I've been sandwiching them inside of the noble croissant is probably worthy of some sort of public punishment in France.

At least maybe I countered some of the pig balls and horse jaw meat by walking around the giant musée militaire here in Brussels. I went there yesterday with some classmates for the second time, and I still haven't really had the time to take in everything. It's free, so I'll be going back. I could spend all fucking day in there and I mean that literally, I'd have no problem with staying there all day and sleeping there as well. I can easily see myself donning Napeolionic-era armor with bullet dents in it and passing out on a Nazi tank with a fricadelle in one hand and a Kwak in the other.

The wife is kickinh my fat ass off the computer so I shall write more about meat later