Action Cooking

Our diet in Switzerland is extremely different than it was in America. There are several reasons for this. One is that, since lunch is the primary meal of the day, our typically-Swiss dinner usually consists of fresh bakery bread (really the only kind to be had here) and a table full of sliced meats, cheeses, and spreads. This was great for a while. Its easy, there’s no cooking in the evening, and, since each person gets to grab what they want, everyone is happy. We tried all of the multitude of bread varieties in the store and sampled the equally plentiful selection of Swiss cheeses. Though James mostly subsisted on peanut butter and jelly, still his favorite combination, and definitely NOT Swiss. (They do have peanut butter here, but only one generic option, and I think we are the only ones who buy it.)

Meanwhile, I have to cook lunch for all the kids, since Emily and James come home from school at noon each day. Cooking a hot lunch each day for myself and three kids has proven to be more of a challenge. For starters, they’re kids. They are fairly picky, though they have learned to try anything I put in front of them. After some trial and error, I learned that it is NOT worth spending an hour making something that I consider to be nice, only to sit down for 15 minutes and watch them pick at it and complain that it isn’t very good and be stuck with a ton of leftovers.

The other reason our food is so different is shopping. Technically, most of the food we get in America is also available here. It’s just so darn expensive! Meat is particularly expensive. Cheap meat includes a variety of sausages, leberkase (a bologna-like meatloaf), pork chops and some chicken, and usually costs about $9-10 per pound.* Better cuts of meat, especially beef and fish, usually cost around $20 per pound or more. Needless to say, we haven’t eaten much beef while living in Switzerland. In fact, what we eat is really determined by what is on sale, or “Action.”

Back home, before my weekly grocery trip, I would plan out meals and put the ingredients from the recipes on my grocery list. Here, when I go to the grocery store, I head straight to the Action meat case at the front of the store where all of the meat is discounted. Whatever is on sale usually becomes our meals for the next several days, and once we get it home I figure out what to do with it. However, it tends to be the same things, and there is only so much you can do with sausages, pork chops, and whole chickens. Recently, I’ve been walking past the Action meat without getting anything because I am craving something different.

A few days ago, I bought one of the larger cuts of meat in the Action section, which I usually avoid because of their size and because I don’t really know what to do with them. I picked out something called Schweinsbraten Hals, which was only $7.25 per pound, but it weighed 2.6 pounds. Today, I looked up what that is, and found out it is a pork neck roast. I looked up a recipe, and it takes 3.5 hours to roast! So, it’s in the oven now and it will be our dinner tonight. And that’s the last thing I have in the refrigerator, so tomorrow I’ll head to Migros and see what’s on Action.

* Note: Food here is sold by the 100grams (or sometimes by the kilogram), and is priced in Swiss Francs, but I did the math.