Duck Paté

The first day of my Pescetarian Challenge was almost undone by a little bit of duck paté.

I spent the last few days celebrating New Year's Eve in the Black Forest in Germany. Fourteen of us who had all met between January - June of 2013 in Coimbra, Portugal (mainly through people doing their Erasmus year there) met again in Germany and celebrated a very international NYE.

Posing in front of Titisee-Neustadt where we stayed in Germany.

A small part of our initial big shop.

We bought a lot of generic food in Germany, and people also brought food from all corners (well, 3 or 4 corners...) of Europe; there was cheese and deliciousness from the Netherlands, a strange mustardy dip and Slivovicia (a strangely tasty but somewhat throat burny plum liquor) from Slovakia, then baguettes, blue cheese, wine and mousse de canard (the offending duck paté) from France, whereas I brought scotch whiskey from the UK and Port wine (of course) from Portugal. In addition to this, we also took advantage of the fact that we were in Germany and ordered in a few crates of superior German beer.

Just before sitting down to eat.

My last meal as a meat-eater in 2013 was actually a mélange of various small nibbles/dishes people had made; pasta salad, potato salad, garlic bread, normal salad, and my contribution a bowl of mini bratwurst sausages, peppered and onioned. My last meat of 2013, and hopefully until June 2nd, were these mini bratwursts, which were lovely, by the way.

Enjoying a German brewski after food.

I was hoping to take good pictures of all the food was eaten to document it for this blog, and especially the chili sem carne we had the following day, but I got a bit lost up in the moment. In fact, the photos that I have here were taken with Filip's camera, which is much better than my own iPhone camera.


So what about the duck paté? The story wasn't really that incredible, but now you have the important context; that there was a lot of international food on offer. January 1st arrived after a lot of drinks, shots, unsafe firework displays, dancing on a snow-soaked roof in socks, and much reveling. Bizarrely, the day after I had no hangover. We went snowboarding in Feldberg, I had my first gluewein of 2014 and we returned to the cottage to eat.

Coimbra Badiboopi does snowboarding in Feldberg

Whilst half the crew slept off hangovers and rested up for our last night together, Jules, from the Netherlands, got to work on his chili sem carne. He was helped out by a three-man crew consisting of an Aussie, a Welshman and a German, who chopped the veg and chatted away. The Aussie, Liam, is working in Chamonix, in France and had brought with him a few bottles of red wine, which we were happily devouring, some cheeses and some mousse de canard. The vegetables were chopped so we brought some bread in to the cheese party and cracked on to the cheese. It was amazing. French cheese and paté brings me back a few years to when I used to holiday in France with my family. Of course, back then it was jus d'orange I was drinking instead of wine. As cheese was passed around, I casually asked Filip, who was on the other side of the table, to pass me over some duck paté on bread. It looked amazing, and as he spread it over the little chunk of baguette, I felt my mouth watering in delightful anticipation. Just as it was passed over to me, my brain kicked in to gear and reminded me that as of today I had decided to give up meat, and, unfortunately, a duck was still a non-fish creature.

So, that was it. I said it wasn't really that exciting a moment. But the fact that my challenge was almost destroyed on the first day by the simple habit of enjoying meat means I have to be a lot more careful in the future.

Damn you non-aquatic delicious meat creature!

Note: A big thank you to Filip for having a better camera than me, and allowing some good pictures (except the duck...thank google for that one!)