Luxembourg Unit

We’ve been slowly working our way through Europe in our country studies, mainly because I was tired of hopping around, so I told the kids, “Let’s get Europe done, and then we won’t have to keep track of all these different notebooks for our geography lessons.” Seriously, right now we have Europe notebook, United States Notebook, Asia Notebook, and then I cheated and put the Oceania notebook (which apparently I need to upload) into it as well (I was shocked to find out how many little countries are part of the Oceania area, seriously a lot). All that to say, here’s our Luxembourg Unit.

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Learn about Luxembourg

Not too surprisingly, our local library had nothing on Luxemburg. Actually, it had nothing on any of the countries we learned about for November 2019, something about them all being essentially overgrown city-states. With that in mind, I turned to my now favorite geography YouTube channel, okay it’s the only geography YouTube channel I follow: Geography Now.

They’re a fun and silly way to learn a bit more about a country, and usually, is our starting off point. Sadly, in the case of Luxemburg, it was also our ending point because my searches on the country came up with lots about banking laws, and about how their culture is an amalgamation of the countries right next to them.

And continuing my lack of ability to find much, there also wasn’t much on the internet in general, but I have to say Luxembourg (I have now seen it spelled both Luxemburg and Luxembourg, but it’s spelled Luxembourg on their website, so I need to go back and change that) has done a great job optimizing their website because it’s the top 5 search results when you search Luxemburg.

But, so you have some great information to fill out your Europe notebooking pages for the Luxembourg unit, here’s what I’ve found.

• Luxembourg Facts
• Visit Luxembourg
• Luxembourg Facts for kids on Kiddle
• Luxembourg Facts for kids on Easy Science for kids

Luxembourg Potato Cakes

We made Gromperekichelcher (potato pancakes from the Luxembourg site recipe. I was rather tempted by the Dainty Apple Cake to try, maybe I’ll make that sometime as a surprise for Jeff who loves apple recipes.

I know, we usually try to make meals from the country we’re learning about, but I could not find a meal that everyone would enjoy. Seriously, Luxembourg has lots of sausages made using intestines and other stuff I knew would not fly. So, potato pancakes it is.

To go with our potato cakes we did a breaded chicken, which was essentially schnitzel.

So, here goes our fun Luxembourg Potato Cakes for our Luxemburg unit.

Luxemburg Unit Potato Cakes ingredients

The recipe we followed was all in grams, so here is our adaptation of it. Also, Batman cooked this as part of his independent project, so I have zero in process pictures. It’s kind of weird to have absolutely zero to do with cooking these recipes now.

• 6 potatos
• 1 shallot diced
• 4 cloves garlic (I’m always an add more garlic girl, personally)
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 Cup flour
• 5 eggs
• a pinch of parsley, nutmeg, salt, and pepper
• oil for cooking

Let’s make those potato cakes

Y’all the directions on the site were terrible. It’s the ultimate minimalist instructions.

Wash and skin potatoes, and then grate them. This is going to take FOREVER, so plan way ahead for this step. Also, I think we ended up using the food processor to speed up the process, this would be better.

Add chopped shallots, garlic, parsley, and spices.

Mix with the eggs, and then add in the flour.

Cook patties in the hot oil.

If anyone’s curious about our schnitzel-ish chicken

• bread crumbs (Italian)
• random spices that sounded good, probably large amounts of garlic salt (this is on my Subscribe and Save) Future Ticia no longer has it on her subscribe and save because we don’t use it as much.
• beaten eggs
• chicken breasts pounded thin
• melted butter to cook it in

First pound your chicken breasts nice and uniformly thing. This is an oddly satisfying thing to do. I usually at this point cut it into smaller pieces.

Next mix the bread crumbs and whatever random spices you want to use.

Then dip the chicken in the beaten eggs (if you want to extend, you can add a bit of milk), then dip it in the bread crumbs mixture.

Heat the butter or oil, and then cook your chicken.

As you can see this isn’t the healthiest of recipes, but we thoroughly enjoyed eating it.

Let’s see where else we’ve studied for geography

• Singapore Unit Study
• Learn to follow maps with picture books
• Me on the Map: My Room
• Texas Geography Unit
• Rosemary Pork Chops of Yummyness (New Zealand)

Streppel, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons