Hoofd?

Last week we biked over to the adorable neighboring town of Veere to try to get a table at De Peperboom, the restaurant that our exchangers had recommended. It was full, and we weren’t really dressed for a more upscale place anyway, so we settled on one of the more touristy places in the central square that we’d been to before. We’d found out from the waiter the last time that Veere is a popular tourist destination for wealthy Americans on the smaller yachts – he said yachts, not me – as well as for day trippers from the Benelux region. There were a shitload of Americans walking around last time we were there, I’m not kidding, so we wanted to keep a lower profile and try to blend in. Until we saw the menu, that is. I hadn’t seen the dinner menu last time, and was vaguely horrified to scan down to the center of the page to see this: Hoofd. Oh, hell no. What are the animals with hooves, anyway? Do sheep have hooves? What about cows, and yes, definitely horses have hooves. Wait a minute, aren’t they called cloven?  I am already mostly vegetarian, never eating beef and occasionally some chicken or pork, so I was really not ready to be ordering from this section. Not possible. I settled on a warm goat cheese salad from the top of the page, and didn’t mention Hoofd to anyone. Can you imagine how relieved I was when I got home and looked up the word in the dictionary? It means mains, principals – you know, like Entrées. It was just the list of the main dishes, nothing to do with hooves or even animals. Go ahead, laugh at me…it is pretty funny.