In September I was in New York for a few days to visit family and friends. I spent a morning at the Neue Galerie enjoying the Klimts and Schieles (I've been obsessed with the art, design and architecture of the Wiener Secession lately and I love Schiele!). While I was waiting for my sister-in-law to join me I felt a pang of hunger and so I went to the Café Sabarsky for breakfast. Just reading the menu made me feel homesick and made me think about and miss so many places I love: Vienna, the childhood holidays spent in the Austrian countryside, breakfasts in Berlin (the capital of breakfasts - at least it was until not too long ago...) At first I couldn't decide what to order there were so many amazing breakfasts on offer: Kaiserschmarrn, Weisswurst, Eier im Glas... I had to go for the latter, one of my all time favorites! It seems it's not a frequently ordered dish - all the wonderful Upper East Side Ladies oohed and aahed when it arrived and looked very surprised to see peeled eggs in a Martini glass:
I had a food and memory experience this summer. I was roadtripping around Central and Eastern Europe with two friends of mine, who also thoroughly enjoy food... Everywhere we went we bought a few things at local supermarkets to take home with us. Austria was paradise for this - we bought amazing Kürbiskernöl (pumpkin seed oil), Powidl (plum jam) and Schokobananen. As a kid my family spent every summer holiday in the Austrian countryside with friends in their countryside house. The house is right next to a forest and mountain a few kilometers away form the next village. Lunches and dinners consisted of fish freshly caught by my dad and his friend KTh and rarely a deer they hunted and of the herbs and veggies Gigi (KTh's wife) grew in her vegetable garden. A couple of times a week we would drive into town to buy everything else we needed including Schokobananen - the most horrible, artificial, yellow, gooey stuff covered in chocolate. Us kids loooooved them and luckily KTh did too. Every evening after dinner he would get out one and cut it in slices - one per person. Which meant that every person got an approximately 0.8 cm slice of chocolate banana...
