That's something Liesbeth says to me all the time but I just noticed today. "Right" and "important." It rhymes in German though and has a nicer ring. So after breakfast this morning, I helped her make gnocchi from scratch because my sister Lisa was stopping for lunch on her way from Graz to Wien.
Cooking with Liesbeth is always an adventure. Step 1: find the right cookbook, scour its pages for something useful, read over once, and let's get moving. Step 2: make an absolute mess. That's the one thing that's so awesome about our kitchen: it's a well-used organized mess that we clean up, only to mess it up completely a few hours later. When you make gnocchi, you make the dough and then you have to test it by dropping it into the boiling water to see if it falls apart or sticks together. Ours were very sticky--so much that Liesbeth was flinging them off of her fork and into the pot proclaiming "Herein mit dir!" ("In with you!")
I only spent a couple of uneventful hours at work today, after which I dragged myself back up the hill (occasionally I walk to work). Around 4:30 Liesbeth looked at me sideways and pulled me off the couch, saying it was high time for me to move past this funk I've been in and that we were going on an adventure.
First stop: Spar and then Hofer (Austrian Aldi.) Tomorrow is a national holiday (May Day) and so everything will be closed. And with my sisters coming home we will definitely be cooking up a storm.
Then we were off to Burgenland, the Austrian state to the west of Styria (where I live.) Burgenland was once part of Hungary (all of the signs are still in German and Hungarian). Liesbeth decided it was going to be a choose-your-own-adventure type deal, and after listing off the options, looked at me expectantly. I chose Schlaining, because how cool is a name like Schlaining?! (Shl EYE ning.) Turned out to be TOTALLY the right choice.
I consider myself to be a castle-aficionado. I've seen a lot of them (there's 3 within 10 kilometers of my house, for goodness sake), but the Burg at Schlaining blew basically every Austrian castle I've seen out of the water. I won't even attempt to describe it in words, so please enjoy the pictures.
Inside the castle, however, was of course a Heuriger (wine tavern.) Liesbeth and I sat outside, enjoying the last of the day's sunshine, along with a couple of glasses of Sturm (partially fermented wine) and some really tasty toast--typical brown bread with smoked gouda, pears, and mountain cranberries on top. I pretty much wanted to stay there forever and never leave. Being a retired history teacher, she also gave me a brief history of the happenings of that particular area, mainly the annexation of Burgenland (the newest province in Austria.)
Mostly I like being at castles because I like to imagine what it would have been like to live there. You know, like as a kid--running all over the place, in the woods and creeks. What it would have been like to be attacked by the Turks. I got a little taste of that today--we hiked all the way around the entire fortress. There was even a Roman-style theater, which was basically asking that I run down the stairs and jump up on the stage. Made friends with a snail, picked some pretty snowbell flowers. Then got accidentally drunk in a castle.
On the way home, we took a lengthy detour through Burgenland, through some adorable villages that even Liesbeth had never seen before. Since May Day is tomorrow, each little town center or churchyard was erecting a "Maibaum" (May tree, kind of like a Christmas tree but way awesomer looking-- it's a needle tree, usually between 20 and 40 feet high, that has been completely shaved, except for the top 5 feet or so. The branches at the top are hung with pretty red and white ribbons.) The end goal was her home village of Neudau, quite possiblly the sweetest little place in Austria. It also, of course, had a castle. This one was interesting--the front part of it was clearly out of the middle-ages, but behind it was a gorgeous late-Baroque mini-Schönbrunn, for lack of a better description. It was even yellow, too!
Afterwards she took me to her birth house, a surprisingly massive farmhouse on the outskirts of Neudau. When she was born in 1950, her parents lived there along with her aunts, uncles, and cousins, which I think would have been such a fun way to grow up. We had an interesting discussion too--one of the political parties (the red), which was made illegal post-World War II and is associated with the ideas of communism, socialism, and atheism (and Hitler), actually remained (secretly) popular in Styria, primarily a farming province. I of course asked why, and it turns out that Hitler actually supported it, along with the preservation of family farms. Which was of course why it was made illegal, but at least it's easy to understand why the people would still hold onto the ideals.
Now the two of us are drinking beer and watching the Austrian version of the Tonight show. What a day :)
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