Where Life Can Take You

     I have to interrupt today's regularly scheduled programming to take a step back and appreciate life, and how food can be such an enriching part of it. It dawned on me last night, that exactly one year ago to the day, I was on a train going back to Munich after spending a wonderful weekend in Vienna. At the beginning of the summer of 2012, I had no exciting plans, but after making a very spontaneous last-minute decision to visit a friend in Germany that August, I really began to appreciate the fact than life can surprise you sometimes in the best ways. Even a month before I left, if someone had said that I would be running around some of the most beautiful cities in Europe by the end of the summer, I wouldn't have believed them. So you never know where you can end up in a month or a year, and after remembering the first anniversary of my trip to my favorite city in the world so far, I then realized that I have no idea where I'll be a year from now. I could still be in Germany, I could be studying in a summer program, I could be traveling somewhere else in Europe, or I could be sitting right back here in my childhood bedroom. But here's the crazy thing about that: I actually think that's a comforting thought. Although I don't know where I'll be, I do know that it could be someplace really great because that's happened to me before. I'm excited to let life surprise me again.
     So what does all this have to do with food? Well, I connect food and travel in my mind. I often remember places and even people by associating them with the food I had, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite meals from my weekend in Vienna. As I already said in my Wiener Schnitzel post, I unfortunately ran out of time to find actual wierner schnitzel in Vienna, but this lunch I had at the opera house café was pretty good too:

     That's a huge slice of roast beef topped with veggies with a side of Kartoffelpuffer, which I liked so much, I had to learn to make them myself! So yes, I'm that nerdy tourist who takes more pictures of food than actual attractions, but somehow these pictures trigger the most vivid memories for me. After lunch on the same day, we went to a different café for dessert. Everything on the menu at this place looked like a work of art, and after a long deliberation, I decided to try this one:

     This was sort of a jello/pudding creation, and as you can see, it actually looks exactly like the picture on the menu! How often does that happen?

     

     So I hope you enjoyed this very different kind of post. I definitely do want to continue the recipes well into the future, but looking ahead, this is how I envision the travel portion of the blog to be when I'm in Europe. It won't all be centered on food, but food and travel seem to go together quite naturally, so there will probably be more posts like this to come. Tomorrow, I'm finally going to post my all-time, hands-down favorite recipe ever, ever in the whole wide world. So come back to find out what it is!