We’ve been in our Vienna apartment for two weeks now and have settled into a great routine that includes a brisk hour-long walk along the Danube Canal every morning (with a bakery stop for fresh breads on the way home); breakfast on our rooftop “terrasse” (which like most apartment terraces here has a view of other rooftops); wandering aimlessly in tiny cobblestoned streets, museum visits, opera performances, and sampling the delights of the Austrian kitchen.
Why Vienna? All our friends and colleagues ask the same question.
It’s because this is a remarkably vibrant town…vastly different from its dowdy, depressed personality 30 years ago when we lived in Innsbruck and visited the capital city. The array of cultural events is staggering. There’s a fascinating museum for every day of the month. The sense of history (the bad along with the good) pervades every little street and gasse (tiny alleyway). And the food is terrific.
So my husband and I rented an apartment on-line…through Vienna Center Apartment...and found “home” in a building that dates to the Austrian Empire and overlooks the Danube Canal (which flows into the Danube a mile or so away).
Mercifully, our apartment was built in the last 20 years…tacked onto the roof of the splendid courtyard-centered structure. That means we have sloped ceilings but lots of light. We also have a very usable kitchen (rare in European apartments) that was remodeled last December.
Since we wanted to visit the city’s famed open-air markets and cook at home, the kitchen was a determining factor in the choice of Herminengasse, 4 as our temporary home.
And, since compulsive and organized are two words that have on occasion been used to describe me, I brought with me to that kitchen all the tools that I knew I couldn’t live without.
Here are the lists of "THINGS I KNEW I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT" and "THINGS I DIDN’T REALIZE I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT"
WHAT WENT INTO MY SUITCASE
1. My favorite Wusthof 8” Chef’s knife
2. Small paring knife
3. Serrated knife (from Del Mar Fair hawker)
4. Cheese plane
5. Small rasp grater
6. Zyliss vegetable peeler
7. Froth Au Lait, my beloved milk steamer contraption that turns 6 ounces of low fat milk into a huge cloud of froth for cappuccino and lattes
8. Tazo Zen tea bags.
9. SportTea for iced tea
10. Anglesey Salt (from Victoria Gourmet)
11. Battery-operated Graviti peppergrinder, filled with multi-colored peppercorns. (Actually I somehow forgot this…it must be on the bed at home…and I’ve had to resort to one of those McCormick spice bottles with the grinder on top.)
12. Four placemats and four cotton napkins. (Rental apartments never provide these and I didn’t want to
spend time shopping for them when I could be sightseeing or hiking.)
13. One pair rubber gloves for washing dishes
14. Pillar candles for candlelight dinners. (This is the one thing I could have omitted. There are plenty of reasonably priced candles here.)
15. Last, but certainly not least, one small plastic tub of Trader Joe’s Mini Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups. Coals to Newcastle? Not really. Sometimes you just want a tiny bit of familiar sweetness at night and not a towering whipped cream wonder.
The photo, right, shows a dinner of Austrian grostl, a jumble of sauteed squash, potatoes and onions served with a spiegei (sunny-side-up egg) on top.
THINGS I DIDN’T BRING TO VIENNA BUT QUICKLY LEARNED I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT
1. A large-mouthed mug/cup for caffe latte with lots of foam. In this part of the world, folks drink their coffee and tea from standard-sized cups-and-saucers that hold, maybe, 7 ounces.
2. Small poly cutting board (everyone uses wood here…and mostly cheap, splintery, hard-to-clean wood).
3. A measuring cup. Even when I’m not following recipes, I have found this a critical tool.
4. Scotch tape. Sounds dumb. But trust me, don’t leave home for a month without it.
5. GOOD wine glasses. Nothing is more frustrating that trying to appreciate all these unfamiliar and exciting new wines in a doofus cut-glass “goblet” that holds about 5 ounces. I bought two Riedel “O” (stemless) crystal glasses and will attempt to get them back to San Diego in 2 pieces.
6. Ice cube trays. C’mon. What IS it with these people? They are genetically incapable of putting more than 2 weensy ice cubes in a drink…and their ice cube trays reflect that affliction. However, since we didn’t have cocktails at home often, and since there is probably not an American-style ice cube tray on the continent, I decided to “rough it” (!) with the ONE tray in our freezer. It gives 12 cubes at a time…each is 3/4-inch by3/4 inch. Essentially that’s one gin and tonic on a sunny day.
Oh, yes. The “THINGS I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT AND SO HAD SENT TO ME IN VIENNA” list.
It’s a short one. My husband says I should be embarrassed to include it. But I’m a newspaper person, through and through, and so…here goes.
1. My favorite newspaper sections from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
I ask you. What good is a fabulous caffe latte in the sunshine on your rooftop terrasse if you don’t have the NYT Dining In or WSJ Weekend sections to read?
Yeah. Yeah. I know I could read these things on-line, but it simply is not the same experience.
Our son Ben dutifully gathered my favorites (which also included NYT Escapes, Travel and Home) and mailed them Express Mail each week. OK. So each packet cost about 25 bucks. But they provided unbeatable entertainment every morning.
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