Allison's Food and Otherwise: Viennese cooking museum exhibit & Ice skating at the Rathaus

Georgie and I had a great Monday this week. I had the day off so we went shoe shopping, got some coffee, went to an exhibition, went ice skating, and then I made a late-night dinner for us both. I made salmon with lemon and capers, dill potatoes, and a cress salad with goat cheese and pomegranate seeds. Oh, and then we traded foot rubs since our feet hurt from ice skating and watched two pirated episodes of Scrubs on my computer. What a nice day. Perfect, really.

Both the exhibition and the ice skating were at the city hall; the former indoors and the latter out. The exhibition was about the history of Viennese cooking. It was really interesting and I am glad I went. In the first room, there was a display of really old cookbooks. Georg pointed out to me their antiquated language, and you could see that the measurements were pretty vague compared to today's recipes, obviously due to lack of measurement technologies.

A recipe for almond milk.

We then proceeded into another room, where there were lots of cute vintage Viennese food posters, a video projection of vintage cooking shows, and a display of artifacts related to Vienna's most famous and traditional dishes.

"Cook finer...cook with Thea [butter]"

An advertisement for Anker's little egg puffs

Some cute polar bears that probably sold a lot of ice cream.

Georg told me once that there is a ball for everything; we realized he was correct when we saw this ad for a Wuerstelball...a ball for sausages.

Haha, those pigs look happy.

Cute little 1960s cooking show man.

Making stuffed red peppers for an appetizer. I am not sure what he was stuffing them with, but my photo makes it look like butter. Ew!

This woman introduced viewers to cow anatomy by pointing out the different cuts of beef.

Alternatively, here's a pop-up book to learn the cuts of pork.

Ich kann kochen=I can cook...haha. I love that woman's expression.

Here's a picture of a Schweinebraten. It is just a roast of pork shoulder or butt featuring decoratively cut fat and caraway seeds. Mom and I made it for an Austrian wine night she hosted once. It was really good! Here's the recipe we used if you're interested.

This is the world's smallest cookbook...it features over 100 recipes. You can only see it with a special lens!

Here's the cookbook in comparison to a regular-sized book.

And now on to our ice-skating adventure. The rink created outside the city hall was really neat...it had two big, round areas in which to skate, and then several long, wooded, narrow paths connecting these two areas. The paths made it so that you could skate and feel like you were going somewhere instead of just languishing in the same oval rink the whole time.

There's Georg.

Someone actually offered to take a picture of us, which was nice. I usually end up holding the camera above both our heads, taking (bad) aim, and taking the picture myself.

Georgie intently watching the other skaters.

The city hall and the surrounding trees were decorated using bright lights...

The ice skating complex is also one of the last places you can get punsch and gluehwein...until skating ends March 9th! All of the stands in the city have long since been taken down, since it's considered more of a Christmas thing, and I had missed it! I am glad it will always be there for me at the Rathaus ice skating rink.