This Summer on Button Soup...

Most of the posts on Button Soup this year have been about the Supper Club.  In case you've missed any, there have been four dinners:

• Burns Supper
• Pork Dinner
• St. Patrick's Day
• Easter Sunday

The Supper Club is taking a break for the summer.  I am typing this post from Semmering, Austria, which is an hour or so south of Vienna, in a mountain pass between the provinces of Lower Austria and Styria.  I am here for one month to cook in their kitchens, and then for a second month to explore the region with Lisa.

I debated for some time whether I would write about this trip here on Button Soup.  I describe Button Soup as 'Food from Edmonton, AB' in both the geographical and cultural sense, and I've always focused on home-cooking, rather than the professional sort. I wondered if writing about Austrian kitchens, and professional ones at that, would somehow upset the soul of Button Soup.

Now that I am here, I realize that I have to write about this place.  Studying foreign cuisines teaches you about your own.  In fact, several of my past experiments have been inspired by or stolen from the food of central and eastern Europe.  For instance:

• Wheat Pudding - (Ukrainian kutia)
• Rum Pot - (German rumtopf)
• Fir-Smoked Ham - (beech-smoked Black Forest ham)

So, over the summer you can expect lots of posts about Austrian food.


Freelance Editor's Competition

I will be typing my posts on a German keyboard.  The major differences  between a German keyboard and its English counterpart are the inclusion of the 'umlauted' vowels (ü, ö, ä...), and that the 'y' and the 'z' keys are in the oppostie positions.  I can't seem to unlearn what Mavis Beacon taught me, and I am constantly typing 'zou' instead of 'you,' and 'verz' instead of 'very.'  As one of those neurotic, condescending pricks who corrects people's grammar and doesn't respect menus with spelling errors, it's extremely frustrating.

If you ever see that I have typed a 'y' where there should be a 'z,' or vice versa, be the first to comment on it and win a jar of homemade preserves.

There's one more exciting feature this summer on Button Soup.


Introducing Lisa Zieminek, Button Soup's Senior Backyard Correspondent

Lisa is my girlfriend.  We live together in McKernan.  She taught me how to cook.

While I am cooking in Austria, Lisa will be closely observing the growth of the edible plants in our backyard in Edmonton.  She will periodically post about some exciting kitchen preparations of those plants.

It's going to be a busy summer.  Stay tuned...