Happy New Year!

Hello, all, and Happy New Year!

In accordance with my resolution of establishing a more reasonable balance between work and hobbies, I am reviving this blog, for the third time. After not posting for five months, I'll begin with a 2010 retrospective tomorrow, and continue with more of the usual postings about food and travel throughout the year.

Thanks to all of the people who have signed up as followers! I'll try to update the site with items more riveting than what I am about to say about New Year's Day 2011...

Aside from food and music (more on that below), Heather and I looked forward to an exciting spate of close football games between well-matched teams on January 1.
Courtesy of Manuel, I wore my new Michigan State apron tonight despite the Spartans' embarrassing loss to Alabama in the Citrus Bowl. Heather and I were anticipating several lead changes in a game that might even end in overtime, especially since Alabama did not do as well as expected in the regular season and could not hold on in the Iron Bowl. How naive we were.... an 11-1 record in the Big Ten can be a dangerous thing! (See here).

Regardless, at least our two other New Year's Day traditions were enjoyable. Pictured above is this years' version of pork and sauerkraut with potatoes, a dish popular wherever Germans settled in North America, especially Pennsylvania. I made this with a three-pound pork butt roast, apples, onions, ale, brown sugar, and canned sauerkraut seasoned with caraway seed (Whole Foods was out of the jarred kraut, and also out of black-eyed peas and collard greens, part of the traditional Southern New Year's meal). This is a delicious treat, but not the best Pittsburgh New Year's tradition. That has got to be the banging of pots and pans on one's front porch on New Year's Eve. Sadly, fireworks and television have greatly led to that rite's demise, which I only experienced once, on the night of December 31, 1999. The next day, Y2K, was the last time Michigan State defeated an SEC team in a bowl game (Florida).

The wine we had with our dinner was a Gruner Veltliner (I splurged on the Kartaurserhof because it was for New Year's), which goes very well with German/Central European cuisine, especially pork. The most commonly found Gruner in the US and Canada is Hopler, which is quite good despite its mass production. It is also the wine served on Austrian Airlines, which I was surprised to find out when I flew to Vienna three years ago. Most countries' airlines do not serve passable wine. Then again, the difference between flying overseas on an airline like Austrian and, let's say, Delta, is like the difference between riding on a modern chartered coach and a yellow school bus. But, I digress.
The picture above is a shot of today's concert in Vienna. Not being very technologically adept, it is my version of a screengrab (I took a picture of my TV). For those of you who do not watch PBS's broadcast of the concert, it is features long takes of the Vienna Philharmonic playing in the Musikverein interspersed with ballet dancers performing historical reenactments of Habsburg-era flirtatious fun. Obviously, some of these scenes are just as ridiculous as football announcers in over-sized suits reenacting plays on Astroturf in a TV studio. But, as Austrian culture seems to vacillate between self-important gloom (Haneke's movies, Bernhard's novels) and dorky humor (Schwarzenegger's off-the-cuff's comments), one might expect that a concert consisting mostly of waltzes, watched by 50 million people in 72 countries, would have some exaggerated moments. But those are few in comparison with the really cool stuff, like the Lipizzaner horses and the inside shots of the opera house and various palaces and monuments and locations related to different composers (Franz Liszt this year). Here is a link to Radio 3's broadcast of the concert.

Well, I think I've written too much, but it has been five months. More pictures and less writing tomorrow!