Today I bring you a story that almost didn’t make it to print. I am The Kid, the offspring of your normal columnist, and recently back from vacation in Budapest and Vienna.
As I set about planning my trip, as I chose points of interest, I slowly realized that I was creating a fairly creepy vacation. As you’ll see.
The entrance to the Murder Exhibit
On my first full day in Budapest, I visited their recently opened Murder exhibit. The point of the exhibit was to understand what makes a murderer, but in my experience, it was less successful in that, and more successful in giving guests the willies. Tableaus were set up with bedrooms of John Wayne Gacy and Elizabeth Bathory, the inside of Jeffery Dahmer’s fridge, Ed Gein’s kitchen, and more that I won’t spoil. One walks through with a headset, so they were able to take advantage of surround sound. Not for the faint of heart, but very much worth the hour or so spent for true crime fans.
Next, we’ll head to Vienna for a couple of stops.
The Narrenturm.
Vienna is only a 2-hour train ride away, so I decided to spend one of my days checking out the city. My first destination was the Narrenturm, or “Fool’s Tower”. This is one of the world’s oldest asylums and has since been turned in to Federal Pathologic-Anatomical Museum Vienna. It is similar to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, but all the signs are in German. I, dear reader, do not speak German. It was a heck of a time going from room to room, attempting to puzzle what each exhibit was. Some are obvious, but after a while, you start to forget what a normal lung really looks like.
The crypt of Empress Maria Thersa.
I next headed over to the Hapsburg Imperial Crypt. This is a Capuchin monastery, and current resting place of all the Hapsburg line. One member was laid to rest here as recently as 2011. I learned more about Austrian history in the hour and a half tour as I have in all the history classes I have ever taken. It was fascinating to hear all the steps taken by the members of the Hapsburg imperial family that all ended with them in the same crypt and just seeing how design choices had evolved over the hundreds of years, with the first burial taking place in 1619. I’ll say this, Maria Theresa wasn’t fooling around with her 9-ton metal sarcophagus.
The labyrinth.
Back to Budapest now, with the story of how I almost didn’t make it back home. Budapest is split into three parts, Buda, Pest, and Obuda. Buda is more of the historical district. This is where The Royal Palace is located, as well as the Labyrinth of Buda Castle. Running under Buda are tunnels and caves created mostly through natural hot springs. People would use these tunnels for smuggling, parties, and in the case of Vlad Dracula, or Vlad Tepes, a 14-year imprisonment.
These days, curious tourists are welcome to tour the labyrinth, with only occasional arrow signs on the walls as guides. Not long after entering, you are greeted with a fork in the road. One side leads towards more of the dimly lit labyrinth. The other heads towards the Maze of Darkness. This section is totally unlit, and your only guide is the rope attached to the wall. By the end, the rope was my best friend. I feel like the rope really understood me.
Thankfully, I did eventually escape. Though I did pass the same snake statue about 4 times. I wonder how Snake Friend is doing. I hope he’s well.
Thanks for your time.
Greetings from sunny Budapest!
Regular readers will be familiar with The Kid, the offspring of your regular columnist. I just got back from vacation, and she asked if I would be willing to talk a little about the food of Budapest. I offered Toronto as well, but as I never left the airport, it would be “Yes, Starbucks here tastes like nearly every other Starbucks.”
As every meal shared amongst friends in Budapest starts with a small glass of palinka, I’ll start there. Palinka is a clear fruit brandy that is traditionally served before a meal. The idea is that you drink the palinka, and it prepares your digestive system for food. Every restaurant and pub I went to had at least 5 and 20 flavors. I guess they were all just hoping to ready people for digestion? I’m sure that was it.
My first meal in Budapest was Chicken Paprikas. It was at a restaurant my Airbnb host pointed me to, and it was a perfect introduction to Hungarian food. Chicken Paprikas is slow-cooked chicken, in a creamy red gravy. It’s full of Hungarian paprika, and served with spaetzli, a homemade egg noodle. While it’s traditional and delicious, I learned later that most Hungarians save Paprikas for the cooler months at my next culinary outing.
There is a dinner hosted by a local, called Meet and Eat in Budapest. While the host is from Budapest, she moved away to go to school for a hospitality degree. When she got back home, she found that there just weren’t enough jobs, so she made one. Four nights a week, she opens her home to tourists of all different nationalities. With the help of her parents, she cooks family recipes and pairs each of the three courses with a different wine.
All the courses were amazing, and so was the company. Who would have thought that I would spend my Hungarian vacation sharing a meal with people from Scotland, France, and England? The stand-out dish, though, was the dessert. It was a Dobras Torte, a chocolate and vanilla mouse sandwiched between chocolate sponge cake. It was fluffy and lightly sweet. I don’t really have a sweet tooth (a stark difference between myself and your regular columnist, who would list birthday cake as her favorite food), so the cake was a perfect end to a wonderful meal.
If my prattling on about Budapest has got you excited for the food, try this one on for size:
¼ cup butter + 1 tablespoon
For the past few years when the entire Matthews Family band can gather together, we try to catch an on-demand episode of Face Off, a SyFy network special effects makeup competition. The show has made me both more aware of the creations and more appreciative of what folks go through to create believable science fiction productions.
But there were a couple of things during Voyager that made me yell at the TV in frustration.
Dear Picard,
Trek on!
And goulash is the tippiest tip top of the culinary iceberg. If a national dish can be changed so profoundly that the only thing left in common with the original is the moniker, we, the people have probably done it.
This mania to morph traditional recipes has almost become a national joke, a kind of twisted point of pride. At a bicentennial dinner attended by Paulucci, President Gerald Ford summed it up by asking, “What could be more American than a business built on a good Italian recipe for chop suey?”
Flavor NC production observation, day two:
Here’s something that will give what follows some context; a generous portion of my blood is composed of caffeine. Whether it’s an expensive fancy coffee beverage, a glass of my homemade sun-tea that’s so strong Petey and The Kid call it jet fuel, or chocolate so dark it absorbs surrounding light, my engine runs on that stimulant of the jacked up, jittery gods. Without it, I am a cranky toy, with failing batteries, and a belligerent headache.
The attached building contains two of my favorite summer items—air conditioning and homemade ice cream. Charity loves to use freshly harvested produce for it. We’ve just missed the blueberry sweet corn, but the fresh watermelon ice cream becomes part of the shoot.
After visiting the okra field, we drive to the farm annex where the fields went on as far as we could see. One portion was full of countless plants heavy with different varieties of ripe tomatoes. Purely as research I ate a couple; sweet, and warm from the sun.
Next was summer squash of different shapes and colors. Then were pumpkins, a few for cooking, but most were purely ornamental, including ones that were pale green and covered with what looked like warts. Our host Ashley said they were perfectly suited for jack-o-lanterns and Halloween decoration.
We concluded our visit back at the farm stand. Lisa and Charity did a shot that culminated in biting into a raw piece of okra.
And nope, it didn’t taste like chicken.
On breaks, The Kid brought all kind of things home from college.
As a consequence, we only had salads every couple of months, and in between there would usually be a couple of times where I purchased greens and mushrooms for salad but then something would come up and a week later I’d end up face to face with slimy malodorous lettuces and ‘shrooms that had a decidedly gangrenous quality.
The Kid, however, advocated a much more casual, spontaneous approach. This included buying a row boat-sized container of mixed greens from Costco or BJ’s, a log of goat cheese, and some ready-to-go protein to toss into the mix (I butter-toast and salt a couple pounds of pecans every few months and mix them with dried fruit. It keeps in the fridge for weeks). It’s dressed with a bottle of ready-made dressing; I love Trader Joe’s balsamic.
Then there was the time my very own shine-hauling mini Richard Petty pulled into our driveway with six or seven cases of homemade pomegranate mead. Transporting this quantity happens to be a felony in most of the states driven through on the way home.
The mad scientists at Whiskey Kitchen serve it on sliced heirloom tomatoes speckled with crispy-fried okra, all resting on a shallow pool of their homemade pesto aioli. But before any of this happens, they lightly cold smoke the burrata, which gives it a flavor that compels one to just.keep.eating. 
Their pesto is delicious, with a sauce-like consistency. This makes it much more versatile, and a silky coating for pasta, unlike most, which can be greasy and is prone to separate.
If you haven’t been to downtown Raleigh in a while, very interesting things are happening. There’s unique shopping, museums, and NC legend and lore. I strongly suggest a trip in the near future that includes a stop at Whiskey Kitchen.
Petey had one piece of advice: “Make sure you’re quiet when they’re filming.”
The co-hosts make dishes that are NC authentic, tasty, and original, or twists on old favorites. After making hundreds of recipes, it gets tough to come up with new ones, so they count on reader submissions.
We also have a few cold salads. So, I sent in my high-country potato salad, with broccoli and cheddar cheese.
I wrote back, thanked her, and told her I was (at that time) a food writer at the Herald Sun. She then wrote back, telling me that she organized the specialty food contests at the State Fair. Would I be interested in acting as judge for a few of them?
Thanks for your time.
There’s this story I heard years ago.A woman was making brisket for dinner. And, like always, she cut two inches off before putting it into the oven. Her daughter asked why.
Life is full of things we do that make little to no sense, but we do it because nobody thinks to ask Gramma, “Why?”
The first one was about the lady’s room.
Ah, but at Whiskey Kitchen there is no bathroom Gordian knot. There is a giant hook hanging next to the sink in the lady’s room. It should become federal law that every public restroom must have a giant hook hanging next to every sink—it just should.%20Tree%20Nuts%20Allergy2_be393267b3cf384a92feec434cc119f8.jpg)
But those nuts bring more issues than a Batman comic. Not only are there lots of people with nut allergies, these allergies are nothing to mess around with. Allergic people have died from kissing someone who had recently eaten nuts. Even eating food prepared in kitchens with nuts can cause adverse reactions.
Fried okra’s delicious. But, if you’re a fork user, you chase the little nuggets around your plate. If you go commando and use your fingers, you get covered in ranch.
1 tablespoon Basil
Cut all herbs finely, by hand. Combine half in the blender. 
This space has evolved into my confessional. The embarrassing, the disgraceful, the hurt-y; if there’s a red face and burning ears involved, I’m there and have probably recounted it for you, Gentle Reader.
These days it takes a lot more to set the blush scale into motion. I’ve come to terms with my lack of both grace and tact. But there’s still one category where I’m a tad insecure.
I used to really enjoy sauerkraut mixed with grocery store onion dip. I 
I’d drain them, toss into a saucepan with a too-large dollop of margarine. Then I’d drop in a couple slices of American cheese food, and cook until it was a gloppy, homogenous mass.
I decided to use my go-to veg preparation.
Par-cooked veg
Bring the saucepan to a rolling boil. Slide vegetables into water and cook until the colors are bright, and you can just smell them (4-7 minutes-ish).
When you’re ready to finish them, put them in a skillet (don’t overcrowd). Then you need a couple more items.
Put everything into the pan along with a pinch of salt and pepper, then cover. Cook on medium-low until the veg is tender-crisp. Remove cover and let cook until the liquid’s gone. For a tender vegetable, like peas, remove from heat as soon as liquid’s gone. For harder veg, let them cook until they pick up some browning.
This is a very versatile method which gives you plenty of ways to customize. The biggest thing is to not overcook them. If you went to all the trouble of getting fresh, keep it fresh.
Thanks for your time.
You’d like to think that while you may have infrequent dorkish tendencies, you certainly are not a full-time, card-carrying dork.
And then you meet Henry Winkler, and know that deep down, encoded in your very DNA all is lost, because dorky, thy name is little debbie Dorkarella, high priestess and queen of all the dorks you survey. The dorkish benchmark that to which all other dorks strive.
And Happy Days was a sentimental, untroubled depiction of the 1950s. My favorite moments in the show were when Arthur Fonzarelli, or Fonzie, was onscreen. I was in love.
And this year there was a very special guest.
Last year I’d met a history/travel author at an event. It was someone who I’ve always enjoyed, was really smart, and whom I felt had a similar worldview to mine. There was a meet and greet after the program, and I was sure we’d hit it off right away, and bond over our amusement of the absurdity of life.
Henry Winkler had always seemed like a really nice guy, but so had the writer. If he turned out to be a cold, dismissive jerk, my heart would just snap in two. But I’ve adored this man for forty years and couldn’t let this opportunity pass me by.
Allow me to say that one more time, 
bull city mom 