It's Sunday, our one day of weekend after a long week. I am now a Qigong master, having stood in place for an hour and a half on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Qigong is much harder than it looks; it looks like a group of people standing still, but you don't see the fact that everyone has been holding their arms up in the air for 45 minutes and their back is in agony and all.
Anyway, we did end up seeing Un Ballo in Maschera and Pique Dame. The former was pretty mediocre, which unfortunately means really boring. The thing about the Staatsoper is that when something is bad, it's so bad that it's still entertaining, but when it's just fine, it's just agony standing there for 3 hours (having stood for an hour and a half right beforehand in Qigong didn't help, either).
I thought Pique Dame was great (Melanie thought it was good, so now we're even on Arabella, where opinions were reversed). A review can be found here. I agree with it on most points. Anja Silja was fucking awesome. She's 67 now, and the extent to which she can act, both with her voice and with everything else is insanity. We had horrible standing room places off to the side of the gallery, so we couldn't see stage left, and when she first came onstage, we couldnt see her and I was hooked anyway.
We had Celeriac Croquettes for breakfast. They were awesome. This would be a good place to talk about Biohof Adamah.
Biohof Adamah is an organic Austrian farm that sells crates of fruit and vegetables. For €30/week, we get a crate of fruits, vegetables, crazy meats and cheeses delivered to our door on Thursdays. Its our favorite thing ever. This week, for example, we got a big head of some sort of lettuce, 2 Kohlrabi (awesome root vegetables that, to quote Lewis Lawyer, look like Sputnik, unless he was referring to fennel, I dont remember. Anyway, they taste really good and sweet and make a Puttanesca sauce really good), a mess of carrots, a celeriac (celery root, a 1.5 pound weird looking knob), ~8 small onions, a bundle of fresh marjoram, ~8 apples (we get a different type of apple pretty much every week and they're all great [and different!]), ~6 of the best oranges I've ever had, a whole basket of Medlar[Which Melanie thinks taste like apple sauce, and I think taste like apricot and glue paste mixed, but can be turned into something resembling lemon curd, says Wikipedia].
The meat/cheese packet has a big chunk of stinky, swiss-looking stuff, another chunk of different, stinky swiss-looking stuff, some salami-type stuff, and some honey/sunflower(?) flavored ham, I think.
All this stuff is ridiculously high quality stuff, which makes cooking at home yummy, nutritious, and very diverse, since the ingredients from week to week vary wildly (and the question of "What the hell is THAT and what do I do with it?!" is a fun one to answer every week). A+ Gold star. Anyway, celeriac/celery root looks like crazyness, tastes like awesome, and if you cut it up into 2" chunks, boil it for 20 minutes, mash it, mix it with a half cup of milk or cream, a half cup of parmesan, a quarter cup of parsley, some salt and pepper, an egg, and some flour, form it into hamburger patties, refridgerate for an hour, cover it with bread crumbs and brown it with lots of butter, it tastes friggin great. I also made some stuffed turkey cutlets. We'll see how those turn out.
In order, pictures of Medlar, Celeriac and Kohlrabi:
