Verena, Hannes and Oscar had dinner together

Last summer my brother Tomás was in Innsbruck for two months. We once attended an event in which an art catalogue was presented; the catalogue’s title was sumotwister, and it was a bout a series of jam sessions in Tirol. I also participated with music, a video and a light installation. That night Lissie (a friend of ours) and her band ALM performed at the venue. The experimental architect group columbosnext was ther as well, one of their members, Ekki, made a phantastic drawing of my brother and me in AutoCad

After the gig, my brother and I talked about our favourite subject: Food. A subtopic was how the ideas and experiences of a cook are communicated to other people using eatable ingredients. Tomás changed by view on eating by introducing the senses into our conversation. He told me something I never paid attention to…

It’s known that we all use eyes, nose and tongue when enjoying our meals, but that night Tomás enhanced this list by telling me that eating food with bare hands also involved the sense of touch. In that moment I remembered the feeling of my fingers while holding a hot and moist burrito, the peeling-like feeling of grabbing a tortilla chip with salt; the greasy and hot feeling of a fried gordita (tortilla filled with mashed potatoes), the wet freshness of ceviche (in lime-juice marinated raw-fish on tortilla chips) and the feeling of having flour particles on your fingertips while enjoying a Mexican torta (fresh white bread sandwich).

In honour to that conversation I prepared cheese-burgers for Verena and Hannes tonight. The recipe was the following: I grilled halloumi (a greek cheese which does not melt) with onion rings and placed them on white rolls toasted with butter. I topped that with top-Austrian Mustard (Lustenau), organic-ketchup, mini-pickles (Staud’s), Italian cherry tomatoes, lettuce leaves and home-made chipotle (I got them in Chihuahua and they are great!).

We drank many glasses of white wine with our delicious burgers.

P.S. Chipotle is a jalapeño pepper, which is harvested ripe (when red), dried, smoked and then pickled with vinegar and onions.

P.S. 2. The profile pic is the one made with AutoCad by Ekki. If you click on the columbosnext-link you can see a big picture, Tomás and I are in that picture, but one can not really see us