With chilly weather upon us, classic, rib-sticking comfort food gets more and more appealing. Fortunately, the Internet is really one big cookbook, where you can pretty much find any conceivable recipe. During a search for something (I don't remember what), I stumbled across Bernhard's Austrian Cooking (www.bernhards.at), a great resource for traditional Austrian recipes. A little more sophisticated than German food, Austrian food bears influences from Hungary, the Balkans, and Italy, and it pretty darned good. Bernhard is a professional chef in Vienna, one of my favorite cities, and offers his recipes in English with American measurements, so no metric conversion is needed.

So far we've tried a few of the recipes from his site and everything's been really good. Main dishes are heavy on meat, but there are plenty of lighter dishes including a stellar cream of cauliflower soup that, with a good loaf of bread, made for a more than satisfying dinner. The cabbage soup was unusual and tasty, too. By far the best thing I've made so far has been the Rindersaftbraten, or braised beef, which is a sort of pot roast with a tasty sauce of red wine, beef stock, and pureed root vegetables, including carrots, celery root, and parsnip (a substitute for the parsley root, which I couldn't find). Then there were the baked noodles with ham and cheese and sour cream and other things that are probably really bad for you, but was really good. I may have to break down and order his newly published cookbook, which evidently has many more recipes in it.

Then there are the desserts, which I haven't tried, although I'm threatening to make apple strudel this weekend. This involves stretching the dough thin until it covers our entire dining room table, which is going to be pretty interesting. Wish me luck.