Cooking, Eating, Shopping

Shopping, Cooking, Eating

Either lead, follow, or sit down and have a glass of wine with one of these dates wrapped in bacon. They’re delicious.
Eat or Die
I am what you would call an eater. I eat things. I eat bite-sized plants and animals whole. I cut larger plants and animals into smaller, more manageable parts before eating. I eat cute little animals, and I eat ugly fruits and vegetables, and vice versa. If humans have been known ever to have eaten something, I will eat it. I will eat things which no man has eaten before. Raw, blanched, blended, steamed, boiled, stir-fried, poached, scrambled, stewed, simmered, tossed, frozen, thawed, and Buffalo-style are just a few of the ways I will devour a plant or animal. Sometimes I will mix two or three of these techniques together to stuff my face. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. Variety is good but this soup needs more salt. Spice is also the spice of life.

If you don't eat you will die. Try not eating. You will die. Life will throw out your scrawny carcass when you starve to death but death will eat you right up, bones and all. Death has an incredible appetite. I don't want to die so I eat. Death is often only a bagel with cream cheese away from where I am sitting in this coffee shop. Death circles like a vulture…waiting…waiting for me to miss a meal, waiting for me to screw up and starve to death. Death is patient. Death asks to borrow my newspaper. Death reads the sports page. Death sees that my team is in last place. Death smells death and leaves me to finish my bagel. Death instead goes to circle the clubhouse. I sigh with relief but cut it short because I remember that sighing with your mouth full of food is impolite. A near-death experience is no reason to lose your manners.

Death is relentless and so I eat relentlessly. Death never sleeps. It is difficult to eat while you sleep which is why people die in their sleep. My solution is to dream about eating. I'm not dead yet so maybe I'm on to something. Death does not play fair; nod off for a second and death will be all over you like a sweaty undershirt. I nap with a ham sandwich in my hand, an over-sized bag of generic cheese doodles resting on my stomach, a cooking show glowing in front of me. You can't be too careful. Actually you can be too careful, like the time I tried to go to sleep using a chicken drumstick as a pacifier. I woke up choking and had to give myself the Heimlich maneuver by throwing myself against the pizza delivery boy who just happened to be at the door. $10.50 for two sausage and pepperoni pizzas. I gave him $15 and told him to keep the change for knocking the wind out of him.

They say that eating too much can kill you. Lord knows I have tried to kill myself by eating too much, but so far all I have to show for my trouble are a few pairs of pants I can't wear any more. I keep them hanging in the closet just in case, just in case I lose a few pounds. You never know when a cholera epidemic will break out. When it does at least I'll have something nice to wear. Not eating will kill you faster than eating too much. Besides, while you are killing yourself by eating too much you can watch TV. There are worse ways to go—unless you don't have cable in which case I would rather be eaten by sharks.

Sharks gotta eat too. And what about worms? If we don't die what are they supposed to eat? We are trapped in a seriously vicious circle. Just thinking about it makes me hungry. I’m hungry all the time so I guess you could say that everything makes me hungry. Go ahead and laugh but I would suggest that my survival instinct is just stronger than yours. About the only thing that doesn't make me hungry is eating. Eating keeps my mind off hunger. At least it does unless I am planning another meal as I eat. Thinking about bacon makes me hungry, even if I'm eating bacon.

They say that you should never shop when you are hungry but my grocery store has a strict “no outside food” policy. They have also forbidden me to try the free samples of food products they are promoting. They say that I didn't respect the “one sample per customer” rule on the free stuff. They told me not to bother wearing disguises to get free samples. I can't believe they saw through my one-armed Mexican revolutionary costume and the pregnant nun get up. Now I get my groceries delivered. I make my order during lunch. I ask if the delivery person can stop by the Chinese carry-out joint on the way over. I need a little something to tide me over until dinner.

The Way the Spanish Eat
Just about the first thing you notice in Spain is that the people put a lot of time and effort into eating. To the untrained eye it appears as if Spanish people are always eating. Of course this isn't true but it is close. It is difficult for me to think of a single activity that they do here that isn't interrupted by food and drink. I can imagine someone being taken to the hospital in an ambulance and asking the driver to make a stop along the way for a little glass of wine and a few olives with bread. The important task for any new immigrant is learning the rhythms of the Spanish diet.

Something everyone learns when living and eating in Spain are the names and very approximate times for the different meals throughout the day. Desayuno is breakfast and consists of coffee and perhaps a piece of some sort of bread-based product. All of the meals throughout the day have their own verb that matches the noun so for desayuno the verb is desayunar.

After breakfast comes almuerzo which I first learned to mean “lunch” in Latin American Spanish but in Spain it means a mid-morning snack, usually a sandwich and a beer or soft drink. This meal is taken between 10:30 and 12:00, más o menos. This mid-morning snack is a big favorite of people in the building trades and you will see guys eating huge sandwiches at this hour. The verb for the almuerzo is almorzar.

Lunch is called la comida here so please don´t let anyone catch you calling it almuerzo, or lunch. I remember everyone constantly correcting me when I called this meal almuerzo. I was often corrected on my Mexican Spanish and soon had most of these verbal ticks beaten out of me.  Lunch here starts late. Don't show up to a restaurant before 2:00 pm for this meal unless you want to brand yourself as a tourist. As the summer days wear on, hotter and hotter, this midday meal can begin as late as 4:00 pm, maybe 6:00. Spanish people always complain that when they visit France and other European countries, they always show up at restaurants too late for the afternoon meal. In France most folks are done by the time the Spaniards show up. This meal has defined the entire Spanish work day, setting it—at times—sharply at odds with other countries in the European Union. Because it is such a big meal it has made necessary that most unique and idiosyncratic of Spanish habits, the siesta.

It is exclusively at la comida when Valencianos have their big rice dishes such as paella or baked rice. Make sure that you always wear loose-fitting pants to this meal. The verb the Spanish use is comer which any first year Spanish student knows means “to eat.” After this meal a useful phrase for you might be echar una cabezada which means “To take a nap.”

Then comes the merienda, or the afternoon snack. If you haven´t noticed already, the Spanish eat a lot, or at least they do in theory. We have already had four meals and it is not even six in the afternoon. The merienda isn´t too well defined and only serves as a designator for whatever you shove into your fat pie hole in the time between lunch ( la comida ) and whatever you wolf down during before-dinner drinks. I need to take a meal break in just the amount of time it takes me to describe what these people eat during the course of a day. The verb they use for this vaguely-defined meal is merendar or “to snack.” This afternoon snack is mostly reserved for school kids who have a sandwich when they leave school in the afternoon.

Late in the afternoon comes la cena, or dinner. I say late in the afternoon but what I really mean is really late at night, at least as far as dinner is concerned, dinner for an American. The Spanish don´t stop calling this part of the day "afternoon," so en la tarde (in the afternoon) can mean twelve o´clock at night. They usually only say buenas noches when they are going to bed. The evening meal is usually of a lighter fare than in the afternoon, at least in their way of thinking. “¿Arroz en la noche?,” Valecianos will recoil in horror when you tell them that you ate rice for dinner, yet they will eat a loaf of bread with their "lighter meal" and think nothing of it. Their views on diet and nutrition are more ruled by tradition than science or logic so I wouldn't bother trying to tell them otherwise.

Tapas, as I've mentioned before, aren't a big part of the culture in this corner of Spain but it´s not like Valencianos will say no when someone places a bit of food in front of them along with whatever it is that they have ordered to drink. I was actually quite disappointed when I learned when I first moved here that they don´t really have tapas here. After living here for a year I can rarely even look at food during this time of day that is set aside for tapas in other parts of Spain. Eating four meals previously in the day tends to weaken my appetite.

Valencia, Where You Really Are What You Eat


I’m thinking about writing a cookbook with the title, “Recipes I Have Overheard in Spanish Bars.” Seriously, Spanish men talk about food almost as much as football, if that is even possible. I suppose that it’s a defense mechanism to keep them from talking about the more depressing subjects of politics and “la crisis.”

I have mentioned before that I live next door to the Ruzafa Market, one of the city’s biggest. I awake six days a week to the comings and goings there as trucks begin arriving before the sun rises and things don’t calm down until about 3 pm. It would be impossible for me to ignore food from the vantage point I have a couple of floors above all of this commotion. The whole of life on this Iberian Peninsula is somewhat analogous to living next to this vast marketplace for vegetables, meat, seafood, and everything else you need to make just about any sort of Spanish meal you could imagine. Everyone must eat so to say that food is important to Spaniards doesn’t begin to define their attitude about cooking. It would be like saying that water is important to fish. There is a very strong bond that the Spanish have with cooking and it is something that I adopted very early in my residency here in Valencia.

One of the biggest tourist attractions here is the Central Market downtown. It is a big attraction not because there aren’t other noteworthy sites around town but because the Mercado Central is truly something to behold. Its magnificence speaks volumes about the relationship Valencianos have with food. Some cities have a big mosque or a lavish cathedral; Valencia has the Central Market. Its worshippers are devout and extremely loyal bordering at times on the fanatical—if you don’t believe me just try to get between some Valencian granny and her seafood purchase. I’m not saying that violence is common in the markets here but you just need to learn to avoid certain situations, usually those involving an octogenarian, her shopping pushcart, and your rightful place in line. Not only do you have to keep your eye on the golden girls but quite often they have a Yorkshire terrier tied up at one of the exits which are ready to rip your throat out at their command. Survival in this environment requires working knowledge of the law of the jungle mixed with the samurai code.

Something that is difficult for Americans to understand, or at least something that is completely different from our own way of life, is just how much food defines Valencianos, even more so than people from other parts of Spain. I have talking about this with a lot of people lately and at first everyone tells me that in Andalucía food is ridiculously important in day-to-day life, or that in Asturias they have a traditional cuisine second to none, and what about Granada which practically invented tapas? In reply I simply say “paella.” The response I get is either silence or, “Oh yeah, paella. Got me there.”

We Americans have our national flag and Valencianos have paella. Last year when Valencia Club de Fútbol was in the final of the Copa del Rey their fans laid siege to the area around the stadium in Madrid by making paellas during the tailgating parties, or whatever the hell you call them in Spanish. Paella became the battle standard of the contingent from Valencia. I don’t think any other region of Spain has a dish that is quite as iconoclastic as paella Valenciana. As far as the local identity is concerned, food plays almost as big a role as the language, whether that is Spanish or Valenciano.

Once you realize this you may forgive the people here for guarding their recipes for jealously. Change one single ingredient in paella or baked rice and you’ll never hear the end of it from your local friends. You can improvise all you want, just don’t call it by the name they use for that dish. This doesn’t mean that I don’t tease my Valencian friends half to death whenever I cook something. I like to invent enormously elaborate names for the dishes I cook if they detour from the local recipes that are written in stone. “I call this ‘dish rice made in a style remarkably similar to paella but I wouldn’t dare call it paella for fear that some old Valencian grandmother would drop dead if she even got a hint that some immigrant was calling a dish paella when he profaned this venerable recipe by adding a bit of sausage.’” I usually keep going on and on until someone tells me to shut up, and that the point is taken.

Improvisation and variation in cooking are fine but you need to know the basics which provide you with the true north on your gourmet compass. I take great pains when I first learn to make one of the local dishes so that I am as close to the traditional recipe as possible. You will find a certain amount of variation from one person’s version to the next here but they are usually fairly similar. When I set out to make a local dish I compare several recipes and boil my version down from all of them assuring that what I make is pure, 100% Valencia.

La Paella Valenciana
As good as any place to begin on the subject of food in Valencia is with the region's—and perhaps Spain's—most iconic dish, paella. When I first arrived I thought paella was basically just a rice dish. I have come to learn that aside from being the signature dish of Valencia, it represents for them so much more than food. It defines Valencianos, it keeps them tied to their past, it unites families and friends, and once you realize this you will want to take the time and effort to learn to prepare it well.

Almost everyone who knows a single thing about Spain knows that paella is one of the signature dishes of this country. Most foreigners probably even know enough about paella to give a fairly complete recipe: rice, green beans, garrofón (butter beans), chicken, rabbit, a bit of garlic, tomato, and saffron. At least this is the recipe for Paella Valenciana, give or take an ingredient or two. What most people don't know is that for people who live in Valencia, paella is not just what you call the dish, it is the event of sharing a paella with friends or family. I was going to a paella at the country home of friends who just recently moved from my Valencia neighborhood of Ruzafa.

I met another friend of mine, who also lives in Ruzafa, at our favorite bar. Not only is Adrian (Adrià in Valenciano) from Ruzafa but—except for brief excursions like the one today—you couldn't get him to leave this neighborhood of Valencia under the threat of violence. Like me, he feels that Ruzafa is the center of the universe. When we left the center of the known universe (after a quick beer) we had to take the #1 metro line going south from the Plaza de España station.

In just a few stops the metro rises out of the tunnels and glides out of the city, past agricultural communities with mostly Arabic names which stand as witnesses to Valencia's centuries of Muslim rule. Most words beginning with “Al” stem from Arabic. This prefix represents the definite article in Arabic and besides a lot of local place names, you find many Spanish words derived similarly. Here in the countryside of Valencia, riding through the orange trees which were first brought here by the Moors, you see strange names like Font Almaguer, Alginet, Alfafar, L'Alcúdia, Al Farp, Albal, and today's destination of Catadau.

In the countryside, the language of Valenciano is much more widely spoken. You notice this sharp contrast the moment you leave the city limits of Valencia. We are met at the tiny metro stop by our hosts, a Frenchman and a native Valenciana. This means that two out of the four of us are local. It only seems natural that the language changes from Spanish to Valenciano. Just when I get to the point where I am almost completely comfortable with Spanish, it's time to start learning another language.

I watch a lot of television in Valenciano. There is one show in particular that I try to see as often as possible that is about bicycle touring in the Valencia Community. I can understand the language rather well if I make a big effort but I rarely hear it spoken in the city. Between my knowledge of French and my growing fluency in Spanish, Valenciano shouldn't be too difficult to pick up if I can just find a good grammar book. As I slowly but surely master Spanish, doors are continually opening for me—like this weekend in the countryside. I can only imagine that learning Valenciano will open even more doors—not only in Valencia but in Catalonia to the north and the Balearic Islands where the language is also spoken.

The first thing you need to know about paella is that it is best cooked on an open fire. It is hard to find stove tops big enough to accommodate some paella pans which can be as big as several meters in diameter. The one we will be using on this evening is perhaps one half meter in diameter which would present a challenge to most kitchen burners. A wood fire provides an even heat for the entire pan at an intensity capable of keeping the rice at a boil.

If you ask a 100 people from Valencia for advice on how to cook paella, you will get 1,000 different recipes and you may have to officiate a few fistfights. If there is a Spaniard not from the Valencia region involved in the argument, you may be officiating a civil war. You won't find a dish more traditional to the culture and history of Valencia and yet everyone has their own set of variations. For true Valencianos, the ingredients won't be too different from those I mentioned; you may see red pepper strips added or snails, but the basic ingredients I gave are written in stone...somewhere. Every paellera, or paella cook, will have his or her own tricks to the process.

Our host's trick is to first brown the rabbit and chicken in the hot pan and then remove it. Very unorthodox. Next, he added a can of tomato puree with a bit of garlic. Next come the green beans and the butter beans. When these have all cooked he adds a bit of water and returns the meat to the fire. More water is added and when this comes to a boil the rice is added along with the saffron. He also added a couple of small branches of dried rosemary. Once the ingredients are thoroughly mixed you don't stir the pan. It simply boils down until the rice is cooked. A paella cooked on a wood fire is truly a thing of beauty, not to mention the aroma.

So besides the dish itself, the word “paella” can be used to describe the act of eating paella together with friends. I have been to paellas with 50 people or more, huge affairs staged by the neighborhood committees, called casals. During Fallas in Valencia, these casals will have paella cook-offs right in the street. Wood fires are lit in the road and several paellas will be cooked at once. A true paella is more of an event than a dish or a simple meal.

I would say that four people is the minimum crowd for a true paella. You can order an individual serving of this rice dish in almost any restaurant in town, but a true paella should be served among friends who share from the same pan. Sharing large family-size portions is more the rule than the exception in most Spanish cooking. This fits in well with my own philosophy as I rarely cook anything except in huge batches sufficient for feeding ten people at a time.

I doubt there is a better place to share a paella with friends than on a patio in the Valencian countryside, in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean, although I will probably keep looking. After a few brutally hot days we were blessed with a perfect evening. I even briefly considered putting on a sweater until I thought about how silly that would be after surviving temperatures reaching almost 40 degrees only two days ago. Instead of a sweater I opted for another glass of red wine.

Reflections on a Spanish Summer Afternoon #13: Two Naps in One Day
In Arabic there is an entire inflection of nouns in the dual to describe two of something. Considering the Moors heavy influence on the Iberian Peninsula I can’t believe there isn’t a word in Spanish for when you take two naps in one day…and before any of you say it, I already thought of “useless sack of shit” to describe this unprecedented—at least for me— accomplishment. Time to invent a word. Siesta de Respaldo? Re-nap?

An Ode to Eggs, Potatoes, and Olive Oil (and salt, don’t be stingy with the salt.)

“Every family has its own method for making tortillas, their own secret.”
-3,000 Años de la Cocina Española by Rosa Tovar and Monique Fuller

The first thing we Americans learn upon visiting Spain is that a Spanish tortilla is completely different than the Mexican variety. A Spanish tortilla is a sort of omelet made with eggs and some other kind of filler. The Mexican variety of tortillas, either made with corn or flour, are hard to come by in Spain. We are lucky to have Mexico as our neighbor. Their food has permeated our culture on many different levels. Spanish food is less well-known to Americans and the tortilla is a good place to begin.

The Spanish tortilla is probably my favorite dish here in Spain. I get a craving for it on a regular basis. It is a perfect food in my opinion, a wonderful balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Eggs are a fantastic source of protein, potatoes are as good a place to get carbohydrates as you can find, and olive oil is a fat made in heaven. And don’t forget about the salt. I thought I already told you about this?

Tortillas are sold in almost every bar in Spain. Tortillas are served as a tapa, alone like a slice of pie, or you can get a tortilla sandwich. You can get tortillas made with zucchini, artichokes, spinach, mushrooms, cheese, and just about anything else you can imagine. The most popular and what probably defines the tortilla in Spain is the tortilla de patatas made with potatoes. This is my personal favorite.

After returning from a few weeks in Spain a few years back I saw a sign for “Tortilla Española” in a Seattle restaurant I frequented. I was with a friend who had spent a lot of time in Spain so we were both anxious to get a fix of this great combination of simple ingredients. I was served scrambled eggs with potatoes—not the same thing as a tortilla. I didn’t complain because I really like the restaurant but I realized that no one who worked there, from the cooks and dishwashers, to the waiters and bartenders, had ever been to Spain to allow this dish to be called a tortilla.

This was when I started trying to make tortillas at home (notice the use of the verb “to try”). I am a fairly good cook and I can usually nail just about any recipe after a couple of attempts but my forays into tortillas generally ended in something considerably less than a success. I will give a basic recipe so that you can see how easy it looks on paper.

Tortilla de Patatas
6 eggs
3 pounds of potatoes
1 Onion
Olive Oil
Salt

Peel and slice the potatoes very thinly. Slice the onion the same way. Sauté the potato slices in a generous amount of olive oil being careful not to brown them. When the potatoes are about half cooked add the onion. When the potatoes are cooked, drain off the excess olive oil. Beat the eggs in a bowl and add the cooked potatoes and salt. Transfer this to a sauté pan. Cook on one side being careful not to brown the mixture. Cover the pan with a plate and flip the tortilla and return it to the pan so the other side cooks. Reshape the tortilla with a spatula as the other side cooks. Repeat this again.

This sounds pretty simple and straightforward and it may be for some people. I had my share of disasters. I was becoming a bit discouraged until I watched a Spanish movie I rented about some street kids living in Madrid. One of the kids offers to make a tortilla for everyone. As they begin to eat it everyone spits it out because he didn’t even cook the potatoes ahead of the egg mixture, he just threw everything into a pan. This scene made me think that perhaps I wasn’t a complete klutz in the kitchen and there was more to this deceptively simple dish than what the recipe explains.

I have learned to cook this dish fairly well since I moved to Spain. I bought a special non-stick pan especially for tortillas. I have experimented a great deal with how I cook the potatoes. I used to bake the potatoes ahead of time if I was using the oven for something else. I found that this required that I use a lot less oil than is normally the case—not that I am really out to use less olive oil, I practically drink the stuff right out of the bottle. I thought that this method was a nice shortcut because sautéing the potatoes in oil takes forever. I have returned to the sauté method just because I am trying to be more authentic and they cook it this way for a reason. It tastes better.

Just what “authentic” means when talking about this icon of Spanish cuisine is difficult to define. Absolutely every Spanish person I have interviewed concerning this dish has their own truco, or trick. People’s recipes for tortillas are as individual and defining as fingerprints here in Spain, so be careful not to leave a half-eaten tortilla at a crime scene or they might track it back to you. My own recipe has been distilled from dozens of others and is still in the developmental stage. It may never leave that stage of constant improvement and improvisation. I may never have a recipe that is anything approaching permanence—it’s like the jazz solos of recipes.

While rummaging through the kitchen at my first apartment in Valencia, I came across an odd plastic thing that looked like a lid for something. My roommate back then told me it was for flipping tortillas. He never used it and instead preferred to use a plate. It was purchased by a former roommate who also never used it. In the spirit of integration, I never used it either but I took it with me when I moved to a new place. I began using it and I found it vastly superior to the plate method of flipping. The plastic flipper has a knob handle on one side which makes it easier to hold than a plate. I anoint it with a bit of olive oil before using (the Spanish use the verb untar, to anoint, whenever they splash olive oil on anything). They make a special pan for making tortillas called a vuelvetortillas, or tortilla flipper, but I don't know anyone who has admitted to using one. It's kind of like cheating in my book. Some people cook one side in the pan and then they transfer the dish to the oven to cook the top part. This seems wimpy to me.

I have a few trucos of my own when it comes to making this dish. For example, I prefer a ridiculously high potato-to-egg ratio. I credit this discovery to the woman at the vegetable stand in the Ruzafa Market near my apartment. I told her I was going to make a six egg tortilla and she suggested I purchase two kilograms of potatoes. This seemed like a laughably large quantity of spuds but I loved the way it turned out. Instead of a potato omelet, it is more like potatoes with a thin veneer of egg. And I think that this bears repeating: Don’t be shy with the salt—that’s why they keep it in a big bowl by the stove instead of some wimpy shaker.

Tortillas are great because you can eat them any time of day. I eat them for breakfast sometimes, although you’d never find a Spaniard doing this. While having a beer or a glass of wine, a small portion on a toothpick makes a great tapa. Stuffed in a loaf of bread they make a hearty sandwich. A slice of tortilla makes an elegant side dish for a meal.

Spain seems to have wonderfully fresh eggs; even those you find in the big supermarket chains are quite good. I buy mine from one of the stalls at the market and they are always very fresh. The abundance of nice, fresh eggs probably explains a lot about why this dish is so popular here.

¿Algo Más?

Stating the Incredibly Obvious #21

Never get behind an old person in the supermarket line. Even if they only have one damn thing you’re in for a siege…guaranteed! If the total is 14.99€ of course they have the change and will go to absurd lengths to dig the coins out of their handbags, pockets, the bottom of their shopping cart, or maybe they just forgot that they had it in their other hand. As they take this vaudeville coin search gag to the outer limits of humor it’s hard to keep a stiff upper lip when you look at another register and people who weren’t even born when you got in line are walking out with their purchases.

¿Algo Más?, or “anything else?,” is what you hear every time after your order has been filled at the market. My Spanish has improved by leaps and bounds since I arrived here some ten months ago. Just the other day I explained to a Spanish friend in great detail about the mortgage crisis in America and how this is playing havoc on the exchange rate here in Europe (If I had known before I left just how poorly the dollar was going to fare, I would have converted all of my savings into half-off pizza coupons). My Spanish is pretty good these days but I still don’t know how to say “no” when someone asks me, “¿Algo más?”

I just want to fit in; I just want to be anonymous. How can I do this when I go to the market and buy such puny amounts of food? I don’t even have one of those cool market baskets on wheels than any self-respecting Spanish shopper takes with them when they go to buy groceries. I sometimes feel like I am the only person in this country who cooks only for himself.

I very rarely just order the exact amount that I need for whatever I have planned to cook for that day. Today, for example, I had everything that I needed and I was on my way out the door of the market when I noticed a type of chorizo that I hadn’t seen before in one of the butcher stalls. I bought two big links, “just to try,” as I told the woman working there. When she asked me if I wanted anything else I felt like I wasn’t even in control of myself any more. I ordered four hamburger patties. Just when I plan on getting around to eating these wasn’t clear to me then and is even more of a mystery now that I have had time to inventory the contents of my bursting-at-the-seams refrigerator.

I now live with two Spanish women who don’t give me much help in consuming the vast amount of food I buy and cook regularly. I think that more food falls off of my plate on to the floor than both of them eat, combined, during the same meal. I have even started using the marker board in our kitchen, like the restaurant chalkboards you see all over Europe that announce the daily specials, to advertise what I have cooked and that I need help eating it. If they don’t get on board my cooking gravy train I may end up as the “before” picture in some weight loss program.

I buy big pans, really big. My paella pan is big enough to roast a whole pig, something I plan on doing some day when I can catch one of those slippery little fellas. Spanish people cook a lot with these cool clay baking dishes. When I went out to buy one I measured my oven so that I could buy the biggest one that it could hold. Back in Seattle I had a pot for making stock that was as big as those cauldrons the cannibals in the cartoons used to try to cook Bugs Bunny. I could have used it as a sort of low-rent hot tub. I think my quest for size in cooking is not some sort of over-compensation for my diminished sense of masculinity. The only part of my body that isn’t big enough for my liking is probably my liver, but that’s only because of the amount or red wine I drink over here. My fetish for bigness in cookware is probably because I have never got over the fact that although I come from a large family, I have remained single and childless.

Shopping and cooking have become two of my favorite pastimes here in Spain. I like them both more than eating, but I like eating a lot, a lot. Some men restore old motorcycles or build model train sets. I go to the market and pester anyone there who will talk to me. The gorgeous woman who sells me my eggs told me a story today about how her mother used to make her a treat to take to school that was bread soaked in red wine with sugar on top. You can’t make that stuff up. My butcher gave me his recipe for pork stock. The woman at the vegetable stand told me how many potatoes to put in my tortilla de patatas (it seems like an awful lot of potatoes but I’m going to trust her on this). I used to have to walk six or seven blocks to get to my old neighborhood market. Now I can practically trip from my front door step and fall into the Ruzafa Market. I think that I will be there almost daily.

I take shortcuts through the market when I am on the other side coming home. This could prove to be dangerous as I already have toxic levels of pork in my system and it wouldn’t kill me to walk the extra steps around the outside of the market. But the market is fun, the market is exciting, it’s where everyone goes. It’s like a disco during the daylight hours. There is no cover charge but if you’re like me, you’ll always spend more than you planned.

Pumped up - Deflated

The Sad Truth about Making Fried Calamari

A kilo of small squid seemed like a lot until I spent at least an hour of the little time I have remaining on this planet cleaning it and realized that what I had were about three big mouthfuls, at least my mouthfuls.

P.S. I just realized that my frequency in making squid at home coincides exactly with the time it takes me to forget what a huge pain in the ass it is to clean these little critters.

I had to pick up a couple of things at the market this morning in preparation for the fiesta this afternoon so I asked if there was anything else we needed. I was told no and headed out the door. Before I made it to the stairway in the hall our door opened and I was asked to pick up five loaves of bread. I got so excited I almost skipped to the market. Let me explain.

Whenever I go to the bakery I usually only buy one loaf of bread and I can never even finish this by myself before it goes stale. The bakers always ask me when I order my single, lousy little loaf of bread if I would like thing else. I never do want anything else but I almost want to order more just to fit in. I see older Spanish women at the bakery ordering prodigious amounts of bread. Do they work in an orphanage? Perhaps they run a soup kitchen which requires them to buy so much bread every day? These are the kind of thoughts that go through my mind as I walk out of the bakery with my one, little, shitty, loaf of bread.

But today I was going to buy five loaves! I felt like a Spanish Pinocchio. “Today I am a real boy!” Since I was buying such a very Spanish quantity of bread on this day I didn’t feel like such a dummy bothering the baker to explain to me the different loaves they had for sale. There are certain privileges that come with being such a big spender (total price for five loaves: 3.45€).

Some guys enjoy the status of wearing an Armani suit or driving a Porsche. With women, who knows what their idea of status entails? A Prada bag? Gucci shoes? For me, right now, it’s walking around carrying five loaves of bread. Cancel that shipment of Viagra; I don’t need it anymore, not today, thank you. I didn’t want to walk straight back home; I felt that I needed to show off a bit. I decided that I’d go have a coffee at the bar in the market, and not my usual, touristy café americano, I ordered an espresso, or a café solo as they call them here. God, I really wanted someone I knew to see me right now. Just when I was at the height of my status high, an older Spanish guy elbowed up to the bar to get a REFILL on his red wine. It was 09:44, that’s a.m., like “in the morning” for you civilians. So much for me being a big shot. I just got punked by some 80 year old stud. I felt like half a sissy. If he had one of those cartoon thought balloons over his head it would say something like, "Out of my way, coffee boy. Maybe you should go fix your makeup."

I laid the money for the coffee on the bar and slouched out the door.”


Celebrating Food

Food is such an integral part of Spanish life that I doubt that folks here can pay a parking ticket at city hall without including a celebratory meal in the process; at the very least a sandwich and a beer.

Yesterday outside my front door an older couple asked me for directions. I didn’t understand what they wanted so they asked a young Spanish kid. He didn’t understand either but I got that they wanted to know where the place is to pay your water bill. I told them it was a couple blocks down the street and they headed off. I went upstairs for minute and when I came back down they were seated at a café having a small beer and some olives—as if simply asking for directions warranted a break.

Sometimes I think that I probably spend too much time writing and thinking about food, not to mention the time I spend actually cooking and eating. I could understand how other people probably think that I am a bit obsessed about the subject. I guess that you could say that cooking is sort of a hobby for me, but it's not like building model railroads or collecting stamps. You have to eat every day. Unless you live at home and your mom cooks for you then you are going to have to make a lot of that food yourself. You can either eat well or not.

Sometimes eating can be a chore but it should often be a celebration. From what I have learned of Spanish, French, Italian, and Greek cultures, they choose to celebrate food much more than we do in America. I don't mean this as a criticism of Americans, it's just that these cultures put a higher value on food than Americans or the British do. I would say that Americans and British people put a higher value on comedy than these Mediterranean cultures I mentioned. They could definitely learn from us on this particular subject. At least for me, laughter is as essential as eating, but for now I am talking about cooking and the role food plays and should play in our lives.

Spanish food is fairly simple, for the most part. Most people here aren't particularly sophisticated about the food they eat or how they cook it. I think that the French are much more savvy about cooking techniques and food preparation than the Spanish. This doesn't mean that the people in Spain don't have a reverence for food. A casual walk through the lovely Mercado de Ruzafa will demonstrate just how highly Valencianos value what they put on their tables. It's not just a matter of the quality of the food people buy, it is the very way that they choose their food. Supermarkets are popular in Spain but most people buy a good portion of their staples at their local market.

In the market people have a closer bond with the food they purchase. In the stalls of the market you deal directly with people who know their products intimately. There is a degree of customer service in the market that you would only expect in a fine jewelry store or a pampering health spa. I go regularly to the same stalls at my market and have developed a pretty firm relationship with all of the merchants. I have a level of rapport with my butcher that Dick Cheney probably has with his heart surgeon. Considering how much pork I buy from my butcher, I should probably ask for the phone number of Dick's surgeon.

You can enjoy food without parting with a lot of money. It is up to all of us to savor the simplest things: a ripe tomato, a perfectly hard-boiled egg, a glass of modest wine, a mug of great beer, a loaf of freshly baked bread, or an olive. I think that one of the things I admire so much about the Spanish is that they really make an effort to stop their lives every day to sit down to the table for their afternoon meal. Even after all this time here I still have trouble adopting this daily ritual, and I really like to eat. It's just difficult for me to stop whatever it is I am doing and sit down at the table. This simple act is what elevates the status of food for the Spanish. It doesn't really matter what it is they are eating, the respect they give the meal is what is important.

You can show a lot of respect for just about any sort of food or drink just by presenting it well.
For example, it's rare to see people here eating potato chips out of the bag. They decant the chips into a bowl before serving. That doesn't sound like much but it all adds up. A meal without a glass of wine is almost unthinkable in these Mediterranean countries. I think that the wine is almost as valuable for its symbolism as it is for the taste it contributes. Wine is like a secular prayer that we enjoy at the table. Since we don't really have an English equivalent (how odd), I will say it in French and Spanish, “Bon appétit and Buen provecho!”

An Ode to Tomatoes

I was buying a few things in one of Valencia’s ubiquitous green grocers that are almost the exclusive domain of Pakistani immigrants. As I placed my items on the scale the shop owner asked me if I wanted to buy a watermelon. I said that I didn’t, thank you very much, and he countered my knee-jerk dismissal of his offer by asking, “Why?” You got me there, my man. I didn’t have a “because” for his “why,” at least not a good one, so I bought a beautiful watermelon. Not the most sophisticated sales pitch I’ve ever heard but his earnestness made me laugh.

Moral to the story: It’s summer; buy a damn watermelon already!

You can have your fancy auto-mo-biles and your shiny jewelry, during the summer months I am happy with little more than tomatoes. Valencia has their own variety that are about as good as tomatoes get. July and August are the best months for these Valencia tomatoes and I buy them compulsively from just about every vegetable stand that I pass during the day—and I pass quite a few. It's too hot to cook (although I still cook a lot) so something as simple as a sliced tomato is about all you need. Maybe a pinch of salt, a couple drops of oil if you must, a leaf or two of basil if you have it, and vinegar once in a while just for a change.

These aren't the hothouse variety of tomatoes that you find all year long in most U.S. super markets, or the uninspired tomatoes you find here in the winter. These are right off the vine and still ripening as you bring them home from the market. I had a hothouse tomato lying around a couple of weeks ago, a remnant from those harsher times when the good ones are still in the ground. I had it sitting in my kitchen for a few weeks and it just sat their patiently, not changing color and not getting a bit riper with age. I finally put it out of its misery by chopping it up and throwing it into a soup.

These summer Valenciano tomatoes are very impatient. You only have a window of about three days to eat them before they ripen into mush. They are so good that I don't like to use them for anything but serving uncooked and unprepared. It's almost a waste to make gazpacho out of such beautiful pieces of fruit. I eat them alone or in a Greek salad with cucumber, onion, and green peppers. I serve tomatoes as the base with pasta salads. Basically, I use any excuse that I can find.

My favorites are called raf tomatoes and they are odd-shaped things with the meat separated into different lobes. I have my own little trick for serving tomatoes which is especially helpful with this raf variety. I use an apple corer to remove the stem base and I push the corer all the way through the tomato. This whole center of the raf is kind of difficult to deal with so using an apple corer works really well. Next I cut it in half from the top. After this you can sit the half on its side and slice the lobes individually.

Valencia Oranges
I finally got the opportunity to do something that is as embedded in the culture of Valencia as anything; I was able to go to an orchard and pick oranges. Oranges are as synonymous to Valencia as paella, something a short drive in the countryside here will quickly confirm. The entire coastal plain in this corner of the Mediterranean is packed with orange trees. I have been bike riding through these orchards all year, smelling their hypnotic blossoms and almost tasting the sweetness of the fruit in the air. In December the trees are almost breaking with the weight of the harvest and anyone with an orchard is screaming for pickers.

We drove south of Valencia, past Xátiva to the village of Chella. The family of an acquaintance has a small orchard with a few dozen orange trees near their home in the village. The older parents of my friend live in the village and they are a bit beyond doing their own harvesting, but the trees are still producing an absolutely prodigious amount of oranges and persimmons. Someone needs to go out and pull them off the trees. When I was asked to volunteer I fairly jumped at the chance.

Just seeing the countryside out this way is enough reason to take me away from the city for a day, or the rest of my life. The valley is dotted with lonely village church steeples and defensive towers built by the Arab occupants a thousand years ago, but mostly there are orange trees—another product left behind by the Moors. The mild, frost-free winters assure a strong yield, year after year. It was sunny and warm on this late December day, perfect for picking oranges.

We arrived a bit later than scheduled and I was ready to head out to the orchard and start filling bags with fruit. I quickly remembered that I was in Spain and that there would have to be a bit of eating before anything else could be attempted. Not only was this Spain, but a Spanish country home, so I walked into the middle of something resembling an American Thanksgiving dinner. After introductions I was seated at the table and force-fed dish after dish. All I could think about was the futility of someone trying to go on a hunger strike while seated at a Spanish grandmother’s dining room table. I’m sure that I would be able to resist whatever cruel tortures the CIA could dream up at Guantánamo much better than I can refuse to accept anything in the way of food offered by a Spanish host.

There were three kids at the table, ages 3, 4, and 8. The 8 year old girl could barely contain her disappointment in me when I admitted that I didn’t know anyone from High School Musical, and she would have been completely devastated to know that I don’t even know what that is. I’m never too shy about eating and I was only too happy to be stuffed like a Christmas goose with shrimp, rice soup, and cocido. I ate at least twice as much as anyone else at the table. I was just being polite.

I don’t know if it is just because I like kids or that my Spanish skills are more suited to conversing with the little guys, but I always seem to gravitate to the playground when I am in these sort of mixed-generation, social settings here in Spain. I was quickly recruited to go outside and play pilla-pilla which seems to be a sort of hellish Spanish version of tag where I was cursed with being “it” no matter how many times I caught one of the kids. I think that Spanish kids take advantage of me in games because of my status as a foreigner. Just the other evening I was trying to teach my 5 year old friend to play chess when he invented his own rather Machiavellian version of the game in which all of his pieces on the board seemed to have super powers enabling them to take out my players at will. I didn’t stand a chance.

The late afternoon sun was threatening to slide behind the mountains to the west when we finally drove about a half kilometer out to the orchard. This area is a collective of the village with each family having their own trees, some of which were already completely stripped of fruit, others in desperate need of harvesting. When we began picking I was immediately astounded by the output of every tree. It is common for a single orange tree to yield 100 kilos of fruit. The trees are pruned every year so they don't grow too tall which makes picking a lot easier. After less than a half hour of picking we had more oranges than 50 people could consume in a week—now I just need to find about 45 more people, either that or set up my own stall in the Ruzafa market.

I think that I would really like to have my own bit of land here in Valencia. I would like to have a few fruit trees and enough olive trees to keep me in oil and olives for the year. The odd-shaped raf tomatoes that are grown here would also be a lot of fun to grow on my own. I also need to grow my own basil as this is my favorite herb and difficult to come by in the winter. I’ll have to find a garden that I can commute to on my bicycle from downtown Valencia. Perhaps I’ll just get my own country estate with free pilla-pilla games for the kids. Cheating encouraged!

I Ham What I Am: A Pork Lover’s Paradise, a Vegetarian’s Worst Nightmare
I have a pig’s rear leg sitting on the counter in my kitchen, its little hoof pointing daintily upwards as if it’s trying to get a perfect ten in a diving competition. In almost every other country in the world this would be a little strange but in Spain it’s as natural as a paper towel rack is in an American household. These pig legs are called jamón serrano or jamón ibérico and you see them hanging from the rafters in bars and restaurants in every corner of Spain. Cured ham is one of the most popular delicacies in Iberia and for good reason: ham is good. It is dry cured here and then sliced paper towel thin. It’s a bit like ham jerky for lack of a better description. Jerky is good, and ham is even better, so what could possibly be better than ham jerky? While you are thinking in vain I’ll just cut myself a few thin slices—this pig leg isn’t going to eat itself.

Jamón is more established in some parts of the country than others but you can find it everywhere. In most parts of Castilla and Andalucia it is positively ubiquitous. In Madrid I once took a cab that served jamón. I just made that up but it sounds like a money-making idea to me. Here in Valencia it isn’t quite so popular but people still eat it whenever they get the chance. You can buy jamón in every supermarket and meat store in town.

One of the bars in my neighborhood specializes in jamón as the owner is from another, more jamón-friendly province. There is always a ham mounted in a slicing rack where someone is almost always slicing away, trying to keep up with the customer demands. Next to the carving station there are a dozen or so hams hanging on the wall like players waiting to go into a game. All of these benchwarmer hams have a little upside down umbrella underneath them to catch any fat that still may be draining out of the salt cured and dried legs. I eat so much ham that I probably need one of these drip cups. I’m not going to say where it should go.

It’s not like the only part of the pig that gets eaten here is the hind legs. Just look in my refrigerator and you can probably find the rest of the carcass. In the butcher shop meat case you’ll find the feet, ears, belly, ribs, and heads. Nothing goes to waste because that’s why they invented sausage. As much as I like Spanish hams, I’m an even bigger fan of the wide variety of sausages they make here. They have become my drug of choice, not that I have abandoned my other drugs of choice. A sausage wouldn’t be much fun without wine to go with it.

Villages all over Spain showcase their products by holding Bacchanalian celebrations of wine and pork products. Spanish people take their meat very seriously and they are too preoccupied at these events with the food and wine—and they are probably too well-adjusted and mature—to stop and think of the humor potential of being, literally, in the middle of a sausage fest. My own puerile mind can’t help wanting to scream out, “Don’t you get it? It’s a sausage fest!” Evidently they don’t.

You may want to ask me, “Don’t you think that you eat too much pork?” All that I can say is that it’s a complicated matter and a very difficult question for me to answer if I want the answer to be “no.” I love pig. I eat a lot of it. I eat so much that the other day I burped and it sounded a little like an oink. It’s just that it is difficult to avoid pork in Spain. Pork finds its way into so many of the national dishes that it is conspicuous by its absence in those few recipes that call for some other animal. And yes, there are recipes in Spain that do not call for pork; you’ll find them at the bottom of page 1,113 in the All the Recipes of Spain cookbook, right after the dessert section (all of which use at least a tea spoon or two of pig meat sprinkles).

You can’t get many of these wonderful Spanish pork products in America because of U.S.D.A regulations or whatever. I have decided that an easy way to get rich is to start an international smuggling cartel. I tried to start my jamón traficante business last week by smuggling a ham into the country disguised as a pregnant nun. By the time I got to Kennedy Airport in New York all I had was bone. I shared with everyone around me on the flight so at least I made some new friends. If you are an importer of illegal goods, never use your own product. I think I saw that in a movie once. I don’t like drugs very much so if I were a cocaine dealer this wouldn’t be a problem, but Spanish ham is just so good.

Some Spanish hams are almost as expensive as cocaine so it is fairly common to see overweight men in hot pants and halter tops standing on corners in the shady areas of town doing whatever they have to do to feed their habit. I have not yet reached this level of depravity although I sometimes will buy ham instead of other basic household necessities. I mean, how often do you really need to wash your hair? If it were possible I would buy cheaper wine to give me more money to buy pork. The wine I buy now arrives at the supermarket in one of those cement mixer trucks. I guess I could quit drinking to afford more ham. Ouch! My liver just kicked me like an 8 ½ month old fetus. White Slavery: Too high a price to pay for Spanish ham? That is a question only you can answer. Now where did I put that mini skirt and boa?

Yes, We Have No Horse Meat
I guess that I should wait to write this post until after I have actually tried some horse. Horse meat that is, they eat it over here. There is a store that threatens to sell horse meat (in the picture) across the street from my building but it is never open, or at least I’ve never seen it open, so I presume that horse meat isn’t too popular. They don’t sell it in the supermarkets, and you won’t find caballo on any restaurant menus that I’ve seen, but they do eat it. I asked around.

There is a stall at the Mercado de Algirós that sells horse meat. I checked it out the last time I was there. I mean I took a look, I didn’t eat any. They weren’t giving out free samples, or maybe they did but by the time I go there it was all gobbled up. Horse meat is a really dark red and the piece the woman was cutting looked pretty fatty. I would have thought horse meat to be very lean. I guess that I have a lot to learn about horse meat, or maybe I won’t learn more about it. I haven’t decided yet.

It is funny to think that I come from a culture where there is a significant taboo about eating horses. I have eaten some weird stuff in my life so it’s not like I’m easily frightened by what some people think of as food. I’ll try almost anything once. Most people eat some pretty horrible looking sea creatures. I have even eaten guinea pig before, a critter some people keep as pets. There is something about eating horses that goes even beyond our taboos about eating cats and dogs. I’m not saying that I would eat a cat or a dog before a horse. Let’s just say that when my brain receives and interprets signals from the body about hunger, the first impulse it sends out isn’t, “Hey, I have an idea: Let’s go with horse meat tonight.”

Am I alone in thinking this? For all that I know you people are all just dying to sink your teeth into some rare horse flesh. You are really starting to gross me the fuck out. There is no way that I am going to kiss you now until you have flossed and brushed. If there is anything worse than horse meat it’s the horse meat that’s been stuck in your teeth for three days.

See, now I’m just being culturally insensitive, so just put down your horse burger and come over here and give me a big fat kiss. Holy Jesus! A horse meat burp? You’re a real class act, young lady. You’ll never get a husband with manners like that. On second thought, I just don’t think this is working out between us, Little Miss Horse Meat Breath. Don’t take it too personally; I’m not attracted to vegetarians either. It’s not you, it’s me. I think that I probably just watched too many cowboy movies as a kid to eat a mode of transportation.

I have the world’s worst toaster. How shitty is it? I gave it as a gift to someone and they gave it back when they left the country. A slice of bread got stuck inside and it was probably easier to rescue those 32 Chilean miners. I don’t remember how that story ended but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have to cut them all up into little pieces to bring them out. I'd buy a new model but I still have five payments to make on this one.

There was way too much profanity in this episode to interest news agency so I haven’t bothered to alert the press. The toaster ruined half of what was to be a steak sandwich so the swearing was justified.

I know that I'm assimilating because my knee-jerk profanity leaves my mouth in the Spanish version, at least some times. I really was trying to be a better person in Spanish and leave my potty mouth behind. As it turns out it just took me a while to learn all the good stuff; I blame movies from Argentina—those dudes can swear with the best of them, almost as good as Arabs.

Old habits die hard...or will probably die with me.

Hurry Up And Wait
The Spanish have their own system for waiting in lines; something that is required a lot here. When you walk up to the crowd waiting in the post office or at the butcher you ask, “¿El ultimo?” The last person in line will let you know who he or she is and then you are the new último, or the last one.

I have found that the most aggressive line jumpers are female senior citizens. These golden girls will make every attempt to wiggle around your rightful place in the queue and then act like they didn’t notice you when you call them on it. It certainly doesn’t pay to be shy when you are standing in line although there’s no point in losing your manners. I make a point of being firm yet polite, and I always take my large pocket knife out of my backpack and clean my fingernails while still keeping a watchful eye on my place in line.

I have never been forced to toss a Spanish grandmother to the ground with a violent judo throw, not yet. I like to keep the threat of a couple of my more effective martial arts techniques out there on the table, just to keep things honest. I would probably feel bad about slamming an old woman to the ground in front of the market vegetable stall and crushing her like a bag of dried and rotten sticks, but I didn’t write the rules to defending one’s place in line. I also don’t want to be taken advantage of just because I have an accent.

I was waiting to buy olives the other day and had already spent about ten minutes behind a guy who was buying some sort of dried fish thing. Had I been less tired or in a better humor I would have asked him what the hell he was buying and if it was intended for human consumption. Instead I waited as patiently as I could. All I wanted was a small bag of cracked olives. The olives at this stall are well worth even a ridiculously long wait. Another guy came up and asked me if I was “the last.” A minute later an old woman shuffled up pushing her grocery cart and asked who was last. The guy behind me answered and she immediately started in on a story about how she was in a hurry and if she could please move in front of him in line. He quickly and deftly passed the buck to me, directing her to ask me for my place in line. What a coward! I could see that my turn was coming up because the guy in front of me was paying.

I am as polite and gentlemanly as the next guy and I was almost going to let her go in front of me until I realized the archetype I was up against in this battle. I have had the misfortune of being behind women like her and watched as they take more time to order a couple of pork chops as it would take me to remodel a large kitchen. I hesitated a moment and then turned to the merchant and ordered my bag of olives. I wanted to tell granny that I didn’t fall off the turnip truck this morning, but instead I just let out a non-apologetic, “Hasta luego,” as I laid down the exact change for my olives and got the hell out of there.

I realize this isn’t exactly the most harrowing tale you will ever come across but you didn’t see the look of complete evil in this octogenarian’s eyes as I did—the devil in sensible shoes and support stockings. Dogs aren’t allowed inside the market but you never know if one of these golden girls has a West Highland terrier stuffed in her cart ready at a moment’s notice to rip your throat out on her orders. I was victorious on this occasion but how long can my luck hold out? Every day I avoid death is a gift.

Looking in my medicine cabinet it dawned on me that the off-brand mouthwash I have costs as much as a decent bottle of Spanish table wine. I’m not really smart enough to come to any meaningful conclusions on this observation but it seems like this should mean something.