American in Spain

When I lived in the US, I remember meat being something I picked up from the refrigerators of the supermarket, shrink-wrapped between plastic and styrofoam. Then, I started dating and eventually married a slaughterhouse veterinarian, and hung out with a group of Spanish slaughterhouse vets, none of which had even remotely considered the possibility of abstaining from meat, a practice relatively common in my homeland. Every American can name at least one vegetarian friend, and probably a vegan, too. These are, of course, luxuries that our rich country can afford us.

Contrary to life in the US, life in Spain consists of personally knowing your own butcher (mine is my neighbor, Bruno), seeing – and often choosing – the cut of meat that is fed into the meat grinder to produce the exact quantity of ground meat that you desire, or asking your butcher to slice the chicken breast actually off the chicken and then into fillets for you.
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I’ve invented a new American in Spain tradition! It’s a little similar to my Fourth of July Hamburgerfest. Today, you see, is San José, Saint Joseph’s Day. All the days have saints assigned to them here in Catholic Spain, and March 19 happens to be assigned to Saint Joseph, the poor old shepherd who, according to dogma, never got to have sex with his wife and still had to raise a son that was not his own. That’s rough.
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Recently my wife has discovered a blog by a Spanish housewife called Cocinando Entre Olivos (Cooking Among Olive Trees). I must say that I am extremely impressed with the quality of her posts, particularly the step-by-step photographs; you almost don’t need to be able to read the text. There really is a photo at every single step, often actually showing the addition of each ingredient. After several years of not adding any new recipes to our cooking repertoires, it’s quite refreshing to have some new things to cook. Recently my wife made some homemade chinese food, which consisted of cooking three recipes simultaneously (the recipes are in Spanish): Chinese Chicken with Almonds, Chinese Rice With Three Delights and Spring Rolls With Sweet-and-Sour Sauce.
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We’ve heard from past years that the nearby town of Santoña puts on a good Carnival festival. We were a little disappointed, however, to see that the parade starts at dusk rather than during the day when it’s warmer and easier to see costumes. But we decided to give it a chance anyway, so we left at around lunchtime to go have some tapas and spend a lazy afternoon in Santoña awaiting the parade. Nora, of course, was delighted to get a chance to get more milage out of her Sevillana dress.
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Learning the words for the meals of the day is difficult any time you change cultures, whether you change languages or not. In different parts of the US, for instance, the word “dinner” can either refer to the meal at midday or in the evening. It took me years of living the UK to realize that “having tea” doesn’t only refer to imbibing an infusion, but can often refer to the evening meal. In Spain, most people eat three main meals each day, but there are words for five meals. Confused? Let’s have a look…
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It’s pincho time again! Every year just before Christmas, bars and restaurants in the local town of Laredo hold a competition to create the best tapas (called pinchos). It’s one of my favorite events of the year for reasons I described here. Unfortunately, this year the weather has been absolutely terrible. Last weekend, when it started, we had steady downpours with heavy winds that kept us at home all weekend. Of the eighteen pinchos competing, I was only able to sample six this year. For that, I apologize, dear readers. I’ll try to do better next year.
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My parents are visiting us in Spain this week. When it came time to make Thanksgiving plans, my first thought would be to make a turkey pizza to eat, and then lie around the house in a digestive stupor as is American tradition on this holiday. My wife suggested that we take advantage of my day off work go to Santander after she got off work (it’s not a holiday in Spain, of course) to see the penguins and sea lions at the Palacio de la Magdalena. This was, as usual, a superior idea to mine, so we decided to do that. Then, at the last minute, she suggested that, if we wanted to, my folks and I could take the entire day to go to the nearby town of Castro Urdiales to see the beach and church there, rather than wait most of the day for her to get off work. In the end, this plan won out. We spent Thanksgiving walking around and eating tapas in Castro Urdiales.
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Earlier this week, my wife told me that, to celebrate a successful business meeting she was going to have with a client, she wanted to have pork chops and fried eggs for lunch. Then she said, “And save the big egg for me. Don’t use it for any other recipes.” I raised an eyebrow, “The big egg?” She smiled and said, “You’ll know it when you see it.”
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Last weekend we went to the annual festival in Ampuero, a neighboring town of 4,000 residents. Every year, they hold a miniature version of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, complete with all night partying in white clothes and red scarfs, a running of the bulls, and bullfighting. Of the six years we’ve lived here, we’ve gone several times. We knew from past experience that it’s nearly impossible to park in a small town that’s hosting three times its inhabitants in a festival, so we parked on the outskirts of town to save the time and stress of finding a closer spot.
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When discussing what sort of mischief and/or tourism we could get up to last Sunday, my wife mentioned that a friend had recommended visiting “the oldest town in Cantabria”. With only this tidbit to go on, I turned to Google and discovered a Cantabrian tourism site with the sentence, “It is said that [Bárceno Mayor] is the oldest town in Cantabria, and possibly even all of Spain.” Yet nowhere on the great big internet could I find out how old the town was thought to be. It was also unclear how one would even determine how old a small town is when it’s nestled in the mountains near a cave with 15,000 year old Paleolithic cave paintings.
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