American in Spain

If the dozen or so hours of “travel in Spain” television shows I’ve watched are any indication, one of the tapas capitals of Spain is San Sebastián. There’s one particular district where every bar you glance into has fifteen or twenty different tapas to choose from, all laid out on the bar. The quality is really high, just like the prices. Just the previous week, I had been at a tapas festival in Santander, and I’d noted that 2.50€ for a tapa and drink was a little expensive. Well, in San Sebastián, all three tapas we tried were at least 4€ each (with drink). Pricy!
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Every year, right around Santiago, nearby Santander celebrates its Semana Grande (Big Week), with the most Spanish of traditions: bullfights and tapas. My interest in bullfighting has waned in recent years, but my interest in tapas is as strong as ever! On Sunday, the last day of the festival, my wife and I went to sample the wares that the restaurants around Santander had to offer.
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This morning I was reading an interesting Lifehacker post about self control, when I came across a very cute embedded image, which was full-freakin-screen on my iPhone, of a little blond girl eating broccoli. She reminded me a lot of Nora. My next thought was, “Wait a minute! We’ve got some broccoli in the fridge!” At that point there was no turning back [insert ironic quip about self control here]; I had to take some broccoli publicity portraits of Nora.
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Strawberry season is about to draw to a close in Spain. Although I’ve consumed several kilos this year, I’m sad to see them go. The thing that most annoys me about strawberries is how long they last after I buy them. In my experience, if I don’t eat them within 48 hours, they all turn to mush and they get all fluffy with mold. This is especially a problem since I normally can’t stop myself from buying a whole 2 kilogram box of them. So I decided to turn my frustration around and use the rapid growth of mold on my strawberries as the subject of a timelapse video.
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When my in-laws came back from their annual Easter trip to the La Serena region of Spain, they brought back a wheel of the typical cheese of the region, Queso de la Serena. It’s made from the milk of Merino sheep, and it takes almost two dozen sheep to product enough milk for a kilogram of cheese. It’s coagulated using a natural vegetable rennet taken from the cardoon, a thistle-like plant related to the artichoke. The coagulation happens very slowly, allowing for a rich, but tart, flavor to develop. Cheeses coagulated with cardoon tend to be very creamy, making the interior of the cheese very oozy. In fact, a traditional way to eat it is by slicing off the top and eating the creamy inside with a spoon. I’ve never done that, but it sounds wonderful.
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Living in a fishing village has its perks. When the fishing seasons change, suddenly everyone knows someone that has some fish to get rid of. Mackerel season just started, and I’ve heard lots of people around town saying, “Hey, you want some mackerel? I’ve got some extra.” It’s unclear to me exactly why this happens. My best guess is that they overfish, either intentionally or by accident, especially at the beginning of the season when the fishing’s good, and they can only sell a certain amount of it legally in the market, so they give away the rest to friends, and the friends give it to their friends, and eventually the fish trickle down to all the dinner tables in town.

I don’t regularly interact with many of the fishermen, but the other day Bruno, my neighbor and local butcher, knocked on my door and offered me some. I threw it in the fridge and, the next day, asked him how I should prepare it. What follows is the incredibly simple recipe he gave me.
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Today I was invited to participate in an annual event in the Cantabrian mountains, a private donkey eating feast. As I understand it, because their numbers are dwindling, eating donkey is “officially prohibited” in Spain, but apparently it is not very well enforced, and even policemen have taken part in the event in past years. The donkey, I was told, was between one and two years old and was slaughtered humanely a week before the event and the meat was frozen to soften the strong flavors.

The event began as a get together for a local bowling club (a special local style of bowling, not ten-pin), but as the years went by various members stopped going and their numbers waned, so they started inviting friends of the original members. After ten years or so, the original bowling club members make up only a tiny fraction of the attendees. Today there were 34 of us. It was only men, for unspoken reasons. I was invited by my friend, Andrés, and I subsequently invited my father-in-law.
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[Part 1] [Part 2] We got up late and were clearly both aching from the day before. My feet were begging for a dose of ibuprofen and another six hours in bed, but I only gave them the former. Tuesday was “meet the Internet people” day, with lunch scheduled with a second cousin I’d never met who had found my blog a few years before, and dinner with an Internet friend of an Internet friend, a social network contact of mine.
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[Part 1] Up at 7:00 AM like the sun. After a shower, we headed down to the street for a coffee at a local shop, and then to nearby Union Square where we found the Powell-Hyde cable car line. A one way ticket is a steep $5, but a three-day passport is only $20. So as long as we could take two round trips in three days, it would be worth it to buy the passport. Boy, did we ever get our money’s worth out of that! Several times we took the cable car just to take it. We love walking through cities, but there’s a point where you’re glad someone thought to pull trains along underground cables.
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The time has come once again for the Sandwich Party, a sandwich blogging event. I participated in the first, second, and fourth sandwich parties. The third one was held the week my daughter was born, so I missed it. This time, I admit to preparing, photographing, eating, and digesting my sandwich before the party was even announced, because there is often less than a week’s notice from when The Sandwich Divas announce these things.

This time around, I’ve gone with a family favorite: The Beltch. My mother, the polite lady that she is, chooses to put the vowel after the L, making it a Bletch (as if that’s a polite sound!). As you might have guessed, it’s a variation on the famous BLT (bacon, lettuce, and tomato), but adding cheese (CH). For proper BELTCH construction, a fried egg should be added to achieve full letter representation, but circumstances did not allow for an egg in this production.
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