American in Spain

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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On Sunday we were invited to a meal where the main course was pigeon. Yes, in Spain, people eat pigeons. As far as I know, most of the pigeons that are eaten are raised especially for that purpose, and aren’t just captured with a net or hunted with a BB gun in the local town hall square. There’s a reason pigeons are called “flying rats”.

What follows are some photos I took this weekend, not all related to the pigeon stew.
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Nora is constantly eating. Upon waking in the morning, she complains nonstop while her breakfast formula bottle is prepared. After drinking 200 cc’s of the milk and cereal mix in her bottle, she can sometimes make it an entire hour before asking for a cookie. She does this by first shouting “YETA!“, which is how she says the Spanish word for cookie, galleta. Even though I know what she wants, I ignore her until she “switches to English” and shouts “DOH CHI!“, which is her approximation of the word “cookie”.
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Those of you that know me will not be surprised, once I explain what it means, to learn that “¡Tienes mucho morro!” and “¡Tienes un morro que te lo pisas!” were two of the first native Spanish expressions I learned from my later-to-be wife. The word morro literally means “snout”. So the two phrases above translate literally to “You have a lot of snout!” and “You have a snout [so big] that you step on it!” respectively, the latter being a hyperbolical form of the former. She was not actually suggesting that I needed a rhinoplasty. The closest expression in English that I can think to capture its meaning would be, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, buddy!” It’s something to say to someone that is acting like they are entitled to something that they aren’t, or are just being too prideful. It’s what you’d say to a jerk that drives all the way to the end of a lane that is ending and then cuts in front of your car. Anyone that has ever fed farm animals can clearly understand why the Spanish would use the word “a lot of snout” for such an expression.

So anyway, this morning at my local butcher…
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On Saturday morning, my wife got a call from her boss, who had just sold his motorcycle, and, as part of the sale, had acquired way more barnacles than he could consume, so he offered us some. Barnacles are a special delicacy in Spain, particularly in northern Spain and Galicia. At Christmas time, barnacle prices can reach 99 €/kg ($65/lb)! The best, most expensive ones come from the Cantabrian sea on the northern coast of Spain. On Saturday we were given 1.5 kilograms of the good, expensive barnacles, so on Sunday we had a feast.

I had never eaten or cooked barnacles, so everything was new and fascinating to me. Here’s what I learned…
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We had another successful Hamburgerfest this year for July 4th, with friends Agustin, Ana, Ivan, Veronica, Manolo, Elena, José Luis, and Azucena attending. In 2009, we came up almost short on hamburger meat, so this year we decided to make sure that definitely didn’t happen. As a result, we have about eight hamburgers left over to freeze or eat this week. Nora was very well behaved with the guests once her initial “who are all these people in my living room??” confusion wore off. And they were very good about warming up to her slowly. Agustin fed her a pretty big portion of his dessert of flan, ice cream and whipped cream, which endeared him to her at least for the duration of the dessert course.
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