American in Spain

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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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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Our two-year-old daughter, Nora, has been in Extremadura with her grandparents for all of last week and will be there for another two weeks, one of which we will be visiting her. It’s hard to be away from her for a whole fortnight, but we’ve been video conferencing with her with some success. We thought it wise to take full advantage of our childlessness and do some tourism that would be a lot more difficult with Nora around.
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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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As a direct consequence of some recent pimento cheesery, a plan was hatched among some bloggers I have gotten to know to hold a Sandwich Party, a weekend in which everyone makes a sandwich that’s unique or special for them and blogs about it. I figured I would go for the most uniquely Spanish sandwich I know, the bocadillo de tortilla de patata, or the Spanish potato omelet sandwich!
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The other day, I saw pimento cheese mentioned in passing on a sibling blog. As far as I know, pimento cheese doesn’t even exist outside the Confederate States of America, so of course it doesn’t exist over here in the Old World. It reminded me of my childhood, even though I’ve probably only eaten a dozen pimento cheese sandwiches in my life. I commented on it and was given a recipe to make some myself!
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This Saturday, we returned to the restaurant where we had our wedding celebration, Etxe Aundi, to eat a dinner for two on the house. Apparently they were pleased with our 10,000€ business.
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We’ve got a little tradition forming here. This is the second year in a row that we’ve eaten a turkey pizza for Thanksgiving. I’ve taken some photos during the cooking process to show you.
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