Hiatus

Well all, it has come to pass.  What I warned earlier this fall has finally arrived – I have to put the blog aside for a few months.  I have six day work weeks with mountains of homework that are threatening my sleep schedule, and due to the crisis, both of my roommates have lost their jobs and cannot afford to live here.  So in the next two weeks, I’ll also be tied up with moving.  Hopefully you’ll see me back here in April when I’ll be doing my internship and out of class, but if not then, shortly after.  I leave you all with this and apologize most exhaustedly.

Alternative Heating: Mulled Wine

Last time I posted something seasonal to drink up here, I kind of missed the boat.  So before we get into spring, I’m going to go ahead and post this.  The pictures have been langoring around here, all lonely.  Technically I should be proofing my projects for my literary translation class, but I can take fifteen minutes to encourage you all to drink.

I have no heating in my apartment.  But you live in the south of Spain!  you may exclaim.  You don’t need it!  So, so wrong.  The cold here isn’t that bad if you are outside.  No snow, no hail, temperate cold. But  it’s a humid kind of cold that soaks inexorably through your coat, and more pertinently, into the stone walls of your apartment building.  Add in single paned windows full of chinks and you’ve a recipe for living in a damp fridge.  I now pick my restaurants and bars based on the quality of their heating systems and insulation instead of the quality of the food and drink. Right now it’s 11 AM, a beautiful day outside, high fifties Fahrenheit.  My nail beds are blue.  No joke.  Well, maybe it’s more purple than blue.  But anyways.  We’ve got a space heater that we share around, but with the price of utilities here is straight up hairy and those things are electricity hogs.  So now you know why I sleep in Andalucía under flannel sheets, a down comforter, and then a folded quilt on top of that.  With my hot water bottle kitty.  And my face slowly freezes at night.

But why all this bitching about the poor state of my core body temperature on a food blog?  Well, I have found a cheaper solution to central heating.  Mulled wine.  It gives you a false feeling of warmth from the alcohol dilating your blood vessels and is actually warm from you know…boiling it on the stove.  Just drink it quick before the apartment leeches all of its heat away!

Extremely Multicultural Teacakes

It’s that time of the year again – cookie party time. This party/marathon of confectionery was my second abroad, though this year I was blessed with more backup: Dan and Erin, my fellow Americans.  Last year I flew mostly solo, so I didn’t take them for granted.  More important than their labor (which was nonetheless herculean)  was having my people around me to listen to Christmas music with and crack jokes in English.  Though we did take some time out for Curso dandalu (Curso de andaluz, the accent we live in now).

One and a half kilos of butter combined with only one lonely and hardworking cookie sheet can produce a shocking amount of cookies with enough time and patience.  And arm strength, since I still don’t have a stand mixer here in Spain – and probably never will since those cost upwards of 500 euros each.  I.e. most of my monthly salary.  We ended up with about 450 cookies: two batches of spritz, one batch of gingerbread, two batches of chocolate chip, two batches of oatmeal raisin (right off the top of the Quaker Oats lid, though my oats were bought from my miracle workers at the herbistoría), and of course, two batches of Swedish teacakes.

Fall Flavors

Here in Spain it is still totally fall.  So I’m sticking with this title.  And anyways, these ‘fall flavors’ are equally valid throughout winter.  What are they? Comfort food.

Thanksgiving in a foreign land…again

Well, here I am writing about my Thanksgiving while listening to Christmas music – and I have a stern rule about the order of my celebrations.  Yes, I finally made good on my warning that I’d be updating this blog rather sporadically this year.  My Master’s degree in translation and interpreting finally required me to show up for class and instantly all my free time converted into glossary building and research on free translation tools.  This weekend I get my last break, so I’m trying to take advantage of the gap and get everything done.  Including finally writing about Thanksgiving.  Just so you know?  The pictures have been moldering in draft status for three weeks.  So I’m only half lazy.

Food Nostalgia Challenge: Bagels

When you ask an American student what they most miss about home, after their family, the most common response is often…the bagel.  My plan L (for lottery winning) in life is to open up a bakery here in Seville called Desa y Unos that specializes in American pastries – pie of the day, quality cookies, and of course – bagels.  Caroline and I still wax nostalgic over our bagel dates in college – a fresh bagel, toasted crispy and shmeared with flavored cream cheese accompanied by an almond latte.  So, so, so good.  Here in Spain, they are not to be found.  Like anything denied, it starts to grow in importance, taking on a rosy glow in your memory.  I had had it.  I had made gluten free bagels before, why not make glutentastic ones?

I called up my friend Erin and told her my plan and she started chipping in with her own sighs. The desire of her heart? A sandwich: the Tribeca Turkey from Manhattan Bagels.  The plan coalesced: we were going to make this sandwich and failure was not an option.

 

Vegetables! Wait, really?

This blog is not the healthiest of food blogs.  Do not come here if you want to lose weight.  It is filled with pies.  And I like it that way.  I’m a pie enabler.  Don’t you want to be enabled?  At least the pictures in and of themselves are not fattening.  But even I eat something besides jamón and cookies every once and awhile, and so we’re going to take a pastry break to eat some veggies.

Tu cara me suena… El Pepito

Those of you who have poked around in the past entries may find this one to be hauntingly familiar.  But it was worth it to me, personally, to whip this together.

Meet the Pepito.  It is the Serranito‘s beef montadito cousin. For those who aren’t here in Spain or don’t recall the earlier posts, montadito’s are mini sandwiches for snacking and tapearing.

Pop the Ball Celebration: Fruzz Cake

For the last year or so, a friend of mine has been developing a game for iOs – available for iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.  I’ve been watching the progress with quite a bit of interest because I actually did the translation into English.  The game is called Pop the Ball, and it’s for sale in the app store here, with Facebook page here.

I may be a little biased, but it’s awesome. It’s easy to learn but I’m somewhat backward and am still stuck on the fourth level.  My roommate is doing much better than I am.  I’m not surprised.   But what the hell does an iPhone app half to do with a food blog?  Truthfully, if you’re asking that question you haven’t spent that much time on the internet.  We be baking us a cake.

MegaTea – Cold Smackdown

For the most part, I have been warmly welcomed here in Spain.  I have a good group of friends, supportive coworkers, and several adoptive families.  But there is one segment of Spanish society that has declared out and out war on me – viruses.  Last year I had three debilitating colds in two months and here I am again, two weeks into my second year  laid low.  Great. It’s as if Spain has thrown down the gauntlet – if you can survive the anti-foreign body security measure of their collection of viruses with your foreigner’s immune system, you are worthy of residency in the country.  Challenge accepted with lethargy. And hey, it gives me a chance to play such games as Fever or Not?  as I yell at the Celsius thermometer.

When I get sick, I get a super impressive cough that usually leads to me losing my voice and sounding like a very creepy man.   When we lived together, Gabrielle used to have me make threatening phone calls to all our friends.  Rosa just calls me Manolo the truck driver.  The real problem is that I’m an assistant teacher, so losing my voice is a big deal.  I got sent home from work one day because listening to me made my coworkers wince.

What does all this whining have to do with my food blog?  Well.  In the midst of those three colds last winter, I got increasingly shacknasty and desperate and started soliciting cough remedies from pretty much everyone I knew.  Herbal tea, hot water with lemon, tea with honey, hot water with ginger, and from my parents – hot whiskey.  Anything that would soothe my throat and help me stop coughing so I could sleep and drag my butt through my commute and back.

In my cold medicine addled state a brilliant idea came to me.  What if I were to combine all of these ideas into ONE?  It would be like the Power Rangers or even Captain Planet – a MegaTea!