Coffee Break

Hey everyone.  I have a lot of posts already photographed, but I’ve been swamped with 1) the holidays and 2) job searching.  I spend hours on the computer all day amongst the unwashed digital masses combing through job offers and trying to convince HR filters that I am awesome.  It can get tiring, and I get sick of my laptop. So the blog has fallen a bit by the wayside.  I am a sorry excuse for a blogger.  I apologize.  Before I go back to typing tests and parsing through my saved job searches and cover letters, let’s take a coffee break together.

Copycat Cocktail

Somehow, by being disgustingly lucky, I have managed to develop a rather snooty palate. This is particularly true in terms of my drinking style.  No matter what the liquid is, the more expensive it is, the more it attracts me.  I love those stupid minted waters, the fancy teas, microbrews with strange flavors, fancy wines, and pretty much anything with bubbles in it.  If it’s foreign or imported?  Even more alluring.

So when I go out on the town to drink, I’m always looking for something that I can’t make at home myself.  I have one expensive drink and I nurse it as long as possible, for as I’ve said before, I’m pretty much broke off my ass.  The old saying “champagne tastes on a beer budget” is very, very true for me at this stage in my life.  But that doesn’t get rid of the craving for expensive things.  That’s where friends and family with kitchen toys come to the rescue.

Mint Iced Tea

It is still obscenely hot here.  I still do not have AC.  But I found something I could bear to make.

Feria de Sevilla – Rebujitos

Well, still no cheese steaks.  But I have a good reason!  Feria sneaked up on me.

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!

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.

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!

Nerd Cocktail

I am kind of nerdtastic.  In high school I was in sciencey activities and band, dabbled in Bollywood watching and more pertinently to this post, anime.  My brother was really in to Japanese culture – studying the language, did a short study abroad program there, the works, so there was always a steady influx of anime in our house (later dorama as well).  Leo acted as a filter for me.  He would watch the bulk of the shows and then pass on whatever he thought I’d like.  I did the same for him with fantasy novels, so we were good.

One of the shows he passed on to me was a kid’s show about a detective school, because I am a huge fan of mysteries and the detective novel.  And so my equally nerdtastic friend Victoria and I started in on Tantei Gakuen Q or Detective Academy Q.

Kyu with his skunk patch.

Heyo, Britain.

About a month ago, I took a short jaunt up to London and Brighton to witness the graduation of my friend Caroline.  I am monstrously proud of her and her fancy pants Master’s degree (and now her pending PhD journey!) and was excited to go be her personal cheering section.  As I’m the closest, geographically, it made sense that I would play surrogate mom, making a fool of myself and generally taking lots of pictures and beaming.

One of the many things that delights me about Caroline is that like me, she knows how to think with her stomach.  So I’d like to share with you some of the tasty tidbits that she managed to finagle into our trip.

First of all, thank you so much to Caroline, Bea, Megan, and Bridie for giving me the best weekend I’ve had in a long time full of delicious Asian food and hard cider.  Two things that are severely lacking in my Mediterranean diet.  I hope I get the chance to hop up there again, because I’m not done with you all yet.

Now for gratuitous pictures of food. Just a bit, though, because I was too busy being proud of all those smarty pants I just mentioned and their posh degrees.

We will eat what we will, THANK you.

A few months ago, freshly graduated and unemployed, I spent several days laying around waiting for my friends to get back in town or someone to please please please call me back for an interview to some menial job or another.  Needless to say, I ended up watching a lot of TV, especially since it was pouring down rain the entire time.  Eventually, I ran out of good TV to watch and began flipping through the On Demand menu and fell to a low I never thought I’d reach: multiple episodes of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant.

During this onslaught of mind-numbing programming it suddenly occurred to me that every single one of my good friends had managed to escape this fate – we were all baby-free college graduates.  And suddenly my heart swelled with pride.  As invitations for weddings and baby showers began to clog my mailbox, I started to think.  Shouldn’t we also be celebrating our own, non-marketed brand of good fortune?  I needed a party to cleanse my palate of congratulatory Hallmark cards.

Thus: the Thank GOD I’m Not Pregnant Party.

It's hard to find favor boxes for a party like this. Dutch mints and condoms go well together, though.