Hotlanta

Surprise, surprise: I went traveling.  Just after getting back from my mini trip to Sevilla to wrap up paperwork (as if, I am currently gathering more official stamps so I can get permission to begin the application process in the hopes that someday my diploma will come in the mail), I went on down to see my friend Caroline.  I bought the tickets with some sky miles in a fit of frustration after a disappointing breakup and PowerPoint-shaped rage against my thesis.  Fabulous decision.

Caroline was a wonderful hostess. She shared her friends and took me around town to eat in many, many lovely places.  We also got the chance to cook together for the first time in over a year, after buying way too much food at the Dekalb Farmers Market.  Where they don’t let you take pictures, so oh well.  I took a few pictures of my favorite things she prepared for us, and those will be popping up in the next few weeks.  Especially since her breakfast burritos were worth the price of the tickets alone. Also, I bought a gigantic cookbook on southern cooking.  So there’s that.  In the mean time, for anyone thinking of going to Atlanta, please consider…

Bye Bye Spain

I had a little post about roasted tomatoes in the works, but then I got lazy and didn’t finish it before taking off for Spain for my Master’s wrap up.  That’s all done with, and now I’m on my way back the the Pacific NW to try to cobble a new life together.  Again.  I’m actually sitting in the Madrid airport, trying to take advantage of the expensive little mobile modem I had to pick up.

A sick bitter orange tree was blooming out of season, allowing me to get one more whiff of azahar in October. My friend said it was Sevilla saying goodbye to me.

Clams! Again! But Spanish this time.

About two years ago, I wrote up my favorite recipe for clams. And it is still my favorite recipe.  But last Christmas Day, after my drunken Abandoned Americans in Sevilla party, I got adopted by a family that served me an equally wonderful set of clams.  And I’d like to share the idea.

Roman Holiday: Tartufo

Well, back from Rome.  Tomorrow, I leave Sevilla and go back to being a US resident.  That’s strange.  Hopefully I can channel my re-entry culture shock into food impulses, as I did last year, because this time I’m staying for good.  A major economic depression can cause such upheavals… Even though I’ll be leaving Spain as a resident, I’ll be back in October for a short, education-related visit and I have been assiduously stockpiling Spanish recipes for my favorite things, as well as cookbooks.  So this blog right here will continue to have a slight Mediterranean flair.  I invite you to listen to this song when reading Spain-related entries, by the way.  It makes things more exciting.

Anyways.  In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to Rome and that I had planned to taste-test three or four “best gelato places in Rome”.  Well.  I didn’t.  I had only been in Rome for a hit and run half day before this trip, so I was all for actually getting to try out all these great suggestions people were throwing out, really immerse myself into the food culture of Rome.  But it was an absolutely wonderful trip, and we sank so far into relaxation that we said to hell with gelato shop hunting and just ate it where we found it.  And it was all absolutely delicious. We visited all of one place on our list, which was suggested both by my friend Michelle and my coworker Ana, separately. I kept the list, though.

Feria de Sevilla – Rebujitos

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

Churros

I love churros. I grew up with Costco churros, the giant sticks as long as a child’s arm covered in cinnamon sugar, hanging out with the over-sized soft pretzels.   They are a mass market interpretation of a Mexican churro, and the image that most Americans carry around in their heads when thinking about churros.  But now that I am a part time expat in Spain, I am learning that there are many types of churro out there, and they are just waiting to show me their particular tasty subtleties.

For those of you who don’t know exactly what a churro is, though you may be few in our globalized world, it’s a tube of fried dough – somewhat like a doughnut, somewhat like choux pastry.  What decorations or fillings or dipping substances then come next varies with mood and geography.

Tapas II – Estilo Granaino

A while back, I wrote a short treatise on the art of tapas featuring my favorite restaurant in Sevilla, with the drawback that what I did wasn’t truly tapear-ing, because I never switched locales, but parked myself at the table until I couldn’t get up to request any more platelets of solomillo.

Oh, quick update on that: I am working on the recipe for solomillo al eneldo, but it’s still not quite there.  I’ll post it when it gets close enough to the real thing.

A month or so after that adventure, I tagged along with my roommate and her father on a day trip to Granada.  Rosa had a family meeting to attend, so her father and I took a long walk, meandering through the city center and chit chatting about history.  After admiring the sights, though, we got down to business, and we slipped into one of his favorite tapas bars.

This is the only picture I have of that visit because I was too busy eating and trying to decipher the super Andaluz chatter of twenty-five of Rosa’s relatives.  But no worries.  A few weeks later, she and I went back, alone, to concentrate on what’s really important.  And it’s not the Alhambra above, but tapas.  Granada style.

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.

Leela Aunty’s Rajma

Summer before last I lucked into the trip of a lifetime.  My friend Rubai was going back to India to see her family, and I jokingly invited myself along, then the joke tumbled into reality (this seems to happen a lot, and I love it).   We ended up staying with various family  members or friends and visited Delhi, Mumbai, Amritsar, Khandala (by accident), Rishikesh, and other cities.  I met a ton of great people, learned a few words of Hindi, saw a million beautiful (and some scary) temples, got my picture taken by strangers, almost fell out of an auto rickshaw in a monsoon, sweated buckets, and generally had an unreal time. And of course, I ate lots, and lots, and lots of good food.

India Gate, in New Delhi.

I could easily write a book on the things I loved eating, and post pictures of some of them.  Unfortunately my vanity is going to prevent most of that, because it was summer in India and I was a beautiful, sticky shade of red for most of it.  I ate chicken tikka wrapped in the most tender flatbread I have ever witnessed; I would go back to India just to eat it once more.  They are called roomali roti, which captures some of the poetry that I love about Hindi.  Roomali is a handkerchief (a lady’s handkerchief) and this roti was like the embodiment of a fine square of silk that tears gently open at the touch of your teeth, except tastier.  Or the cold coffee in recycled glass bottles for fifty cents that chases the sweat from your brow for just a moment and allows you to breathe deep and plunge back into the market, amidst the samosa sellers and bunnies for sale.  Oh, and Indian goat.  You can’t find it here, so I won’t go into it, for fear of sending myself back into a funk.

We ate ear upon ear of corn, roasted. Then you rub it with a half lemon dipped in spicy salt. Oh man, so good.

But the best food in India came from no stall, no restaurant..  It came from the little, busy kitchen of Leela aunty, Rubai’s aunt we stayed with in Noida, a suburb of Delhi.  I could write three books about the wonder of her cooking.  She thought it was no big deal, but her cast off leftovers put to shame anything I spend a week planning and executing.  I could gain a hundred pounds if I were to live with her for a few months, but I would be an ecstatic blob.  Everything she touches has such savor…now I’m her-homesick.  Anyways.  Back to the point.

I got a few recipes off of Leela aunty, which was difficult, as she has cooked so well for so long that her recipes are all internalized.  So she handed over the cookbook that came with her pressure cooker – where she started many years ago.  Following please find the recipe for rajma, or kidney beans.  It’s a basic staple that I like to eat like I did so often: with chaval (rice) and Coke in a steel glass.  Unfortunately I have no steel glasses, so I often beg Meenakshi’s mother to make it for me at their house and then we watch a Bollywood and I pretend that I’m not a white girl from Washington, and that John Abraham will come save me from an arranged marriage.   Again, back to the point.

Rajma chaval!