Hikers’ herbs

I went hiking a few weeks ago, leaving the protection of the city in Spain for the very first time.  The father of a friend of mine organized a nature photography hike for the town.  You can see his HD nature videos on youtube (here is one of the more serene examples and here one of the more disturbing). But now, I have seen the sierra, and it was worth it.

Spiky and poky, but totally worth it.  It seems that everywhere is a plant waiting to taste your blood, but just as a way of saying hey, hi!  Then you realize how beautiful everything is, in a dusky, muted green and vibrant deep blues.  The sierra is completely opposite in composition and color of the Pacific Northwest.  There is more dusty brown, the pines are shaped more like lollipops that Christmas trees, and the trees are sparse and solitary.  Without the horde-like nature of Northwest evergreens and it’s shockingly dark, saturated colors, ‘nature’ feels a lot more open and arid.  There is a lot more shrubbery and scrub, and the scent is completely different, lacking the resin and scent of heavy moisture I’m more accustomed to.

But then you catch a whiff of what I think is one of the more surprising gifts of the sierra: wild herbs.

¡Jamón!

One of the most compelling reasons for my return to Spain would be jamón.  Jamón, simply translated, is Spanish for ham.  But where we may differentiate between lunchmeat ham and a baking ham, with further adjectives like Virgina ham or spiral cut, etc, etc, Spain doesn’t mess around. Yes, you can divide ham into those same two categories (jamón york o una pierna de cerdo), but overshadowing them by far is a third category: cured ham or jamón serrano.  Most Americans have never had the luck to try jamón serrano, though this may be changing with Spanish cuisines infiltration of the hoity-toity world palate. But most of us are familiar with prosciutto, the Italian cured ham.  This makes sense, given the heavy and heaven-sent influence of Italian immigrants on American culture, especially in the east.  But sorry, jamón is way, way better.

A Very Expat Thanksgiving

Technically, I am not an expatriate.  But I thought it was a catchy title.  I wasn’t really planning to write about this adventure as the food is rather traditional and there are a bajillion and one recipes out there.  Also, I was too damn busy cooking to bother to take pictures.  But my friend Victoria requested a play-by-play of some of the hiccups that I ran into,  so this is for her.

This Thanksgiving was important to me.  It was my very first Thanksgiving pretending to be an adult – as I live many thousands of miles away from all of my family, I could not simply show up to my mother’s house and throw together a pie, then repeat the same process at my father’s place.  Also, I don’t have my beautiful, beautiful Emile Henri matchy matchy ceramic pie pans here.  Though I was so grief-stricken at the thought of leaving them that I almost shoved one into my carry-on.  Then I picked up the carry-on and opted for tin. I still have recurring pangs of loss. At least I can visit with my family through webcam.  A pie plate has very little to say.

Anyways.  I love Thanksgiving, and I wasn’t going to let my emotional pie pan baggage or complete lack of turkey experience stop me from making something happen.  My group of friends here has met many different Americans through a conversation exchange program (including me), but they have never celebrated a Thanksgiving, most likely because students living with a host-family don’t have free reign of the kitchen, and American movies and TV are always telling us that we will fail.  Hilariously, but we will fail.  I did save a Domino’s coupon for this very reason.  I at least have the upper hand in that I have prepared every dish at least once, minus having full command of the turkey.  I was feeling great, until I recalculated the guest list.  We would be twelve.  And nine of those would be a group of men with black holes for stomachs.  And the challenge was set.

In the end, I set Día de Acción de Gracias for the Saturday before, because one of our roommates is moving to Argentina and had no time during the actual Thanksgiving weekend.  I picked a Saturday because you don’t get a federal American holiday off when you are living in Spain, so I gave myself the lead time to prep the feast properly, especially since I don’t have classes on Friday.

Our planned Thanksgiving menu:

4 chickens

Green beans with onion, bacon, and chopped almonds,

Oven-roasted carrots

Stuffing

Cranberry sauce

Mashed potatoes with parmesan

Gravy

2 apple pies

Pumpkin pie

Whipped cream

Easy as pie was never more difficult

It can be hard sometimes as an American in Spain to describe what exactly is ‘American food’.  Everyone volunteers hamburgers and expensive lattes, fried chicken and peanut butter.  Yes, I guess.  I am caving to this image in a way, because next week my conversation partner is coming over for ‘an American dinner’ and he has asked me if I can make chicken like KFC.   So sure enough, fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy is the order of the night – complete with caveat that not it won’t be KFC as I don’t really have the right machinery or chemicals.  I’m slightly ashamed, but it is what he wants to eat, so… I have a week to figure out how to keep the damn batter on the chicken – mine always falls off.  At least I bake my chicken so I won’t have to listen to an hour about how unhealthy our food is – only a half hour, probably.

The problem is that my favorite thing about American food is the open-armed thievery from other cultures.  My friends have started showing me around the city to watch me ‘flipar’ – flip out, absorbed into Spanish.  When my friend, Sergio, took me to a Chinese grocery squirreled away in a side street in downtown Sevilla, me flipé, sí.  (See the comments section for the location).  My reaction, faced with the wall of hoisin sauce, Sriracha, and tofu in cans was to beam from ear to ear and say, “I feel as if I’m back in my own country.”  His response was “… I didn’t know you were from China.”  But the thing is that Seattle, like many other cities in the United States, is chock full of small and gigantic ethnic grocery stores and restaurants.  We are addicted to diversity of flavor.  So when I kept wandering around and found not only my favorite curries and frozen hum bao but my favorite brands, I wasn’t seduced by the foreign nature of the labels and products but soothed by a feeling of homecoming.  When I ran across a halal butcher by accident in a residential neighborhood (Los Remedios) on the way to shoot pool, I don’t know who was happier when I asked if they had goat meat – me or the butcher urging me to write down the name of the street and come back in a day or two.

Another good friend, Jose, teased me for the rest of the night, especially since we went out for dinner at a Mexican restaurant (at midnight, of course), but he can be forgiven, as he is going to find me nigiri sushi somewhere in this city.  After a month, month and a half of living with me, my Spanish friends now have cottoned on to my very American love of the food of other cultures.  We have a date set up soon to make honey walnut prawns and beef with broccoli. But there were still murmurs of what exactly America itself was bringing to the table.  So I decided to answer the quiet question with the most patriotic thing I could think of – apple pie.

My friends were excited – apple pie!  Like from that movie!  With the guy!  And he – well, you know.  I sighed and said yes.  But there will be no shenanigans with this pie, so stop that line of thought right now.  And so, I began the quest to make an apple pie in Spain.

Fácil es mejor

Last summer, the food trend seemed to Spain – Spanish food hit Gourmet magazine (RIP), the Food Network, food blogs the internet over, you name it.  Now I wonder if it really was in, or I was searching desperately for traces of Spain’s food heritage here in the US.  I had just gotten back from a study abroad in Seville and I was in the throes of cultural readjustment – throwing my own Spanish food party helped, but I was still on the lookout for reasons to brag about Spain that didn’t make me look like a tool caught up in my own personal experiences (which I was), but instead a finger-on-the-pulse, hip foodie.

I’ve gotten over that particular obsession, though every time I see a hint of Spanish food culture, I still get the warm fuzzies, though

Illegally delicious.

I’ve done better at keeping them on the downlow.  Some examples: finding membrillo at Whole Foods, finding real, hard cured Spanish chorizo at DeLaurenti’s Deli at Pike Place Market, drinking cheap bottles of Rioja instead of studying for finals… These are manageable ways to work Spain into my diet without smuggling

cured ham in my suitcase or begging friends abroad to bring me Lemon Fanta.  Well, I’ve done those things, too.

But anyways.  When I was in Spain, I managed to pick up a few recipes.  Tortilla española, garbanzos, and huevo al plato.

Cazuelas

Huevo al plato is literally an egg on a plate.  My host father would make it for me for lunch in the wintertime, cooked in a cazuela, or indestructible glazed terra cotta bowl/plate.  These things happily troop from on top of the stove burner, into the oven, then into the dish washer afterwards.  No problem.  Lucky me got two of them as a birthday gift a few days before I left Seville.

I used to think that a huevo al plato was this specific dish that Jairo would plunk down on the table in front of me with fresh bread, as I toasted my feet on the space heater and wished for the rain to stop so I could get to class dry.  But Doña Margarita of my Spanish cookbook has informed me that in fact huevo al plato refers to the way it’s served – an individual egg in a cazuela.  This now seems very, very obvious to me.  But I share my shortcomings with you so that you don’t feel alone when those kitchen duh moments trickle in shamefully.  If you poke around on the internet, cookbooks, or Spain, you’ll find lots of variations on this theme, especially in tapas restaurants.

You won’t find a huevo al plato in Gourmet magazine (if it were still running) or as the main dish of a ritzy chef, but I love it because it’s easy.  Ridiculously so.  You don’t need a cazuela to make it – just use a small frying pan and slide the mess onto a normal plate and dig on in.

Jairo’s Easy  Peasy Huevo al Plato

Ay, ¡qué buena pinta!

In return for the fabulous Sri Lankan Feast, Gabrielle and I invited Michelle and her sister Andrea over for dinner, as well as our friend Brianna (I say our friend, but really these are Gabrielle’s friends who I have slowly usurped).  I knew it would be difficult to compete, but I was also excited because Michelle and Andrea are meat eaters (Gabrielle and Brianna not so much), so I decided to make up what I’ve been wanting to eat myself: garbanzos.

Tasty face!

A little taste of Spain

I can’t claim to have invented it, nor really spent much time throwing it together, but this simple dish is one of the tastes I have most missed from my short time in Spain: bread, cheese, and membrillo.

Membrillo is something that I didn’t know quite what it was, but I knew I liked it, and that was enough.  What I knew then: it was some kind of thickened fruit paste that put me in the mind of the texture of high quality fruit leather if you stopped short of fully drying it out; it had the full flavor of a fruit concentrate and a slightly gritty texture that lent it enough interest to keep me from thinking I was eating baby food.  I had thought that maybe it was apricot, because the membrillo I got in Santiago de Compostela* was a kind of glowing amber, but the flavor was not quite right; I put it down to really good, Spanish apricots.