Some days, you can just have so many things go slightly wrong that they pile up on you and the only option is to sit on the couch, have a beer, and let the day wash away, hoping that the tide will bring an easier, if not brighter tomorrow. Those days which flicker with mild to moderate misfortune, like an aging florescent bulb. This is a meal for one of those days.
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.
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.
I have become one of those bloggers that I don’t entirely approve of – food bloggers who post pictures without a single recipe. When I read multiple posts like that, I get resentful, as if they are flaunting their luck that I cannot share. But really, that’s just jealousy. When they tell me where I can find that food, it’s like having visual yellow pages and my heart warms with travel fantasies.
It’s worse when it’s a recipe of their own making and they maliciously leave out an ingredient or step, like an ancient craftsman guarding a certain glaze or technique. If you are going to have a public blog, why in the world are you not sharing the bounty of good food? It just makes me tend back towards my old grudge against blogs – at best they are clever, informative, and entertaining. At worst they are a socially acceptable form of public, emotional masturbation. Yes, I understand this is hypocritical as I myself have a blog. But I swear that if I have a recipe, I will hand it over. I want to share tasty bits, not use them as culinary ransom for company.
Stepping off soapbox. In apology for recent posts about food you cannot eat, I offer something you can! And it’s Spanish! Double win!
El Serranito
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.
I’ve written before about my disconcerting devotion to jamón, but there is one thing in Spain that I may love even more. And sorry, Sergio Garcia, it is not you. Really, it’s not a concrete object, but a pleasure that is happily as everyday as it is simple: fresh baked bread.
There are breads that I miss from the US, like soft multigrain bread and the rosemary sea salt bread that is one of the best things of living around Seattle. I’m still flip-flopping bread brands to solve the first dilemma and perhaps I will get the guts to try my hand at yeast breads in order to kill the second craving. At least until transporters and replicators fall into my price range.
But it’s ok. Because more than the act of eating bread (of which I am a professional), Spain has captured my heart by putting fresh bread in every ubiquitous mini supermarket, which means that popping into Lidl to buy super cheap Red Bull knockoffs is an opportunity to receive a warm scent-hug of yeasty goodness.
Technically, our apartment is on a rather severe diet that forbids bread. But after only a week, my roommates discovered that Desa on a that diet is a vicious little monster, and bread has come back into my life. But the ease of getting good bread here can actually be kind of dangerous. The other day we stopped to pick up tomatoes for a salad and they had just finished baking up bread for the dinner shoppers. The smell physically enveloped us, these dusky gold baguettes with pale underbellies, crunching softly in promise, still damp from the steam of baking, like the whisper of a lover.
We stared at the bread. We stared at each other. We left with four loaves.
I cannot count the times that Rosa and I have run in the door of the apartment with bread shouting feel it! Feel it! I am privileged to live with someone who is equally excited when the bread makes it home still hot and crunchy. And in a greater stroke of luck, we celebrate this shared passion every Friday morning, with “un señor desayuno”, or a grand breakfast in the Spanish style.
This is an andaluza. They as a Spanish half-baguette and I love them.
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.
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