The late, late dinner party

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 7

Alec and I wanted to have Manuel (my mentor, and the person who made our posts here happen) to dinner with his wife, Emma.  He has done a tremendous amount for me, and for us, and is also a delightful person.  I asked Manuel if we should invite anyone else and he suggested one of the top guns at the university, Jordi, who Alec and I had met with and liked.  I knew all of their schedules would be tougher than ours, so I asked them to give us a couple of dates that would work.

Manuel’s assistant emailed me to tell me that the 15^th would be the day---at 9:30 pm!  Perhaps this is the time to tell you about eating hours and habits in Spain, and let’s just say that Spain and I don’t exactly see eye to eye on this one.  Folks tend not to eat much before they leave the house in the morning—maybe a coffee and some bread.  Then around 10 or 11, they have a little something—a bocadillo, perhaps.  No one, and I mean no one, eats lunch before 1:30 pm.  The real lunch “hour” is 2 – 4 pm.  It’s so serious here that you don’t even have to feed your parking meter between 2 and 4, and most restaurants don’t open until 1:30.  Many businesses close during these hours also.  So much for running errands during lunch time—you are supposed to stop and eat.  And not at your desk.  I was talking to one of the graduate students one day and the topic of lunch came up.  “I heard,” she said, “that some people in the states sit at their desks and work while they eat.  Is it true?”  “Yes,” I told her, “It is.”  And I have eaten more lunches at my desk, wolfing down the food and hardly tasting it, than I care to admit.

Lunch is a real meal.  In fact, nearly all restaurants serve a “menu” at lunch time, which consists of three courses for a set price and is a much better deal, price-wise, than ordering a la carte.  I once walked into the university cafeteria to get some lunch at 1 pm.  It was open, but the lunch ladies had to cart stuff out for me, and I was the only person in the entire place until I left at 1:40, when folks were beginning to trickle in.

Tapas are for after work time, around 7 or 8 pm.  But if you are like me and you want to eat dinner before your sleepy head is nodding into your plate, tapas it is.  Most places don’t open for dinner until 9, and if you actually show up at 9, you feel like you’re a senior citizen showing up for the early bird special.

All of which begins to explain how we ended up having a dinner party last night that began very late.  In fact, Manuel poked his head into my office on Thursday and said, “Lisa, I’m sorry, but we need to change the time for the dinner.”  I had been worried about the lateness of the hour and was relieved, assuming that he wanted to move it earlier.  Wrong again.  “Let’s do it at 10,” he said.  “I need to be at an event downtown, and I’m sure I can get to your home by 10.”  “Are you kidding?” I said.  “Okay, but I might be in my pajamas, and the kids will definitely be asleep.” “Then I will wake them up!” he said.  And so 10 pm it was.

We decided to cook from our new favorite, Spanish cookbook (The New Spanish Table, if you are new to this blog).  Alec spent the morning shopping at the market.  Friday morning the market is pretty empty, which would seem to make it a good time to shop.  However, according to Alec, everyone there is an elderly woman, and they are not fast shoppers.  Which brings me to another point about local culture.  When it is your turn at the cheese counter, the post office, the bank, it is your turn.  You might take a half hour asking questions and getting served as the line behind you grows longer and longer, but no one seems to notice.  The person serving you will take as long as you need and never, ever appear impatient.  It is as though no one exists for the server except the person being served.  The server does not even make eye contact with anyone else in line.  No one in the line behind you will grown or plead that they only have a really quick question.  It’s really striking.  I found this out myself the other day when I arrived at a yoga studio 5 minutes before class started and needed to pay.  There was one woman at the counter, and one woman in front of me in line.  She was interested in perhaps joining the studio, and asked questions, filled out forms, looked at brochures.  I stood behind trying to practice breathing in and out and suppressing my urge to ask if I could just pay for the class.  “I’m not in New York City,” I told myself.  “Calm down.”  It didn’t really work.  Finally the woman in front of me turned to me and asked, “Are you in a hurry?”  Which gave me the opening to ask if she would mind terribly if I quickly paid. 

Suffice it to say that Alec was gone more than three hours, but at least he enjoys that kind of thing.  He had gotten up before 5 am to take Darryl and Matt to the airport, so he caught a nap in the afternoon while I picked up the kids and took them on a playdate.

By the time we got home, he was in heavy duty prep mode.  Given the late hour for the dinner, we decided not to start with a lot of heavy cheese.  Instead we served some olives and pistachios, and took advantage of the fact that it’s mushroom season to make one appetizer.  It’s a Catalan dish that consists of wild mushrooms (we had three kinds), sautéed with some garlic and finely chopped jamon serano—we made a nice dent in my birthday pig leg with that dish.  You serve the mushrooms on toasted country bread with a little dollop of aioli (the Catalans put aioli on everything) on top.  I couldn’t stop eating them they were so good.

Then we moved to the table for a first course of chard and baby carrots, cooked with chile and smoked sweet paprika, over rice.  Very subtle but nicely spiced.  Spanish food is much less spicy than you might think.  Alec cooked a Basque merluza dish (merluza is hake in the US) with green sauce and served it with roasted potatoes for the main course.  He had made the merluza once before and it totally rocked.  This time, he cooked it in our new cazuela—a large earthenware pot that you can put on the stove or in the oven.  We had bought in last weekend in Cadaques, and the first thing we had to do was to soak it for 24 hours.  It’s pretty big, so it spent an entire day and night in our bathtub.  Alec was not so happy with its performance last night—he could not get it hot enough to get a crust on the fish, but no one noticed the missing crust and it was absolutely delicious.  For dessert, I made the fig tart again.  I think it will be one of those things I make whenever I can get good figs—like the recipe I use for peach blueberry cake in the summer.  It’s that good.

We kept the kids up, which they thought was terrific and which made Manuel happy.  Over dinner we talked about everything you’re not supposed to discuss—religion, politics, money.   We spoke Spanish the entire evening, which was good for me although I missed some of the nuances of the conversation and had to ask for translations of some words, like pederasta translated (it means pedophile).  Round about 2 am everyone decided it was time to go home—although Manuel, who had been working all day and given a talk in the evening, was fresh as a daisy while I was seriously considering putting toothpicks in my eyelids to keep them open.  We called a taxi for Manuel and Emma, and Jordi hopped on his scooter.   Alec and I cleaned up enough to not dread what it would mean to face it in the morning, and managed to stay in bed until nearly 9.  We’re all a little ragged today, but what’s a little tiredness in the grand scheme of things?

Photo of the Day

...notice the trail of snail goo on the palm of her hand. 

Fig Frenzy!

Human Highlighter Suit Tally:  7

Figs are the most fragile of fruits.  And, when at their best, incomparable.  But the season is short, and these fruits seem to suffer more than others from mass production and long travel times.  To experience fig perfection, you must eat them in season and perfectly ripe.  And it seems as if there are about 5 minutes in each fig´s life when it is perfect.  When eaten under other conditions, figs are often bland, mushy and flavourless.

Fig season is at its peak in Barcelona, and I’ve never had such good ones.  I´ve been eating them for a few weeks now—mostly just popping them into my mouth, but also in salads, with cheese, on my morning yogurt.  But I can tell that the bounty will not last much longer, and I feel the need to exhaust my appetite so that I will be sated until next fall. I love figs, so I´ve gone a bit overboard this week.  I started my fig marathon with a tart.  The crust has a bit of rosemary in it, which balances the sweetness of the fruit. The recipe, which you can find at Epicurious (search for fresh fig tart with rosemary cornmeal crust and lemon mascarpone cream), says to eat the tart as soon as it is assembled.  We ate half of it after dinner, and I thought it might not keep well and that perhaps I should give the rest to my neighbour Francesca.  But it got late, so we stuck it in the fridge and it was delicious the next morning for breakfast.

I found pomegranates in the market, so remade the salad that contains roasted figs, pine nuts, cabrales cheese (a Spanish blue), and pomegranate.  It was delicious without the pomegranates but even better with.

Next I made a pizza with figs, jamon iberico, cabrales, balsamic and arugula. You bake the whole thing and then mound the dressed arugula on top.  It was like pizza and salad all in one—really fresh and rich all at the same time.  The perfect lunch.

And, I’m also keeping a few extras around, just to pop in my mouth on my way through the kitchen.  Too good.

Photo of the Day

Our ship has come in!

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 7!

… and with it, all 21 of our boxes.  They were not supposed to arrive until tomorrow and, given how much longer it has taken until now, I was not holding my breath. The kids were so excited, knowing the boxes were on their way, that we had made a countdown chart for them to mark off the days.  But I had made it clear that the 13^th was the day our boxes were supposed to arrive—not the day they would arrive.

Today was a national holiday, so we were off at the Miro museum (great Pipilotti Rist show there that the kids went crazy for) when Alec’s phone rang.  It was the truck driver, asking if it would be okay if they brought the boxes today instead of tomorrow.  Was he kidding?  Of course we said yes.  We arranged for a delivery at 6:30 pm, and we emerged from the train right about that time.  There, parked right in front of the train station, was an enormous truck—an eighteen wheeler really. 

Now, we had told the folks at the shipping place that there was no way a huge truck would be able to navigate the streets up to our house.  But the two guys who showed up with the truck were not the least bit fazed.  There are two flights of outdoor stairs up from the train station to our street, and these guys just carried all 21 boxes up those stairs and into our building.  And it was their fifth delivery of the day.

The moving guys were sweating up a storm by the time they were finished.  I offered them a drink and the guy who seemed to be in charge, who was a bit on the heavy side, said (in a very thick British accent):  “No thanks, mate.  I’ve just had me four donuts and a red bull.”  I guess that’s what it takes.

The kids were overjoyed to get their toy box—Milo is sleeping with his monkey family, and C.C. is tucked under the quilt I made her with her dinosaurs.  And although I was worried about the mountain the boxes would create in our place, it’s not so bad.  Not nearly as overwhelming as I expected.  Not that we’ve begun to unpack anything…

Photos of the Day

Cadaques, to Figueres, and back home

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 7!

We spent the day at Cap de Creus, which is the part of Spain that sticks out farthest into the sea.  Given that Cap de Crues is the tip of a Peninsula, and that Spain/Portugal is a peninsula, we realized that, as we stood on those rocks, we were standing on a peninsula on a peninsula… on a peninsula. 

The weather reports called for a major storm in Cadaques on Saturday night.  When we got back to Cadaques in the afternoon, folks were pulling their boats out of the water, and Isabel asked us to move the plants down from the ledge onto the terrace.  We were ready and, frankly, I like a good storm.  I was looking forward to it.  The wind kicked up again, but we went to bed with no sign of rain.  I woke early to the sound of wind and rain falling on the roof—I love being in bed and listening to the rain.  But the Spanish version of a Nor’easter, it was not.  It stopped by the time we needed to load up the car and head out of dodge.

Our friends Darryl and Matt would be arriving in Barcelona on Sunday evening, and we wanted to stop in Figueres to visit the Dali museum on the way home, so we needed to get a relatively early start.  Well, early by our standards, which was about 11 am. 

Of course, as soon as we found a parking spot, several blocks from the Dali museum, it began to pour.  We had one umbrella and two rain jackets for the four of us, so we were basically drenched by the time we got to the museum and faced a thirty minute line to get in.  I have little patience for lines, and even less for crowds, but we stuck it out, knowing that we might never pass that way again.  Dali created the museum out of an old theater after he left his home in Port Lligat (right next to Cadaques) following the death of his wife and muse, Gala.  The roof of the entire building is adorned with giant egg-shaped sculptures and golden statues of women in a range of poses, appearing as if they are about to dive off of the building.

The interior, because Dali created it, is basically a visual autobiography of the artist—a tour of his mind, if you will, which, n my opinion, is a rather freaky place to be.  All of the dripping clocks and elephants on stilts made the place pretty accessible to the kids, but given that it was nearly as crowded as Times Square on New Year’s Even, we had pretty much had enough by the time we’d been there an hour.  Which was fine, because that was about all we had.  I will say this—although I’m not a huge Dali fan, I came away impressed by the range of styles in which he worked.

The kids were off today and will be off again tomorrow.  You have to love the way the Spanish do holidays.  Here’s how it works:  tomorrow, Tuesday is a holiday—La Hispanidad, which is actually the Spanish version of Columbus Day.  Whereas in the US we’d just move the holiday to Monday and create a three day weekend (which I’m sure the Spanish find strange), the Spanish celebrate it on the actual date, October 12^th. But it doesn’t make much sense to go to work on Monday and then have Tuesday off, so folks are given Monday off, too.  It’s called a puente, or bridge.  And to sweeten the pot even further, the kids’ school gave them off on Friday in order to have a professional development day for the teachers.  And voila—a one day holiday becomes a five day weekend.  I’m not complaining, and neither are the kids.

So Darryl and Matt arrived yesterday evening, and we eased into the day today, sitting around in our pajamas for hours and drinking coffee while the kids made collages and dinosaur videos.   We finally left the house at about 1 pm to stock up at the market, came home with our booty and made some sandwiches, and then took the bus up to Parc Guell in the late afternoon.  It’s a tourist magnet, but much more sane in October than in August, the last time I was there.  It’s a magical place.

Photos of the Day

Note that Milo has accessorized his highlighter suit with his green crocs, as well as a lizard hat.

C.C.'s Video of the Week