A Better Bocadillo?

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 9!

After skyping our families and eating hamburgers for dinner on Thanksgiving, I went out to meet a woman Alec’s cousin Lisa wanted me to meet.  Graciela was born in Argentina, raised in Spain, and has lived in England, the Netherlands, and Italy.  She got her PhD in sociology in Italy and then became an academic.  But she got bored after awhile and wanted to return to Spain, so she moved to Barcelona, where her brother lives, and opened a fresh pasta shop with her sister-in-law last winter.  There is something innately fascinating to me about someone who invests all of that time in getting a PhD, becomes an academic—and likes it—and one day simply moves on.  She’s continued to do some writing, and just published a book about organ donation.  Lisa’s husband Jaume, who is an architect, designed the shop, which is called Taller de Pasta.  It is gorgeous—white marble, butcher block counters, and chrome—and smells like heaven.  Lisa and I met her there shortly before the shop closed at 9 pm on and spent a couple of pleasant hours over beers at a bar down the street called Dow Jones.

When I arrived back home just before midnight, the lights were all on and laundry was strewn about in various stages of clean-and dirti-ness.  I think I’ve made it clear already that Alec, for the most part, does not do laundry.  Certainly not late at night.  Turns out Milo had a bad reaction to the medication he got for his throat infection, and projectile vomited all over his room.  Alec was in the process of washing pajamas, sheets, mattress pad, bedspread, rug…  Milo was doing better by the time I returned home, but wide awake, so I changed places with Alec and lay with him until about 2 am, when he finally fell asleep. The night was too short.

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Despite my overall—and I think temporary—fatigue with Spanish food, this week I’ve had a craving for jamon to beat the band.  I think it all started in my Spanish class.  We were talking about how to say “acorn”—the word is bellota—which of course led to jamon because the pata negra, the best pig for ham, eats only acorns.  This diet lends a nutty richness to the meat.  It is indescribably good.

I went to the Hospital Sant Pau tour on Thursday, which ran longer than I expected, so I had to hurry to get to my next appointment.  I never, ever skip a meal.  I was hungy, and I wanted jamon.  On my way to the metro, I ducked into a nondescript little bakery and asked if they had a bocadillo with jamon iberico.  The woman said she could make me one right then and there.  I took it out on the street and simply could not wait to get to my office to eat it.  My mouth was watering with the mere thought of it sitting there in my bag.  So I unwrapped it and began to eat it as I walked.  Eating on the street is simply not done in Barcelona, so I avoided all eye contact and focused on how good the jamon tasted.  The sandwich embodied simple perfection.  Fresh crusty bread smeared with tomato, and salty, rich ham.  That’s all.  No lettuce, mayo, mustard, cheese.  Bocadillos here consist of a baguette type of bread, split and with something in the middle—meat, cheese, tortilla, but never more than one of those things.  In fact, I’d never had one with the tomato. To me, it was genius. This sandwich hit the spot like you cannot imagine.

The next day—Friday—I went to the market to buy the fixings for our Thanksgiving feast.  I’ll tell you one thing—it’s a hell of a lot different buying supplies for two people (the kids won’t eat most of what we cook) than it is buying for twenty.  Which bodes well for the cooking and clean up as well.  I got our turkey from Mari, the chicken lady (see below) and decided to get some jamon to take home from Henrik, our deli man. 

Jamon comes in a range of grades, for a corresponding range of prices.  I decided that, if I was to embark on a jamon journey, I’d start near the bottom and bought a quarter kilo of pernil Salamanca, sliced.  I had already bought tomatoes, and stocked up on baguettes—for stuffing and sandwiches from Paul, the bakery where we buy bread.  Paul is a French bakery. The brioche and croissants are buttery, and the baguettes are crisp and clean.  I have not been too impressed with Spanish bread.  I’ve been told that many bakeries use lard in their bread and this makes sense to me because sometimes you get some bread that tastes, well… it tastes a bit porky.  I love pork, but I do not want my bread to taste of it.

When I got home, I checked the New Spanish Table to see how Von Bremzen makes her tomato bread, and I used her formula.  Split the baguette, drizzle with good olive oil and rub with garlic.  Put it under the broiler until it starts to get toasty.  Take it out, and rub/squeeze a halved tomato—it needs to be ripe and juicy—on each side.  On top of one side I layered several slices of my jamon, topped it with the other side, and sat down at the kitchen table.  I am hesitant to put this in writing, but I think I’ve improved on a classic.  Have you ever seen that Bobby Flay show called Throw Down in which he travels around the country taking on the best of the classic food makers?  Muffalettas in New Orleans, chicken and waffles in Harlem, barbecue in Texas?  I didn’t do much to this humble bocadillo, but it rocked.

Mari with our turkey.  Below, mushrooms "without worms, without sand."  Just how I like them!

Lousy

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 9

Last week our kids’ school emailed us a letter with the following subject line:  “Kindergarten Lice/Piojos.”  Well, this wasn’t the first I’d heard about lice at the school, and not only in kindergarten.  I knew of 1^st and 2^nd grade cases as well, which means it’s probably a downright infestation.  As with mice, if you see one, you know there are more where he came from.

As I read the email sitting at the dining room table, I began to sputter, to no one in particular: “They want us to check our kids ourselves!  Isn’t that what they have a nurse for?  Isn’t this why we are paying private school tuition?  Why don’t they check the kids at school?”  C.C., who was in the middle of playing a game with Milo, said, “I got checked in my classroom.”  “Me, too,”  Milo put in.  “You did?  Did they find anything?  Why didn’t you tell me?”  My head started to itch.

Alec and I do not conform to many gender stereotypes, but when it comes to rodents and parasites that live on your body, I turn into a total girl.  I am the one shrieking on top of the bed, hyperventilating and scratching in odd places.  So of course, I delegated lice duty to Alec.  He had, after all, worked for several summers as a camp counselor and so had some relevant experience. 

Two of my friend Karen’s kids have had it this year already.  It’s a real pain in the neck if you get them.  You have to wash all of the linens and the kids’ stuffed animals in hot water, and keep combing and combing for the nits—which are the lice eggs. 

Being away for the whole bedbug drama in New York City had made me feel as if I’d gotten over, and now this.

Now, I know lice are common.   I have received similar letters from my kids’ schools—public and private—in Brooklyn.  But in Brooklyn everyone just takes their kid to Abigail Rosenfeld, aka “the Lice Lady,” and she takes care of it. There is no Lice Lady in Barcelona.  It’s every parent for herself.

“We need one of those special combs,” I told Alec.  He came home with the special comb and some spray stuff called Repelice.  Alec is convinced that it’s snake oil but bought it to get me to pipe down.

That night, everyone got a hair wash, after which Alec inspected us all with the comb.  “Are you sure you know what you’re looking for?” I ask.  “I’m going to look on the internet to make sure you know what they look like.”  I move toward my laptop, but Alec stops me.  “Don’t do it,” he says.  “You’ll just get grossed out with those pictures.   Trust me.”  I heed his advice, imagining my dreamspace filled with giant lice. 

“Did you ever think about the word ‘lousy’?” I asked him.  “It comes from being full of lice.”

“Huh. Are you sure?”

I do a quick search on google.  Here’s what podictionary.com says:

“Originally in 1377 something that was lousy was infested with lice.  The word lice in turn comes from Old English and can be found way back to circa 725.” 

So things have been lousy for a very long time.  And the word “louse”?  Dictionary.com gives the slang definition as:  “a contemptible person, especially an unethical one.”

These are creatures you do not want living on your body.

Even nitpicker, the person who tries to rid you of the lice, has a negative connotation:  “someone who makes small and unjustified criticisms.”

One day last week I brought the kids to the school library after school for some extra books.  As we descended the stairs from the library floor to the ground floor, we could see down to the nurse’s little cubicle.  She was cleaning a big bowl of lice combs.  “Look!”  C.C. cried out.  “There are the nitpickers!”  Eew.

Humans have the unfortunate distinction of hosting two different kinds of lice—head lice and pubic lice.  This is because we have two entirely separate hairy zones.  Take that fact to your next cocktail party, especially if you are near the shrimp table, and you are sure to get clear access to all the shrimp you can eat.

In the end, we all came out clean.  We sprayed the kids’ hair with Repelice the next morning before school and it made their hair look greasy and stringy, as though we hadn’t washed them for a week.  I’ll take the tradeoff, if it works. 

Photo of the Day

Not quite Thanksgiving

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 9

I woke up this morning and thought about all of the turkeys sitting in all of the refrigerators back home in the US.  By now they are probably getting stuffed and put into ovens.  I miss the smell of morning sticky buns, butter, sage, and cooking meat.  Normally Alec and I cook for a large and fluid group of friends and family in Asbury Park on this day.  I love Thanksgiving.  In fact, it’s my favorite holiday.  No gifts to buy, no religion that includes some and excludes others.  Just gratitude and good food.  What could be better?

As the holiday approached us here in Barcelona, we weren’t sure what to do.  The kids have school, and our offices were open.  I didn’t feel up to hosting a large dinner.  Somehow the things that seem easy back home—throwing a child’s birthday party, cooking Thanksgiving dinner—still feel a little overwhelming here.  Alec and I talked about it and asked the kids what they thought.  They still have fuzzy concepts of time, and didn’t seem to feel strongly one way or the other.  “Maybe we should just skip it,” I said.  “Or maybe someone will invite us.” But then, as the holiday approached, I began to feel more and more that I wanted to celebrate it, even in a scaled down way.  I told Alec, and he felt fine with it.  We asked our chicken lady, Mari, if she could get us a turkey.  She can.  We thought about whether to invite anyone, and decided to invite the other two families at the university who are here for a year—one American family, and one British.  Turns out they can’t come.

But no matter.  We’ll be cooking our bird on Sunday, along with a local wild mushroom stuffing, green beans with walnuts and dried cherries, and potatoes Anna, which I have not made in years but have had a hankering for lately.  I think I’ll make a pear ginger crisp for dessert.  It’s impossible to find fresh cranberries here.  I thought about smuggling some in on my way back from the states last month, but figured I’d surely get busted by one of those suitcase sniffing beagles the Department of Agriculture uses (see below).  But last week, during my brownie mix quest, I found some cans of Ocean Spray cranberries—sauce AND jelly—at the Deli Shop.  So I picked up a can of the sauce.  It’ll be good on leftover turkey sandwiches.  And it’s a good thing I bought it when I saw it, because one of the PTA ladies told me she went this week, and it was all gone. So the Brownie Debacle was good for something.

Meanwhile, young Milo is down for the count.  Alec picked him up from school yesterday and he did not want to go to soccer.  Milo always wants to go to soccer.  He fell asleep in the car and, excepting the transfer to his bed and our waking him up to have some Tylenol and get his PJs on before we went to bed, he slept until 7 am today.  I spent 3 hours with him today at the clinic, waiting for doctors and test results.  They tested his blood for mono, and he was a real trooper when they stuck that needle into him.  Luckily, the test was negative, but he does have a throat and ear infection.  He went right to bed and fell asleep almost two hours ago.  Hopefully he will be right as rain by the time our turkey is cooked, on Sunday.

I miss my family today, all of whom are gathered at Jody, Matt and Zadie’s house.  I know it will be full of good smells and tasty food, and a lot of love.  Hoping we are all together next year!

 

Photos of the Day

My new look

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 9

The best thing about today was that I got to wear a hard hat.  And a bright orange vest.  I don’t know about you, but I find that fancy headgear enhances almost any experience. 

A few weeks ago, I joined a group called the Barcelona Women’s Network.  BWN is a group of over 250 women from more than 30 countries.  They organize monthly excursions and coffee mornings and, like most women’s groups, engage in good works.  The only common denominator is that everyone there speaks English or wants to.  Now, I am typically more of a lone wolf than a joiner, but I had heard good things about this group and wanted to expand the group of people I know beyond the kids’ school and the university.  So I went to a coffee morning and checked it out.  It took place in a very large room at the top of the Institute for North American Studies and, when I opened the door, I was almost bowled over by the noise of more than a hundred women of all ages, chatting away.  They had brought baked goods, of course.  Despite my initial paralysis, I was hustled into the room and cheerfully welcomed by several nicely dressed mother hen types.  It had a bit of a junior league feel to it, but I decided to stick it out and meet three new people.  One, whose name I cannot remember, was French but moved to Barcelona many years ago after marrying a Spaniard.  I met Francesca, a spunky woman in her 70s, at the pastry table.  We were both about to take the last item on a plate.  I told her to go ahead and eat it, but she refused, demanding that we play Rock, Paper, Scissors instead to determine who would get the last pastry.  I won.  I liked Francesca immediately.  I think we could be buddies.

And then, in the sea of sweater sets and tasteful scarves, I spied a woman with dyed red hair, an embroidered denim skirt and funky jewelry.   She looked like someone I might see in Prospect Heights, in Brooklyn.  I made a beeline and introduced myself.  Isabela, who is British and has lived here for about eight years, is in the middle of a 3 year program in which she is learning to analyze people’s feet to determine what’s wrong with them.  She needs practice, she told me, and asked me if I’d like a foot analysis some time.  Then the ladies in charge asked us all to sit down and listen to a presentation.  “Here comes the boring part,” Isabela said, rolling her eyes, and I felt I might have met a kindred spirit. 

So back to the hard hat.  At the coffee hour, I signed up for a trip to the Hospital Sant Pau.  I’d heard that it was an impressive building and thought it would be a good way for me to meet some new people and also learn more about Barcelona.  Today was the day for the tour.  The buildings, in the upper part of the Eixample, were built just after the turn of the 20^th century.  It is an amazing example of Art Nouveau architecture—a bit chaotic what with the references to nature, the religious symbolism, and the repeated Catalan motifs, but worth seeing.  Originally planned to consist of 48 buildings, 22 were ultimately built. As with most ambitious architectural projects, the money ran out before the plans were completed.  The building was designed by Domenich i Muntaner (so that’s where the name of that street comes from!) who also designed the Palau de la Musica Catalana.  It operated as a hospital until about a year ago and is currently being restored—hence, the hard hats.

I’m glad I went.  It’s been one of my goals to get to know this city really well, and I’ve got to get busy!  Isabel the foot analyst also sent me an email.  She wants to meet me for some stand-up comedy.