From the Better Late Than Never Department

Let the record state that Roslyn and Leah managed to snap a three-game winning streak with a convincing euchre defeat before Josh and Roz returned home. I think, as does Roz, that any fool can see that, given enough time, they would most likely have run their record to 106 - 3 before we won again. As soon as we get home this summer and the girls run off their 105 straight wins, I'll post the official results.

Last week, in the time-honored tradition of tired teachers everywhere, the official Spanish department of Catalonia threw a food-from-around-the-world party. Each student was assigned to write a recipe – thereby practicing the imperative case (boil this, chop that) – from his or her homeland, and then bring some of the food itself to class. So it was that I was looking around a room laden with fried rice and meat pies at 10 am one Thursday morning.

Getting to that point wasn’t easy. For people from Japan or France, choosing a food from home is easy. For me, not so much. My initial idea of s’mores was shot down, even after I had commandeered about 8 minutes of class time to explain what marshmallows were, when the teacher realized that cooking them would require an open fire. Peanut butter and jelly was rejected as too embarrassing, and fried clams would have become something of a logistical headache. Finally, after commiserating with people from Canada, England, and Ireland (poutine, cake, Guinness beef stew), we learned that the teachers had neglected to do the required pre-potluck math – had we each made a dish, we would have had 4 to 6 times as much food as we could have eaten – and we would be combined into one, big Anglo-Saxon cooking team. We settled on a very easy flourless chocolate cake that, given that it contains little aside from eggs, butter, and chocolate, is probably French.

What else was there? If you followed the crowds, you would find hand rolls from the Japanese contingent, a duck salad from some French guys, and spring rolls from Thailand. There was less of a wait at Germany’s confused attempt at pad thai and the other “American” entries: spanikopita and salmon with ginger and soy sauce.

The Iranian man who is constantly asking me why I don’t just attack Sharon, who continues to kill women and children, and why I (I am the US, the US is me) insist on working for international Zionism and oil made some sort of meat balls, which went great with the tahini that an Israeli woman had brought in specifically for that purpose. It was not clear whether their entry was the kind of STATEMENT that makes social studies teachers glassy-eyed, or simply a Middle Eastern meat dish that required sauce.

What was clear, however, is that Russian cuisine has a way to go before it can compete with shrimp fried rice, or even the instant chocolate pudding offered by Germany II. “Russian Salad” is a frightening mix of canned meat, peas, and corn in enough mayo to outfit an entire church picnic. It comes out looking like a sort of Jell-O mold, with mayonnaise in place of the Jell-O, and, generally, tends to look just like that after the party is over. Even at noon, when the Austrians had opened the wine and the Brazilians had commandeered the sound system and started dancing, when everything else except for the array of former Soviet bloc meat pies was history, the Russian Salad remained a gleaming dome of dressing.

Many people asked for the chocolate cake recipe, and no one had a thing to say about America one way or the other. This is something we forget, I think, as we grouse about “The French” and think they care what we call pommes frites. The stupid things are from Belgium, anyhow.

Day to day, people just don’t care where we’re from. Ok, fine, the Iranian guy cares. But he also has plenty to say about how there are too many gay people in his chosen profession – makeup artist – and in Spain in general. He thinks it ought to be illegal, like it is in Iran. Is this how we want to be acting?

Most people that want to talk about America don’t think for a second that we should necessarily be lumped in with our leaders. And even if they meet Americans who do agree with Bush, they treat the conversation as just that: a conversation, not a one-last-chance opportunity to get on the right side. Perhaps Europeans have a clearer sense of the dangers involved in being afraid to oppose what your country’s leader is doing, or a sharper ability to tell when patriotism or religion are being used to advance a political agenda that might not make any sense without a grounding in some sort of inexplicable faith.

Do people want all the soldiers home safely, as soon as possible? Of course. Do they like Iraq’s government any more than they like North Korea’s? Of course not. Do they equate it with edging towards the forces of evil to question their President’s motives, given that it is likely that he will profit from ties to corporations that are in line to get contracts to rebuild Iraq after the war? No to that, too. It’s just asking questions, stating opinions, talking about current events.

So maybe there is something to learn from International No Lesson Plan Free Lunch Day, after all, and it certainly isn’t the recipe for Russian Salad. It’s that people were clearly able, on a day in which we had to put a little sign with our home country in front of us on the table, to separate people from ideas and governments and see the world with a little of the nuance that has been so absent from the negotiations and coverage leading up to the war. And, as if that wasn’t enough, France didn’t mind that I swiped their cake recipe.

Ok, like I promised: How To Make Paella

Making paella is actually quite simple. On a scale from cold cereal to goose cassoulet, it rates a strong fried rice. It is reasonably easy to throw together but hard to do very well. First, you need to get yourself to a market to buy the following:
· 8 large shrimp. Frozen are fine. It is easy to buy fresh shrimp in Spain if you are willing to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $35 a pound. You could probably find them in places in the US like the Fulton Fish Market or Louisiana, but it isn’t worth it for this recipe.
· 3 nice fresh squids
· half a pound of mussels
· 2 artichokes
· an onion
· some garlic. Whatever you think you might like. Five cloves?
· a pound of rabbit, bone in, cut up into pieces. Here in Spain all the butchers have this sort of industrial strength scissors bolted to the counter. I’ve never seen such a thing in the US, butthat doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’ve never seen South Dakota, for example, either. Try to get them to not give you gross things like rabbit lungs and eyeballs. This is food, not a pet. You just need the meat.
· a pound of chicken, bone in, cut up into pieces
· one red pepper
· 2 or 3 tomatoes, or some canned ones
· olive oil
· paella rice. This is sort of oblong and short; I don’t know how else to describe it so you will have success. Ask around, I guess. Don’t mess around with regular rice. You will fail in this endeavor and probably many others, if that’s what you call following directions.
· peas. They can be frozen ones.
· coarse salt
· a lemon
· 6 threads of saffron, or not, if you don’t feel like shelling out the dough

Also, you will need:
· a paella pan, which can probably be procured in Crate and Barrel or a kitchen store, but which I suppose could be replaced with a big cast iron skillet. For this recipe, which is for four people and sort of on the extravagant side, you need something about 18 inches in diameter.
· a burner large enough to heat the bottom of the pan evenly, or a stove with two burners close enough together so that both can heat the pan at the same time. Or you could try on a campfire, or a gas grill. But I don’t know anything about that.
· another pot, full of water. Maybe a half-gallon or so. Maybe a gallon. Better safe than sorry.
· newspaper, for the floor in front of the stove. Things will splatter.
· a mortar and pestle

First, I like to prepare. You can sort of skip around if you are the sort of cook who prefers to just start and see how things go. If you want to do it right, and be a little compulsive about it, do it my way. Wash all the sea creatures and meats. Pat the meat dry. Sea creatures are used to being wet. Cut up the squid into little squares, maybe the size of a stamp. Pick the extra seaweed off the mussels but don’t cut off the little beards. Set everything aside, maybe in the fridge. That probably depends on whether you are planning to take a long time to cut everything else up. I can’t hold your hand through every tiny step, you know. How will you learn?

Dice the onion and set aside. Cut the garlic into discs and put them in the mortar. Or in the pestle. Whichever one of those things you put other things in. Peel the artichokes and cut the hearts into quarters. Clean the pepper and cut into long strips. Do that thing with hot water and a sharp knife that peels tomatoes, or use canned ones. Pitch the seeds, dice the tomato part, and set aside. Spread out the newspaper.

Take a deep breath, because things are going to move pretty fast from here on. There will also be sizzling noises, which scare some people. Try to keep it together. Pour some olive oil in the paella pan. This is probably the only ingredient in which too much is really bad and too little is really bad. What you’re aiming for is a nice coating for all but the outer two inches of the cooking surface. Turn the heat up high, and when the oil thins a bit, you can shake it around to cover the whole thing. Hopefully, you have hit the exact spot where your stuff won’t stick to the pan and yet your rice won’t feel greasy. If it comes out bad, next you’ll know whether you guessed right or not. It won’t be the end of the world. Maybe don’t offer to bring it to a dinner party until you’ve gotten this part down.

Brown the chicken and rabbit pieces. Like I said before, you can use only chicken, only rabbit, or whatever mix you like of the two. I suppose you could leave the meat out altogether, but you’d need to have broth of some sort handy in the place of the water you have in that other pot I told you about. While we’re talking about it, actually, why don’t you heat that up? Great. It doesn’t have to boil, necessarily, just heat up.

Ok, so the meat is browning. Once it gets a little head start, toss in the pepper strips. While they are doing their thing, put the mussels in a pot and put it on a medium-low heat without any water. Without. Any. Really. They’re going to die; you can’t stop it now. Anyway, they will open soon enough and release some water of their own. When they open, just leave them to cool. Cook the meat and peppers for 5-10 minutes. When the peppers are soft enough for your tastes, take them out and set them aside.

Stir the meat around a little. That’s something cooks do. Flip it and stuff so they don’t get blackened. Toss in the shrimp and squid. Actually, in Spain they use this thing that sort of looks like a big, oafy squid but isn’t a squid. It’s called sepia and, frankly, doesn’t taste that good as a squid substitute in things like fried calamari. Usually it is grilled. It’s probably what you need to use in real authentic Spanish paella, but I can’t imagine you could find it fresh in the US. If the paella is horrible, then you can write me a letter about it and then go on a search for sepia. Cook those things until they are done; the shrimp will turn pinkish and the squid white. Squid is pretty hard to overcook, but shrimp is not, and it tastes awful if you do that. Err on the side of underdoing them. When the fishes are cooked, take them out and put them aside.

Add the pieces of artichoke heart. Well, first sort of shove the meat off to one side, then add them. Brown them for a few minutes. Add the onion and fry that, too. When it a little brown and soft, mix it in with the meat. Clear off some space in the pan for the tomato and throw that in there. And, hell, why not the peas? Stir a little. Look at the newspaper. Isn’t it gross? Covered in oil? Aren’t you glad you did as I said? Ok. Now bark like a dog.

All right, back to work. The water in that other pot – remember that other pot? I told you to heat it up a while ago? – should be hot now. Pour it into the paella pan, so that it just about covers all the stuff. Let that simmer for about twenty minutes. Meanwhile…toss some salt in with the garlic and crush it with the pestle, or mortar, whichever isn’t the thing you put other things into. Add the crushed garlic and the saffron to the pan. You could do a little cleaning up now if you like not having a ton to do after dinner. Or pour yourself some wine and stare out the window. This isn’t so important.

At the end of the twenty minutes of simmering, get that rice ready. Pour a strip of rice about four inches wide that bisects the pan and rises a bit above the water line. That’s the right amount of rice. Using a wooden spoon, shove the rice out of its nice neat line so it is evenly distributed throughout the paella. Cook the whole mess for five minutes. During that five minutes, go find those mussels you set aside. Twist off one of the halves of their shell, leaving the mussel attached to the other. Section the lemon. When five minutes have passed, lower the flame. You should be seeing the water get sucked into the rice and the whole thing starting to look more like a wet paella than all the ingredients for paella underwater. When the rice is set enough that it can handle some arranging, put the shrimp and peppers on top of it in a way that pleases you. Then take the mussels and get a little of the paella liquid in their shells. Embed them in the rice, shell down. Wait five more minutes, then add the lemon wedges in some sort of decorative manner. It’s done.

When you serve it, don’t mix everything up. Try to sort of dish it out like you would pie, though it should not be solid, certainly. Just use a little common sense. You worked so hard to get it to look nice. So that’s that. Good luck.

Last week we received our first visitors. We had just barely enough time to kick out our boarder, who still hasn’t paid us – something about money tied up in the Czech Republic – fill the house with croissants, and dry some towels, when Josh and Roz braved the creaky elevator to our 6th floor apartment. After a little breakfast, their eyes started to close. We sent them to bed to prepare for the Sitges Carnaval parade later that day.

When we woke them, a few hours later, it was clear that they could have slept all night and were maybe regretting mentioning that they wanted to see Sitges. But they summoned all the strength possible for people whose last coffee was courtesy of Delta Airlines and boarded the train with us and José and Melissa. We prepared ourselves for the worst, or at least for the infamous: crushing crowds, obscene costumes, gallons of alcohol. In fact, it was a moderately crowded beach town with a nice boardwalk and some pretty houses. We stood in a bit of a mob to see the children’s parade, which featured a lot of tiny people in matching Native American outfits. We were not sure whether these costumes – complete with spears, war paint, feathers, and faux buckskin – were just based on the movies or, like our old Cowboys-n-Indians disguises, which seemed to end around 1983, a bit of willful forgetting of the levels of humor involved in imperialism and genocide. Not that I’m claiming that we haven’t seen questionable costumes at home; I just thought war paint was out of style.

They next day was committed to sleeping (them) or going to class and work and normal things (us). Also, there was one of our typical tired lunches. What’s tired lunch? That’s when we go out to lunch, but we’re tired, and so we either can’t pick a place (since pretty much all the lunch places look the same: a combination menu, low prices, a slot machine) or we wander around for hours. Then, once we do pick something, ordering takes a long time. Essentially, we can never remember what the word is for each different kind of meat. But anything with pudding included can’t turn out that badly, and we were nourished enough to do some quality wandering around. I think we might have made some chicken for dinner. If that was the night, it was noteworthy because Roz, who has helped cut open live humans, lest you think she isn’t worldly, had never before consumed a roasted chicken. She did great.

Tuesday, Josh and Roz meandered their way to the Sagrada Familia, an impressive cathedral that I must admit having no more patience for visiting. In some guidebooks, it is billed as “the only cathedral still under construction in the entire world,” which to me is only interesting because it made me realize that maybe I have no idea what the definition of “cathedral” is. Anyone out there looking for something to do ought to start building one – even if you have to start small. You might get famous. Later, we headed to our favorite tapas and montaditos (finger food on bread) restaurant with José and Melissa to fortify ourselves for our second trip to Sitges. After a dinner of a lot of good snacks that somehow made everyone full, we hopped the train. The platform was moderately crowded with young folk in costume. Few of them were dressed as Native Americans this time; many went the “wig + makeup + funny hat + various plastic body parts” route, and the best costume was a fleet of taxis. We sat down and talked about how it didn’t seem like that many people were going…until we hit the next stop in the city. At that point we were joined by everyone under 25 in Barcelona, a number unquestionably greater than the capacity of the train. Soon after, we learned that a member of our party had a bit of the ol’ claustrophobia, which made it touch and go for a spell. Even though we were technically inside, people used their outside voices. Finally, after a bout with secondhand smoke and body odor that would have convinced lesser travelers that they had already had their night out, we landed in Sitges and got right to work…again, wandering around.

In what can only be described as either a god-on-our-side moment or a sign that most people who fight the crowds to get to Sitges don’t come to sit still, we found a nice outdoor table where we could watch the parade. Every now and then, one of us made the trek to the street to photograph a few of the parade floats, but mostly we sat around and amused ourselves. Even the fact that we were seated directly next to the unofficial outdoor urinal couldn’t…uh…dampen our fun. But suddenly, Melissa remembered that she had to work in a few hours. Like, four hours. It wasn’t the kind of sudden remembering that happens after you actually forget something; she knew she had to work. But around six in the morning it stopped being a late night and became morning. We began to fight our way to the train.

And even though it seemed like everyone else was still going strong, it also seemed like everyone else was waiting in line for the train, too. Ok, well, not “line.” About five thousand people were standing, mostly calmly, awaiting their turn to go through a small doorway and one of five subway turnstiles. It took a long, long time, and allowed J and R to see some things they would rather not have, like the sun coming up. After a groggy ride home, we emerged in Barcelona in the middle of the rush hour commute. It felt a bit like coming out of a long, long movie, in a theater that had a lot of nauseous twenty-year olds lying on the floor, wearing wigs and plastic body enhancements. But, after sleeping until mid-afternoon – hey, do you want jetlag? No, no one does. – we went straight into our official Paella Lesson.

The Paella Lesson consisted of Gloria cooking, Dan taking notes, and Leah translating. The recipe, for those of you who like to try the things you read about on the site and so far have not been enticed to do anything you’ve read about today, will be posted tomorrow. Be forewarned that you will be instructed to buy parts of a rabbit. But you can use chicken if that doesn’t tickle your fancy. This made for a good dinner, to be topped only by the next day’s journey to our favorite place, recommended by J and M. Aside from martinis made with wretched sweet vermouth, the only problem was being too full. And one good thing about the Sitges Train Ride Debacle is that when we realized that the metro had stopped running when we came out of the restaurant, it didn’t seem like any problem at all.

When we arrived home, the beatings began. No, no one tried to tell Roz that Otis Elevator was the true industry leader. Far from it. It was the traditional Boys-Against-Girls Catalonia Euchre Invitational. Do you even need me to tell you that the girls lost? They lost badly. The drubbing was such that only the rapid purchase of a few pairs of discounted shoes, known throughout Europe for their palliative effect, could ease the pain. That took care of Friday. Saturday we welcomed Mr. Kevin C. Joseph, Esq. Everyone headed off to Parque Guëll to picnic and get some sun. Really, though, we mostly walked up hills. It seems like whenever we go to Parque Guëll, we forget that there’s really no grass there. Hence, one winds up either walking or sitting in dirt; we did both. The week of intense touring finally caught up to everyone, and we dragged ourselves home. Both spaghetti and meatballs were created, then heated over a fire, for dinner. Leah fell asleep on the couch. Hearts replaced euchre. We set the alarm early for the first time in a week, then called a cab.

The thing about having visitors when you live in a new place is that you’re between vacationing and hosting. We really don’t know everything to show people about Barcelona, yet, and we probably still won’t in May. We’ve got our handful of restaurants, our good and bad museums, our discount stores. But we get lost, too. We still haven’t seen everything Fodor’s recommends. Our Spanish is pretty solid for ordering the proper kind of coffee, but not, say, for uncovering the details of when trout season begins in Andorra. We stay home a lot; when the weather’s nice, we go for a long walk. So it was good to look at things we made ourselves see once during the first week, and it was also good to be encouraged to get out of the house for the first stretch of beautiful days since late October. We’ve already gotten together a few ideas for how to better help our guests deal with jetlag and find La Rambla easily. It's sort of funny, also, that moving to Spain is turning out to be the best way to get to see various friends from home for a week straight. Even if for that alone, this is turning out to be a pretty good idea.

We recently bid farewell to Roz and Josh. Stories from their visit will be up shortly. In the meantime, there are pictures here. A warning: some of these are a little off-color. Also, the site is acting funny, and all the pictures seem to be coming out on one page. It might take a while to load. In the meantime, we've learned that googling any of these terms will lead you to danandleah.com:

• jewish wedding pictures
  
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• mike basta