Riding with the peleton and running with the bulls

Riding with the peleton and running with the bulls

I go along, day after day, living my life here pretty much taking many things for granted. I’m in another country and the language is different but the mundane aspects of daily life are pretty much the same everywhere. You eat, drink coffee, exercise, read, watch television, or whatever. I go for weeks at a time barely recognizing the fact that I am living in a culture that is markedly different than my own. I try to blend in as much as I can. I know my way around Valencia better than most and I am killing myself trying to hammer Spanish into my head. As my Spanish improves and I become more familiar with how things are done here, my life becomes more normal. And then every once in a while something hits me and I realize than things are very unusual in my new home.

Sometimes it’s something really insignificant that leads me to this thought. Just this weekend I couldn’t stop thinking about how odd it is to see the Tour de France live and in the late afternoon. In Seattle there is something like a ten hour time difference so on some days I would go to my gym at six in the morning to watch the live broadcast of the day’s race, but most of the time I would watch the rebroadcast that starts at eleven in the morning.

For a Tour de France kook like me it’s pretty cool to see it on TV live, although I miss Phil Ligget and Paul Sherwin, the great announcers on the Outdoor Life Network. It is also great to have two entire pages of the newspaper dedicated to the Tour every day. They have their priorities straight here. I am thinking about heading up to the Pyrenees in a couple weeks with my bike to catch one of the great mountain stages when the race passes through Spain. I have climbed bigger mountains in Washington than anything they do in the Tour. Granted, I never climb three or four big passes in one day but still, we got big mountains in Washington. Climbing up Mount Rainier would make a great finish for a Tour stage.

July 7th was also the beginning of the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, or the running of the bulls. Every day at 8 a.m. they show all of the crazy drunks running through the street being chased by huge bulls. If you aren’t up at 8 you can see the rebroadcasts all day long. Yesterday nine people got gored. Just good, clean fun as far as the Spanish are concerned. I have never had any desire to go to this festival and I definitely wouldn’t care to take my chances in a sprinting match with a 500 kilo bull. As I told a Spanish friend, this is one aspect of Spanish life that I don’t mind experiencing on television. Getting gored by a bull isn’t on my “to do” list while I make this place my home.

One thing that is very easy to get used to here is the weather. It is just about perfect. It is sunny and hot during the day and then when the sun goes down it cools off considerably. The humidity is rather low which is common in the Mediterranean basin. It is exactly how I remembered it from the years that I lived in Greece.

More Thoughts on the Tortilla de Patatas

I have my own way of making a tortilla de patatas that involves a lot less oil and is much easier than the traditional method. Most Spanish recipes call for cooking the peeled potatoes in a lot of olive oil without browning them. This takes a lot of oil and a lot of time. You almost have to deep-fry the potatoes. I cook my potatoes ahead of time, either in boiling water or in the oven if I am cooking something else that requires the oven. I then take the peeled, almost-completely-cooked potatoes and sauté them in just a bit of olive oil. They will have a consistency close to mashed potatoes. I add this mixture to the beaten eggs in a bowl to blend.

The trick (or one of them at least) is that you need the right size pan for the amount of eggs you are using. I use an eight inch, non-stick sauté pan that works for tortillas with 4-6 eggs. You need to cook the tortilla at a very low temperature so that the bottom doesn’t burn. I cover the pan which I think helps to firm up the top of the tortilla and makes flipping it a little easier. To flip it, cover the pan with a plate and hold the bottom of the plate and turn the skillet upside down. Slide the tortilla back into the pan with the uncooked side down. Reshape it with a spatula. I flip it three times so that it cooks twice on both sides. Whichever side looks the best I leave up for serving.

This simple Spanish dish can be found almost everywhere. It is a popular item on sandwiches. It also fairly screams out for improvisation—something that is frowned upon in most Spanish cooking. The Spanish are never more traditional than they are when it comes to food. As much as I love a traditional tortilla de patatas, I would love to see a clever innovation to this dish. I think the best way to achieve that might be an accompanying dish.

I prefer to eat this dish after it has cooled so this may dictate what would make a good side dish.

Swiss Alighni Team Wins America’s Cup

This was the incredible finish. Alighni is at the bottom.


Does the America’s Cup have to be over? Yesterday’s race was absolutely amazing. The New Zealander’s were leading on the second upwind leg but they had a bad position to leeward of the Alighni boat. Just before the marker for the last windward leg they crowded the Swiss boat and received a penalty. Alighni passed the marker first and both boats raced towards the finish with spinnakers flying. Not only were the New Zealanders down by 11 seconds at the marker, but they would also have to perform a penalty turn-around at some point before the finish. It seemed completely hopeless. Then they got a huge advantage in wind and pulled way ahead of the Swiss boat and were doing their penalty maneuver just before the committee boat at the finish line. Alighni sailed past and beat them by one second and defended their America’s Cup title by beating New Zealand 5-2. This means that the next Cup will also probably be in Valencia.

Instead of waiting four more years, can’t we just have another America’s Cup next week? Valencia is all set up for it already and all of the boats are here. Why wait? The weather is perfect and there are plenty of spectators, we just need someone to make the call and start racing again.

I have made it down to the port for all of the America’s Cup races and most of the preliminary Louis Viutton Cup matches as well. On race days I did a bike ride along the beaches to the south of town and finished up at the port. I would usually stop and get a beer before I got there because the beer lines at the port were too long. I will miss all of the excitement and the beautiful boats.

Gazpacho

Gazpacho

I made gazpacho for the first time in my life yesterday. Now that I live in Spain and I made it once I guess you could say that I’m kind of an expert on the subject of this cold, tomato soup. I have heard it described as a liquid salad which sounds more accurate than calling it soup. What I can say with authority is that it’s really good and it’s almost impossible to screw up. What more do you want out of a menu item?

Since I have adopted a Castillian accent to my Spanish I now pronounce this simple yet wonderful dish gath pacho. I know, don’t you just want to punch me right in the face? Of course, that would be a little difficult for you unless you finally decide to get your ass over here for a visit, so until you do I will keep annoying the living shit out of you. Did you know that the French for gazpacho is le gazpacho? Wow, I could almost feel the air from your punch against my nose. Nice try.

It has been hot here lately with temperatures in the upper 30’s (I knew the metric system would piss you off, too. Keep swinging like that and you’re going to tire yourself out before the end of this essay). It’s hot but not Florida hot. It hasn’t been humid at all but 39 degrees is definitely hot enough to push you towards lighter, cooler foods. Not me, of course, I’m too much of a glutton to ever actually crave lighter foods. I once ate an entire bucket of fried chicken while in a Turkish bath. I just figured that since I was in Spain and it is summer I may as well make a batch of gath pacho.

All of the produce markets are up to their eyebrows in good tomatoes right now so I got four big, juicy rambo tomatoes. I don’t know why they call them rambo but I suspect it is because they like Sylvester Stallone. You need a cucumber and here they come in little pint-size versions that are about half the size of an American cucumber. The recipe calls for a bit of bread so I bought some of this five seed whole wheat stuff they sell at the supermarket. I rarely eat the bakery baguette variety of bread. It can be interesting when it is fresh from the oven but decidedly uninteresting shortly after this initial freshness has passed. This recipe calls for the bread to be soaked in water which would leave the baguette bread completely lifeless so I opted for the five seed hippy bread.

Gazpacho

- 4 tomatoes (peeled and chopped)
- 1 onion (chopped)
- 1 cucumber (peeled and chopped)
- 1 garlic clove (diced)
- 1 red pepper (seeded and chopped)
- Bread (I used three slices of the 5 seed stuff. Soak it in water briefly and then squeeze out the water)

I had a zucchini lying around (or aubergines as the Brits call them. That’s a good punch you’re packing there—for a little girl!) so I peeled it and cooked it in boiling water for a few minutes.

Salt, pepper, a dash of cumin, a tablespoon or two of olive oil, and a few dashes of red wine vinegar (No, not balsamic).

I just threw all of this together in a pot with a bit of water and then liquefied it with my 750cc, 105 horsepower hand mixer. No kidding, this thing is powerful. Most recipes call for you to strain the soup in a food mill after mixing but mine was completely liquefied. I chilled all of the ingredients before so it was ready to eat as soon as I finished mixing.

I prefer to drink gazpacho out of a glass instead of treating it like a soup and trying to use a spoon. So you kids out there fighting over whether gazpacho is a beverage or a soup just break it up. It’s both.

There are hundreds of variations on this dish but I think this is one of the more traditional recipes.

TV

I don’t watch a lot of television. I’m not saying this as some sort of pseudo-intellectual posturing. I don’t watch much television not because I’m some sort of hippie* but because the programming isn’t very good here and my TV doesn’t have a headphone jack. In order for me to understand Spanish television really well I need to listen through headphones which is why I have little trouble watching movies in Spanish on my computer. The programming situation is something over which I have no control. Even if it means improving my Spanish I pass on watching an episode of Friends.

Between my television speakers and the funny voices they use, Los Simpsons continues to be a real challenge for me. I watched it last night and laughed out loud at this part: Homer gets upgraded to first class on a flight and the stewardess asks if for dinner would he like a steak or two steaks. Homer asks, “Can I have both?” I have laughed about that every time I’ve thought about it and I’ve thought about it about 100 times already.

I wouldn’t be caught dead watching CNN in the States but you can easily catch me watching it here. For one thing, it is in Spanish instead of Catalan or Valenciano. I will sometimes catch myself flipping through the channels and stopping on a news story only to realize a minute or two later that they aren’t speaking Spanish. Watching CNN is strictly for the Spanish lesson because it’s a pretty lousy source of news—in any language. You can get more information scanning the newspaper headlines when you walk briskly by a kiosk than you can watching an hour of CNN.

I like to watch bullfights on television. It’s not to improve my Spanish because they are mostly on the local station which broadcasts them in a blend of Spanish and Valenciano, but I just like watching bullfights. Just the array of wild pastel colors is enough reason; everything looks just like it does in those posters you see advertising the corrida. This may sound stupid but I just like the fact that I’m watching a bullfight on TV. In the ever-shrinking world of globalization and cheap airline flights, it’s still something that that says, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” and definitely not Seattle. If the Seattle PETA crowd knew I was watching a bullfight they would burn me in effigy. The effigy would be made of natural hemp fibers and they wouldn't actually burn it because that causes pollution but they wouldn’t be too happy with me. A mock burning of an effigy goes along better with their whole passive-aggressive approach to changing the world.

*I like saying this in Spanish and it always gets a laugh, although I don’t know if they are laughing at me, with me, or they just thought of something funny on their own. “What, you don’t eat meat? Eres alguna especie de hippy? (Are you some kind of hippy?) I recycle my humor to get the most mileage and if this means moving to another country then that’s what I’m willing to do.