El Factor Maruja (The Mabel Factor)*

Cuando quiero probar una nueva receta siempre empiezo mi búsqueda en YouTube con la receta más tradicional que sea posible. A veces mi receta comienza y termina con la interpretación tradicional y a veces me atrevo a experimentar de ahí. Para encontrar lo que creo que es la forma más pura del plato miro videos de abuelas de Italia, España, Francia, Argelia, o donde sea.

When I’m out to try a new recipe I almost always begin my search on YouTube with a recipe that is as traditional as possible. Sometimes my recipe begins and ends with that traditional interpretation and sometimes I venture out from there. To find what I think is the purest form of the dish I am out to create I look for videos of grandmothers from Italy, Spain, France, Algeria, or wherever.

*Maruja in Spain is an old-fashioned sounding first name for a woman, sort of like Mabel or Gertrude now in modern English. Maruja is a humorous synonym for old woman.

True Detective Season 1 (Spoiler Alert)

Only read this if you've watched all eight episodes of True Detective!

Did True Detective live up to its full potential? Not really but it beats the hell out of feature movies. It took television 60 years to realize its own potential as a medium. If you wear contact lenses apply saline solution before you start watching this scene because it’s six minutes of a tracking shot without a cut. No blinking allowed!

Feature films have absolutely nothing on television these days.
This Simpsons' clip is pure comedy gold (and has nothing to do with the above pointless post).

Just for the Record

I have absolutely no use whatsoever for religion and I never have. I don’t believe in god and I never did, not for even a moment. When the concept of a superior being was first explained to me it came with the bookend ideas of heaven and hell. The fantasy of heaven was enjoyable but I just could never believe that a person could be sentenced to an eternity in hell for fucking up in this short life. It never seemed fair to me and I wanted no part of it. Unfortunately, my family was quite Catholic and I was punished with an upbringing heavy with the rituals of that pagan church. More than anything I just remember being bored to fucking death by all of it: the Bible stories, the Catechisms, the moronic drilling necessary to receive the sacraments, and the tediousness of Sunday mass.

When I was about eleven years old I smartened up enough to skip out of Sunday services by telling my parents that I was going to the earlier mass than the 11:00 event that was their habit. Instead of going to mass I would go to the huge park across the street from my house and play ball or whatever. When my parents left the house for the 11:00 service I would watch TV. It was at this time when I discovered the magic of the Marx Brothers. This is the perfect age to be introduced to their brand of humor and it sure beat the hell out of Catholic mass.

When my father died I told my mother that I was through with the charade of pretending I was religious. My father’s death when I was 15 didn’t come as any sort of revelation but simply served to validate my own feelings about our existence here in this life. This is all we have and that has always been enough for me. I was an atheist and that was that. I haven’t wavered throughout my life. Never.

This was a long time ago before it was acceptable to be an atheist in America. I was the only person I knew who had Atheist stamped on my military dog tags while everyone else had some form of Christian denomination (I didn’t know any Jewish soldiers and there definitely were no Muslims back then). It’s comforting and inspiring to know that a complete lack of religious belief has become much more acceptable in America these days, at least in some parts of the country.

Pozole y Gorditas

Pozole y Gorditas con Queso Fresco de Cabra

If you want Mexican food in Valencia you have to come to my house. I get a mad craving every once in a while and I took care of it yesterday with pozole and gorditas that I don’t think any self-respecting Mexican would turn away. This picture doesn’t do it justice and it certainly doesn’t reflect all the time that went into preparation. I also forgot to add the hot sauce before I snapped the picture and by the time I figured that out I was too hungry to take another photo.

This food journey began last week when I made tortilla soup and used corn tortillas that I bought at Carrefour which were absolutely horrible. The ingredients list was so small you need a microscope to read it, a device I didn’t have with me at the time of purchase. It turns out that they are mostly wheat flour and have almost no taste of corn. What they do taste like is cardboard, something I mostly avoid eating. I’ll avoid the Carrefour corn tortillas from now on. I bought more corn tortillas at the Latin grocery store just around the corner from my place and they were expensive but slightly better in quality. El Serape brand tortillas aren’t horrible but they were horribly expensive (2.50€ for 10 small units). I used to buy tortillas at another Latin grocery (now out of business) for less than a third of this cost.

I bought hominy (maíz blanco) at the Latin grocery and once again it was very expensive (1.50€ for a small can and I bought 4) but I really had set my mind on making pozole. They also had chipotle peppers in adobo sauce which I have never been able to find in Spain and these are what I use in the pozole I was taught to make. I was going to make corn tortillas from scratch to go along with the pozole but I decided to make gorditas instead. I made mine exactly as she does in the video as I had some achiote on hand.

Weather Update

As we roll into the first week of March we have left behind a winter that was never here. This comes at a time when I have the most comfortable apartment in all my years here in Spain. This place doesn’t have heat but it have better windows than my former residences. The fact that it isn’t blessed with three meter ceilings like two of my former majestic apartments also makes it a lot more comfortable when the temperatures drop. There hasn’t been a single day this winter that I have felt uncomfortable because of the weather. In past winters—all of the others since I came here—I have had to suffer some through the cold.

This year I don’t think that the thermometer ever dropped to freezing. I was almost hoping that it would get colder simply to test just how well my new apartment can protect me from the elements. And now it’s March which in Valencia means that the cold weather is behind us.

I realize that talking about the weather is the most boring thing in the world but I leave these entries here so that I can look back and remember how things were as I can never trust my memory.