For Being So Smart Doctors Say Some Stupid Stuff

After a lot of very contradictory information from the medical community on what we should and shouldn’t eat, what will and won’t give us a heart attack or cancer or gout or whatever, I feel vindicated in my lifestyle which has basically been eating whatever the hell I want while being on a first-name basis with the dudes at the local bike shop. 

My Mediterranean Diet is the oldest fad in recorded human history. I am fond of saying that if you start every recipe with "2 Hour Bike Ride" then your body can probably do just fine with whatever else you throw in. 

So high cholesterol equals a heart attack and low cholesterol makes you retarded. Got it.

Free at Last: One Man's Quest for a Laurel Tree

Laurus nobilis

I have finally pulled myself out from under the crushing tyranny of the bay leaf industrial complex by finding my own tree. Well, it’s not my tree but I can reach it from the bike trail south of town. No longer will I have to pay out as much as 40 cents for a slim bag with enough leaves for a few months’ work in the kitchen. I owe it all to a cycling friend who pointed out a laurel tree to me on one of our outings. I have ridden by this spot a million times, just past the railroad bridge on the way to Pinedo.

Bay leaf is a strange herb because I really can’t define the taste but I sure can tell when you leave it out of a dish. “Taste two plain tomato sauces side by side, one of them cooked with a bay leaf or two,” says Laurie Harrsen, McCormick’s director of consumer communications. “The difference it makes is amazing. It’s a ‘foundational’ flavor, a workhorse — not the star.” I would never think of making a tomato sauce or any type of stew without two or three laurel leaves. Just remember to discard the leaves after cooking. If you eat them you will die...or something. I've never been stupid enough to ingest them as common sense would tell you that a leaf that doesn't break down after 40 minutes in a pressure cooker isn't about to dissolve in your intestines.

The laurel is native to the Mediterranean, or was brought here from the east but you don’t seem to find it just anywhere. It always seems to have been planted for the purpose of harvesting. In one spot where I've discovered a laurel tree there is a ruined farmhouse near it. The laurel tree is an evergreen and the leaves can be harvested at any time. 

Spain's Best Food Blog/Blogger

El Cocinero Fiel has taught me so much about the food here and about cooking in general. His Youtube videos cover almost anything you would want to cook.

A New Kitchen Addition

 

Sometimes kitchen gadgets don’t really live up to the hype. In fact, I’d say that most of the time the new stuff is just gimmicky crap and soon is relegated to the outer reaches of kitchen storage (Do you hear that, pasta maker?). This isn’t true about my new tortilla press and I've made a permanent place for it in my kitchen, which is a very good thing because it’s cast iron and too damn heavy to move. I received it as a gift and it'll go down as one of the best presents I’ve ever received.

Having great corn tortillas now couldn’t be easier (unless I could actually buy them at a decent price). The tortillas that I can buy in packages don’t even taste like corn and seem to be mostly wheat flour and chemicals. The ones that I make with my new press are pure corn flour with a bit of salt and maybe some good, old-fashioned lard along with the water. You just have to mix the flour with the water and there's no long kneading process like when making bread. Then you make a small ball of dough and put it in the press between two sheets of plastic. I fry them in a few drops of oil and that’s it.

I've been tinkering with my dough recipe using a small percentage of wheat flour to make the tortillas more pliable but every one that I've made thus far has been wonderful and infinitely better than the store-bought trash I’ve been used to for too long. I have officially broken my dependence on foreign-born tortillas.

In an unrelated matter I made my variant on the Catalan dish Pa amb Tomàquet.

Valencia Marathon: 11,500 Runners and 20,000 Fans

Had I known that it was so much fun to watch a marathon I would have done it sooner. There were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people along the route to cheer, clap, whistle, beat drums, play pasodobles, and I was among them. I think we had a lot more fun than the runners. I was a spectator by accident as I chose a bike route that cut me off from my part of town when I returned and crossing even a couple meters or the runner’s course was impossible, at least with a bike and while not being an asshole.

Running a marathon has never been anything that I have been even remotely interested in doing, even back when I used to run. As far as bucket lists go a marathon is still out of my bucket. Watching the Valencia Marathon again certainly will be in my future. Enhorabuena to all the participants and fans.