You know you're in Spain when...

Chestnuts aren't the only thing roasting on an open fire

You know you're in Spain when...

After wrapping up an English class your student gives you a pop quiz in Spanish confections,
and when you fail he insists you learn your lesson with these

You know you're in Spain when...

A holiday meal kicks off with salt-cured tuna and Marcona almonds

You know you're in Spain when...

You find yourself making brownies in a paella pan

Doctor's orders

With a friend visiting from Andalucía we planned a weekend fiesta complete with crispy fried corn nuts, Murcian Estrella and big plates of paella.  As lunchtime neared we found out one of our guests would be late, but another assured us there was no cause for concern.  Andrés had brought red wine and jamón and with those provisions we could wait indefinitely.  When he retrieved the goods from his trunk it was not a package of sliced ham from the butcher that he carried in with the bottles.  It was a whole leg, from his counter to ours.  When he removed the kitchen towel draped over the jamón's cutting surface I noticed it wasn't a carved out curve but a straight line from end to end.

All for calming restless party guests, staving off hunger and
 imparting jamón-slicing wisdom to enthusiastic Americans.
But first, do no harm.

A doctor at one of the local hospitals, Andrés told me he sees a huge spike in jamón-related injuries around Christmas time, when patriarchs everywhere are setting out festive spreads for their families.  As he demonstrated, the slicing stance involves one arm dedicated to stabilizing while the other works away; it's all too easy for an exhausted cutting hand to accidentally jump its track and meet the other with full force. In order to avoid such incidents Andrés always notches out a deep right angle near the hoof, creating a vertical barrier to keep stray knife strokes at bay--a practice I was very thankful for when he handed the just- sharpened blade over to me.

You know you're in Spain when...

You wake up and go in search of your house guests,
but find this note instead

You know you're in Spain when...

Your house guests bring Queso Manchego from their hometown in La Mancha
and tell you that aside from making the best cheese in Spain,
 the sheep in their region even have a better bleat 

You know you're in Spain when...

Two minutes after walking in the door you're offered chocolate milk and little cakes,
 and then a plate of jamón

Where there's only one way to fry

Menorahs aren't so easy to come by here but with a bag full of votive candles I made do for Hanukkah this year.  After stumbling through an explanation of the miracle of lights in a combination of hand gestures and faltering Spanish (not too many vocab drills out there on biblical keywords), my roommate managed to gather that "Jewish Christmas" has something to do with oil.  When I told her the festive foods revolve around frying, she was all for hosting a latke party.

I put Yolanda to work prepping homemade applesauce and filling bowls with Yogur Griego (subbed in for sour cream) while I started on the potato pancakes.  I wanted to give her the full Hanukkah experience so I took her through the grating, the squeezing and the mixing.  When I looked over and saw she was pressing on valiantly with the onions despite the burning tears in her eyes I decided not to tell her that I actually think latkes made from Manischewitz box mix taste better than homemade.

If it was going to be a party we were going to need dessert, and the obvious choice was traditional Hanukkah Sufganiyot-doughnuts filled with jam and rolled in sugar.  After dinner I found some forgotten sunflower oil in the back of the cupboard, poured it into a big pot and starting cutting out circles of dough that had been rising on the counter all evening.

Yolanda came in to wash a stack of plates, saw the empty bottle and was physically taken aback. In the same endearing way she responds (as if the English language has personally betrayed her) when I try to explain that despite her years of education to the contrary, we don't actually say things like "queue" or "rubbish" in the USA, she threw up her hands and shook her head, dumbfounded.

With an unintentionally melodramatic flourish she knelt down to haul out the 5 kilo plastic jug of extra virgin olive oil her father replenishes when she visits home and set it down in front of me.  The notion that I, or anyone else for that matter, would use oil from sunflowers rather than olives to fry with was completely baffling to her ("it's very strange to see this, do you know?!") but I was able to talk her down with the promise that I would never prepare doughnuts in such an heretical fat again.

A couple weeks later we went to see her relatives in Granada for the holidays, and just like coming downstairs to see your parents showing embarrassing baby pictures to your middle-school boyfriend, I realized she was recounting the episode to the entire table while I was getting more napkins from the kitchen.  They all had a good laugh over my preposterous frying habits and then her dad leaned over and give me a good-natured pat on the back, just glad to see that I had been converted.

You know you're in Spain when...

You meet three generations of a family over the course of a tapas  route
and even the toddler is eating jamón at 2am

You know you're in Murcia when..

My friend Marina made up a big batch of Ensaladilla Rusa and gave me half to take home and share with my roommates.  Made with potatoes, pickled vegetables, tuna, hard-boiled eggs and mayo, Ensaladilla Rusa forms the base for one of Murcia's most beloved tapas-the Marinera.  The salad is piled high on a crunchy breadstick that's looped around and pressed together at the ends in the shape of a teardrop.  When made right, the salad holds its shape well enough not to fall through the middle, and it's finished off with a single anchovy laid across the top.  Marina can't stand anchovies and is always the lone person at a bar to order hers without. 

For some reason, she told me, that's not called a Marinera sin anchoa...but rather, a "bicicleta".   

After 15 minutes and 3 spoons, the container looked like this

You know you're in Spain when...

Even busy professionals can have a nice bowl of tripe,
hot and ready in less than 2 minutes