I began writing this shortly before we left Britain, but then life caught up, and in the chaos of returning to the US, it got set aside. As I write these words now, it has been nearly a month and a half since we landed in the US and a month since we returned to Albuquerque.  Life has been…  Very good, but very busy since the return.  But the memories of Britain and Europe are still strong, and part of our hearts still live there, I think.

So now I flip back through my notes and the feel and scents of Scotland return to me.  I will do my best to transcribe some of them, but there’s a great deal to say, so this may take more than one post and some time to get out.  (Not aided, I know, by my incurable verbosity.)  Think of it as a slow-motion discovery for each of you — you’ll never know when another bit of it will pop up.  But I’ll do my best to at least finish up Scotland before, oh, say, Christmas…

One of the final tour targets for the great Rati-Lane British Isles tours was Scotland. We’d been hoping to hit all of the major regions/countries of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), but we still missed Ireland.  Ah well — good reason to return at some point.  ;-)

We had to decide on something, and we had really needed a work-free vacation, so we packed our bags and headed North.  A lot happens in a week of intense vacationing, so there’s quite a bit to report.  We’ll start with:

Edinburgh

Day 1 (Fri): Travel

Bus to Manor House station, Piccadilly Line to King’s Cross, National Express train up through England, past the now-crumbling line of Hadrian’s wall, and into Scotland.  Caledonia: land of the lochs and mountains and the flamboyant and tough northern barbarians who threw back Rome’s might.

For Americans’ reference, while the British Isles are small in a global sense, the distances are still large in a practical sense, and Scotland is very big and very spacious indeed.  Really big.  I mean, it’s small when you put it down next to, say, Alaska or the Ukraine, but it’s big to travel across.  King’s Cross to Edinburgh is just about 400 miles (about 650 km) and took rouhly five hours.  That’s roughly the distance from Boston to Baltimore or Louisville to Atlanta or Santa Fe to Denver.

We pulled in to Edinburgh about 8:00 PM and plunked down the cash to taxi to our B&B.  (Refer back to trading money for stress when travelling.)  We caught a late supper at an upscale Thai place near B&B row, and then crashed.

Day 2 (Sat): Edinburgh

Up, not terribly early (vacation!  Score!) and off to explore the city.

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and seat of Kings.  It is built along (and spilling off of) a ridge of basalt spanning between two ancient volcanic outcrops, and the scene feels startlingly like something out of a Tolkien novel, or perhaps George R. R. Martin. At one end of the ridge, Edinburgh Castle dominates the skyline.  The “Golden Mile” spills down the ridge away from it, lined with gray Georgian stone buildings.  At the foot of the ridge lies the new Scottish Parliament building and Holyrood Palace, home of kings-in-exile and home-away-from-home for more modern monarchs.  Finally, the ridge lifts up again into Holyrood Park to end at Arthur’s Seat, the other stone mass, open and airy counterpoint to the brooding fortress of its sister pluton.

Our B&B was on, essentially, B&B row, which is pretty much right across from Holyrood park.  So the first thing was walking through the park on the way to town. It was lovely in an ornately-sculpted, eighteenth-century sort of way. Our path took us below Arthur’s Seat (which we resolved to climb… tomorrow) and into the base of the town.

View of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

Then into town, entering near Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building.  We’d seen a sufficiency of palaces at that point, so we glanced in bemusement at the Scot’s brand new, £400 million (!) parliament building.  I guess when you get your independent parliament back after almost 3 centuries of suppression, it’s a cause for architectural exuberance.  Parts of the (in)famous building are really neat (e.g., the native stone facing with samples graven with various quotes and poetry), but other bits were just odd.  It is something of an architectural marvel, in that postmodern chaos-of-architectural-motifs sort of way.  Given its self-consciously avant-garde design and its order-of-magnitude budget overrun, it is, unsurprisingly, a source of some contention among Edinburgh locals.

View of office windows in the Scottish Parliament building

Side wall and fence of the Scottish parliament building

Front face of the Scottish Parliament building

We chose not to tour the Parliament building, but did marvel a bit at the exterior (with some confusion, as we first mistook the bizarrely-grated windows facing onto alleys as signs of a deluded office building).  I was taken, however, with the stretch along the Mile itself, which is faced with different Scottish stone and graven with Scottish verses in English and Gaelic.

From there, we walked up the Golden Mile.  Here we discovered a bit of a tactical mistake.  Remember that ridge of rock between the two promontories that I mentioned?  The city lies along the ridge between the two, but it slopes down from the Castle to the Holyrood Palace, which meant that we were walking the whole mile uphill.  Whups.  Still, it was a fun walk and there were great things to see along the way.  Like street bagpipers…

Street musician in Edinburgh

Our favorite street bagpiper in Edinburgh. Check out the tennis shoes.

(Remember kids: Bagpipes were designed to be heard on battlefields.  These guys were playing a good half mile apart.)

And blue police call boxes…

A true blue police call box. Inoperative, unfortunately. Or maybe that's just what The Doctor wants you to think...

And Adam Smith, trade goods in hand…

Adam Smith, the economist of nations.

And my man, Hume!

Hume's da man!

Along the way, we encountered hordes of tourist shops, ranging from kitsch to high-end.  We popped in to a woolen-goods shop, where Susan picked up a lovely Fair Isle sweater and we grabbed a sun-catcher for our friend Cat (who put up with entirely too much shit from our cats).  Further along, Susan invested in her new hobby of Scotch exploration, snagging an (apparently) lovely bottle of 18-year old Scotch (whose name is not presently at hand — oops).

Finally, we reached the imposing Edinburgh Castle, fortress and last refuge of kings and queens for centuries.  From this site, for over a thousand years, Scottish war chieftans and lords and kings had sallied forth to give battle to everyone from Vikings to English to other Scots.  (And, to hear the brief history blurbs in the Castle tell it, largely to get their asses kicked.)  Here, the infant Mary Queen of Scots holed up from her terrifying uncle, Henry VIII, and here too she herself later gave birth to James VI, future king of Scotland and England.  The Castle was the centerpiece of the Scottish struggles for sovereignty and independence from England for centuries.

(Part of) Edinburgh Castle

The intimidating bulk of the fortress, perched on its promontory of black basalt.

At this point, we were famished, so we made a bee-line for the chic castle cafe.  We were surprised to discover that it was actually good — a big change of pace for tourist monument eateries. (Of which we have sampled our share and then some at this point.)  We had a lovely lunch.  A decadent mushroom bisque to start; then I had haggis, neeps, and tatties (haggis with turnips and potatoes), plated in a surprisingly upscale presentation.  Susan had salmon (Scottish, of course), with lime sauce.  And we split a fantastic slice of Victoria Sponge Cake for dessert.

Contrary to popular opinion, haggis is actually not only edible, but in fact quite tasty.

On to the castle.  We toured the Scottish Crown Jewels.  (Older, by a considerable margin, than the English, but a tad bit less pretentious.  But only a tad.)  The great hall, home, now, of piles and piles of weapons, and, says the audio guide, a fantastically preserved original beam ceiling (and lots of Victorian fanciful interior decor).  Dungeons and walkways and battlements and courtyards.  The Scottish War Memorial.

But we’d done plenty of castle touristing at this point and were a bit burned out, so after only a couple of hours, we called it a day on the vasty pile of stones and headed back down the Mile.

We were a bit at a loss for evening plans, but this turned out to be the week of the Edinburgh film festival, and we hoped to get a piece of that action.  After some tired-tourist dithering, we boldly set off across the wilds of Edinburgh, in search of an art theatre.  After some slight bus mishaps, we pulled in to the theatre we sought just in time to catch the early evening round of animated shorts.

This was a bizarre, but entrancing series of indie animation bits, varying in length from about two to fifteen minutes.  Angst was definitely the theme of the evening.  A blind, old widow, searching for eyes in jars of buttons in her lonely hut in the woods, and the owl-spirit of death who comes to bring her sight and surcease.  The tale of the man who sits at the top of the great cliff to count people in animal costumes who come to cast themselves off the cliff.  The counterpointed stories of three everyday people and their reactions to close encounters with death.  A wordless musical tale of the child who wakes to follow the tooth fairy back to her subterranean home.

Heads abuzz and evening falling, we left the theatre in seach of supper.  Walking back in the direction of our B&B, we ran across “La Bagatelle”, a low-key, but fabulous French restaurant, where we had a stunning and surprising meal.  The appetizers, in particular, were strikingly unusual: Salad with sautéed chicken livers and raspberries, and terrine of pork with apricot jelly.  Then Susan had a fabulous chicken supreme with asparagus velouete, while I enjoyed pork cutlet with truffle sauce.  Altogether, it was one of the best meals we’d had since… Well, France.

Back to the B&B and crashed out, to be ready to take on…

Day 3 (Sun): Edinburgh, reprised

We hopped up to head back to Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat.  In spite of the imposingness of the butte, the climb was not bad — the greatest challenge was finding the correct trail up the side.  From the top, we attained an unparalleled view of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth.  (Linguistic aside: Firth is a Scots word meaning “inlet” or “estuary”.  It’s originally from Norse, and is related to “fjord”, which gives some sense of just how prominently the Vikings figure in the history of Scotland.)  Among other features, we could get a much better view of the entirity of the Scottish Parliament building.  They tell us that the aerial view is important to fully appreciate the architectural design of the building.  We appreciated that it still looked rather like a jumble sale from above.

Probably the most photographed vista in the Edinburgh area

Susan enjoying the sunshine atop Arthur's Seat

The direction marker atop the Seat

After taking the air on the Seat, we headed back down, leisurely. Took a turn through a ruined chapel at the base of the Seat…

Ancient chapel just above Holyrood Palace. Susan does her part to stave off entropy.

And then headed back to the Mile.  There was a great deal more of Edinburgh to see, of course, but we weren’t going to be able to catch all of it, regardless.  So our goal for the day were the Vault tours.

The Vaults are a series of chambers located beneath the three major bridges of Edinburgh.  Not bridges over water, but bridges over the valley: they span out from the top of the central rock ridge to either side, meeting the hills that rise beyond the glacier-valleys that straddle the ridge.  Over the centuries, buildings arose along the tops of the bridges and up against the bridge arches, leaving vaulted spaces beneath the streets of Edinburgh.  For a time, these vaults were active as store rooms for pubs and restaurants, spare meeting space, homes for the otherwise homeless, and haunts of murderers and thieves.  In the early nineteenth century, they were condemned and closed because of water leakage and lack of sanitation, and it was only in the past decaded that some of them were re-opened to tourists.

The gloom of the Edinburgh Vaults, lit by Susan's sunny disposition.

Seventeenth century wine racks, echoes of long-forgotten pubs, wine shops, and gathering spots for Edinburgh's famed intelligentsia.

Our guide was a local history student, picking up a few quid by guiding curious tourists through the ill-lighted vaults and telling them tales of the people who lived and worked there and even an occasional creepy-crawley story.  Unfortunately for him, he had no other customers than us that afternoon, so we hounded him mercilessly with questions and requests for elaboration.  I could tell that he was torn between his history geek-ness and his canned spiel.  I think he was happy enough to see us off at the end of the tour.

From the Vaults, we went in search of the Museum of Musical Instruments (a branch of the U. of Edinburgh School of Music, as I understand).  While searching, we were amused to rest our feet near the Tron Pub (considerably older than the Tron that geeks usually think of!).  Sadly, no pix of Tron…  We did find the museum, which focused mostly on keyboard instruments, so we didn’t find any notable violas for Susan to drool over.  We were, however, treated to some fabulous harpsichord playing by a fellow who was working his way through the collection.

We still had a great deal of Scotland ahead of us, so we headed back early to the B&B to catch a nap and then an early Italian dinner. (The high point was the tagliatelle with salmon and white wine cream sauce; the calimari was acceptable, but not as good as that in Madrid. Oh well.)

We crashed early again, in preparation to fly off to the Orkneys in the morning.  But that’s another post, for another day…

So, clearly there are whole books on a country’s cuisine, but here are some things that British food has been to us:

British food, sort of like American food, seems to be basically family restaurant or pub fare.  The signature dishes are fish’n'chips and bangers’n'mash.  Everyone’s heard of the former.  The latter is sausages and mashed potatoes.

And oh the sausages!  One of the first things we discovered in the grocery store was Cumberland sausages.  They’re pork sausages with a pleasant mild flavoring, but there is something in the filling that makes them the lightest, fluffiest sausages I’ve ever tasted.  Every sausage with this name we’ve tried, in restaurants or cooked up from our own groceries, has been very good.  There are plenty of other kinds of sausages floating around here, but these are the ones we like best.  And it’s a good thing, since we have found nothing that tastes remotely like an American breakfast sausage here.

Fish and chips really do fill the slot for burgers and fries here.  There are chip shops everywhere.  Batter-dipped fried whitefish is incredibly good, especially if you eat it as fast as you can once you buy it.  It definitely loses something if you let it cool.

But here’s something that really flies in the face of the American stereotype: the Brits are not shy with their spices.  Terran learned from some of his Victorian era research that Britain began a love affair with Indian curry when India became part of the empire.  That has not gone away.  Indian dishes are often listed next to the fish’n'chips in pubs.  And if you see any food here, even packaged potato crisps (called “crisps” here because “chips” was taken) marked as “hot and spicy,” be ready for some real burn.  Even if you order your Chinese food in the US at the top of the heat scale, keep in mind that you’re only qualified for medium in the UK.  Brits like their hot food hot.

Another famous type of British food is the hot savory pie.  We learned at a historic food demonstration at Hampton Court Palace that this type of cooking dates from the Tudor era, where flour/water crusts were often used in place of baking dishes for stews.  Back then, the crust was just a wrapper to be thrown away.  Since then, it’s become an integral part of the dish.  Sometimes a pie has an entire crust, but often the stew is made in a baking crock with just rolled pastry over the top.

Steak and ale pie is everywhere.  However, Terran had a hankerin’ for steak and kidney pie.  This has turned out to be very, very hard to find.  We’ve checked dozens of pubs, and only one of them even advertised such a pie for sale.  When we asked, they were out.  Sigh.  So, a couple of weeks ago, Terran undertook a quest to bake is own.  He used lamb kidneys and did his research.  They turn out to be unintuitive and kind of difficult to prepare.  But the result was very good, and we’re going to make it again.

I, on the other hand, experimented with some Welsh cooking, inspired by our hike in Pembrokeshire.  Welsh cooking seems to be known for leeks, dairy, and bacon.  I tried a more modern recipe for a turkey and leek pie with a milk and whipped egg filling.  That was a lot of fun. It was a nice lighter contrast to the steak and kidney pie, which is nothing if not hearty.  I’ve also tried my hand at cream of leek and potato soup (with bacon).  This came out shockingly yummy.

I haven’t even touched on tea.

Tea the meal, which seems to fit in around 4pm between lunch and dinner, is something I can’t really figure out.  I’m simply not hungry for a pile of mostly carbohydrates at that time of the day, and if I skip lunch and try to go until 3pm, I’m likely to make myself sick.  And to be fair, we’ve read that formal tea is dying off in the UK anyway. That said, we’ve managed to make high tea work a few times, and it is so much fun that I’m sad that I can’t come up with any nutritional purpose for it.

I really like black tea with a bit of milk and sugar, and I liked it before I came here, so I fit right in.  Since coming here, I’ve sampled scones and clotted cream.  Clotted cream is a tasty and different pastry spread — basically cream cooked slowly until it congeals.  It has a flavor like light butter and a texture like cream cheese.  Scones are one of the few things I’ve eaten where I think you really need to go to a high-end pastry shop to get them.  The ones I’ve bought in the supermarket have, in my opinion, tasted awful, while the ones we’ve had at high tea have been wonderful.  I want to try cooking these myself.

Crumpets, on the other hand, seem to be great from the bargain counter in the grocery store. I picked a package up on a whim, and I really like them.  They’re like very holey English muffins, but much eggier.

If you’re hanging out at home, you are supposed to make your tea in an electric kettle.  We have one in the house, and it’s so convenient that I think I will look for one when we return.  We have a whistling kettle for the stove at home, but when you have company, it’s just so nice to bring the kettle into the room and plug it in so that people can serve themselves.

Oh, and off the tea theme, there’s cheese.  A lot of cheeses I think of as ordinary are hard to find here.  You can get emmentaler in the big grocery stores, but I haven’t seen any holey swiss.  On the other hand, cheddar expands from the orange block in the corner of the cheese counter to an entire way of life.  There are literally hundreds of different types of cheddar here, and most of them aren’t even orange.

In summary, this has been a great sabbatical for our food horizons.

Breakfast (supposedly) came with the room. It was a nice combined continental and American buffet with yogurt, cereals, sliced meats, cheeses, rolls, scrambled eggs, potatoes, and bacon/sausage. When we checked out, we were told that the breakfast was NOT included because we’d booked on a central Internet site, despite the fact that the website had said it was AND the concierge had said it was when we checked in. (I.e. the central booking site had said in generic terms that it wasn’t booking food, but both the specific hotel website and the concierge said it was included without caveats. We were fine either way, but we wouldn’t have eaten there if it wasn’t included.) Apparently, it cost €15 per person, per day. That’s more than we paid for friggin’ lunches in cafes. OUCH. However, apparently they’d kept lousy records, because they only thought we had eaten there one morning rather than four. So we gave up on making a nasty scene, paid an extra €30, and skeddadled.

There was an open-air market by our hotel, so we had gourmet picnic lunches for two days — baguette, cheese, pate/terrine, and pastries. The prepared meats and pate store had some absolutely terrifying prices: €28 for a jar and up. We tried not to look too poor as we roamed around to find something that looked fun that we could justify paying for. I found some duck pate with dates for €7. I’ve never tried a sweet savory pate before, and it was amazingly good — just enough date to hint at sweet. I got another jar to bring home, which was accidentally opened, so I should eat it before it goes bad :-p. Terran found a jar of pork and truffle terrine. That was also good and had no sweet in it (I dig sweet savory a lot more than he does), though we wished the truffle flavor was a little stronger. We also got a stinky triple-cream cheese (brie-like but much stronger flavor) and a small round of a bleu for a total of about €7. That turned out to be so much cheese that we used it for both picnics and a snack on the return train, and there was still a couple of bites left, which we brought home and stank up our fridge with. Whoops. I had forgotten the perils of stinky cheese.

For the remaining lunches, we had cafe fare. One time, I ordered quiche lorraine and Terran ordered hab omelet. (The quiche was actually served with salad, for the veggie-trackers.) At the other, Terran ordered the best beef burgundy either of us had ever tasted. We now want to dig up a really authentic recipe rather than the ones I have periodically pulled off epicurious for red wine I don’t like the taste of. It’s possible that you can get something to taste that good just by picking the right wine, but it seems like it was thickened and seasoned differently too. I had blanquette de veau (veal in white sauce), which I recall having learned about in French class but never tried. Also very good. In fact, for that meal, we both thought the other one had the better dish :).

We had three dinners at Terran’s friend’s recommended restaurants. In all cases, the standard menu was three-course, fixed-price, with the ability to swap out the standard options for fancier options at additional cost. Wine was additional (we always ordered a bottle, which Terran skipped). Aperitifs were offered, which was largely the option to drink more alcohol before the first course — we skipped that. The first course was essentially an appetizer (though it’s called an entree for those who plan to visit France and read French menus), though it’s scaled to one person. One time I had langustine bisque; another time I leaped at a veggie opportunity and had white asparagus.

Main courses were things like lamb, duck, fish, etc. in sauce. Most often, JUST that with a side bowl of some sort of potato brought separately. In that sense, most of the main courses we ate were a lot simpler than I’m used to in a higher-end restaurant. In some sense, you were getting the main course variety I usually expect by combining both the entree and the main. Though, for the record, the mashed potatoes that came with one dish were probably 50% cream and the best I’d ever tasted — I’m not a mashed potato fan, so that’s high praise.

Dessert was, well, dessert. I had mascarpone and orange one night (more bitter than I expect, but good), a sort of polenta creme brulee another, and we skipped out on dessert to go to the creperie across the street for the last, where I ordered a franginpani (sweet paste made with crushed almonds), pear, and chocolate crepe.

So if you were curious, that was our dining in Paris experience.  When we got home, we ate veggies almost exclusively for a week.

George's fish bar, London UK

Unfortunately, the awning doesn’t come out in this nighttime photo, but the full shop signage says:

George’s Fish Bar / Fried Chicken / Barbecued Spare Ribs Our Specialty / We Fry Fresh Fish / Calamari

?!?!

When we first saw this place, we couldn’t stop laughing.  I’m surprised that they don’t advertise hamburgers, pizza, Chinese noodles, and chilled monkey brains while they’re at it.

This is clearly a grease-pit, but we were so amused by the sign that we had to try it at some point.  Eventually, we did and discovered that it’s essentially just “George’s Fish Bar”.  The spare ribs and chicken were dreadful.  Oh well — it’s about what we expected.  Actually, the surprise was that the fish was not too bad.  (Though clearly not what we get at the most excellent local pub!)

But this is really a small reflection of the kind of culture we find in our neighborhood.  We’re living in a neighborhood that’s struggling between ghetto and gentrification, with a healthy sample of immigrants across the spectrum.  Near us, the predominant immigrant groups seem to be Turkish, Greek, and Russian (or the myriad of Russian-speaking former USSR states and satellites that appear Russian to my uncultured eyes, anyway).  We hear a medley of languages on the bus and English is often in the minority.

The local shops and restaurants reflect that melange.  Like “George’s”, many of the store fronts have clearly changed hands many, many times over the years, housing a succession of ethnic groups and their tastes of home.  There’s a Chinese restaurant on the main drag whose plate glass windows still proudly announce fish and chips.  (It’s now defunct; I wonder who the next generation to inherit it will be.)  The local groceries vend everything from kimchee to couscous to salsa, including some vegetables I have never even heard of before.  Within a few minute’s walk of us there are Greek, Turkish, German, and French bakeries and patisseries.  Butcher shops proudly proclaim that they carry halal meat.  There’s a cafe down the street from us that advertises Italian cuisine on its awning, but as far as we can tell it serves essentially British mainstream food.  It’s run by a Turkish woman who spent most of her career as a fashion designer in Egypt.

It’s a fascinating contrast to Madrid, which appeared (at least to our outsider eyes and linguistically impoverished ears) to be much more culturally homogeneous.  In Madrid, you heard essentially one language and most of the shops and overt culture were recognizably Spanish.  (Aside, I suppose, for the massive flux of dubbed Hollywood films.  On which, hopefully, another post another time.)  Granted, there appeared to be a significant number of immigrants from other Spanish-speaking nations, but there did not appear to be such a variety of different origins or ethnicities as we see here in London.  Beyond our neighborhood here in London, we see a high density of Indians, East Asians, Africans, and others.  We run into Nigerians on the subway and hear French on the buses.  The researchers I work with at UCL come from across Europe and beyond.

All of this makes London an exciting, but also a bit dizzying place to spend a few months.  The US is proud of its history as a great cultural melting pot, welcoming immigrants from across the globe.  (Though we’re currently struggling to resolve our own feelings about the current generation of Mexican and Latin American immigrants.)  But there are very few places in the US that approach this density of diversity, I think.  Different regions of the US have different ethnic mixes — Latin American and Native American in the Southwest, East Asians on the West Coast, a mish-mash of Europeans on the East Coast — but by and large, each city will have only a few highly represented cultural groups.  Perhaps New York or Washington DC approach this level of diversity — I haven’t spent enough time in either of them to get a real feel for it, the way I’m just beginning to here.

I suppose this is to be expected of one of the Great Cities of the world.  London is, after all, the capital of what remains one of the most powerful nations on Earth.  It was a capital city roughly 1600 years before Washington DC was a gleam in Madison’s eye.  I suppose it’s not a great surprise that it attracts such a wide variety of people from so many backgrounds and walks of life.  Sometime it leads to serious friction, of course.  Any time cultures (and economies) collide, there are bound to be.

It’s fascinating and fun and overwhelming.  In the short time we’re here, I’m sure we’ll only have the chance to just sample some bits of it all.  But I’m glad to experience what we can of it.

Oh, and the groceries have truly awesome olive oil…

I was suddenly struck by a clue-by-four in December and went looking for an English-language Christian church.  I have no idea why that didn’t occur to me sooner.  One Google search of “English language Christian church” turned up Community Church of Madrid, which turned out to be a fantastically welcoming congregation formed from a core of English-speaking expats and a lot short-timers like me.  I went to a bilingual candlelit Christmas Eve service that was co-hosted by them and a Spanish-speaking sister church.  It really put the mood back in the season for me.

In the theme of family and home, Terran made rabbit stew the way his father used to make.  Rabbit meat is more easy to buy here than in the States.  I’d never had rabbit stew before.  It was very good.  (Kind of tastes like chicken! :) )

On Christmas Day, we had an invitation from Terrans’s madrileña postdoc, who is home for the holidays, to have Christmas lunch with her family. We had a lovely time and were able to use some of our baby Spanish. The parents spoke no English, but Terran’s student’s siblings did, so we bounced back and forth between languages. At the end, they put on a children’s video for the 3-year-old, and Terran and I laughed that the Spanish was just about right for us. The food, of course, was amazing and unending, but this time I was braced for it: ham and bread and cheese for an appetizer, followed by gambinas (~prawns) cooked in butter and garlic, followed by a main course of suckling pig in the style of Segovilla, followed by a traditional dessert of turron (almond sweets) and marzipan. We’re glad we got a chance to taste suckling pig before we left, since we missed it when we actually visited Segovilla. It was amazing.

We got home in the late afternoon, which was still morning, back in the States, and called our families.  It wasn’t the same as being nearby, but it was a good time.

Now, we’re in the last day of our time here in Spain.  It’s hard to believe the time has gone so fast.  We want to find a way to hold on to the Spanish we have learned, and we hope to be able to visit Madrid again someday.  We think it is one of the undersung cities of Europe.

We still plan to post the story of our Pisa trip and hopefully a couple of other bits about Madrid, but all of that will have to come after we’re settled in London.  We fly on New Year’s Eve (tomorrow!).  The last few days have been crazy and stressful, and I’ll feel better venting about it after everything has turned out all right.  Wish us luck!

So, Thanksgiving rolled around, and we wanted to come up with some way to celebrate it.

Problem 1: Our family is all in the United States.

Problem 2: We have a tiny two-burner stove, one medium-sized stew pot, and no oven.

Problem 3: We couldn’t find any turkey, and we probably didn’t have anything large enough to cook it if we could.

(We actually did find a turkey later at a dedicated poultry shop.  There weren’t any at the butcher shop.)

So, being dedicated foodies, we hatched a plan to make a Thanksgiving dinner as reminiscent of home as possible.  We bought a whole chicken.  Then we cut up half a whole wheat baguette that had gone hard and mixed it with sauteed mushrooms, onions, thyme, sage, and butter to make stuffing.

(As a side note, we looked in five stores, trying to find sage.  We’d given up when we ducked into the last place, a specialty shop that sold, among other things, Peter Pan peanut butter for €4.50 per jar.  It had it.  Joy!  It didn’t turn out to be GREAT sage. There were still woody stems in it that we had to pick out while we ate, but it tasted great.)

So, we browned the sides of the chicken on the skillet in butter, stuffed it with the baguette stuffing (which turned out to be just the right amount — lucky), and shoved it in the stew pot with about a half-inch of chicken broth.  Then we covered and cooked on low for about two hours.  The effect was similar to slow-cooking or using a turkey bag.  Here’s what our compromise looked like:

Thanksgiving chicken

We will NOT be sorry to trade out the kitchen in this apartment to the larger, nicer one in the UK.  Literally only one person can be in this kitchen at a time, and sometimes that’s too many people.  Here’s what we were up against:

Our half-chef kitchen

We had the stuffed chicken with boiled new potatoes with butter and salt.  I don’t know what kind these potatoes are, but they taste very good that way.  And I was skeptical, but Terran was able to get enough drippings to make a nice gravy, though we didn’t have any giblets.

We got to eat this masterpiece while talking to our family over Skype.  Dad and I set up a video conference call, and everyone having dinner at my parents’ place had a chance to say hello across the ocean.

In the spirit of sharing food with people, we made some pancakes and gave them to the nice old lady and her husband who we share a clothesline with.  We told them in our broken Spanish that today was a holiday in the United States for sharing food with family and friends.  Our family was all back in the United States, but we wanted to share some food with them. She appreciated it, and she later told us they were very good.

We also attempted to make chocolate-chip cookies in our toaster oven.  This involved finding a recipe that used baking soda, since we couldn’t find baking powder (it later turned up in a huge cannister at a speciality shop, but we didn’t buy it).  As we expected, this turned out to be tilting at windmills.  You CAN make cookies in our toaster oven, but it heats so unevenly that you can only make them one at a time.  After we made a few, we gave up and ate the dough.  Ha!  No way to fail!

So, we have our souvenir from our trip to Spain.  It’s a sentoku knife of made of Damascus steel.  (A sentoku knife is a Japanese chef’s knife — almost the same as a normal chef’s knife, but with a slightly different shape that we’re geeky enough to prefer.)  We bought it on our trip to Toledo on Saturday.

You might want to click the picture to really see the wavy patterns in the steel.

Damascus steel cooking knife from Toledo

Toledo is THE place for Damascus steel.  Toledo is filled with shops selling all variety of Toledo steel: fancy tableware, hunting knives, full plate armor, decorative artwork, you name it.  And let’s not forget swords — replica swords from all nationalities and time periods.  In fact, many of the ornamental swords for our armed forces come from there.

And for the more media-minded, movie prop reproductions like these from The Lord of the Rings.

Reproduction helmet and gauntlet of Sauron

But the cool thing about a chef’s knife is that Terran and I cook like crazy people.  We’ve been whining about the lack of a good cooking knife in our apartment since we got here.  This is something that is special to the area, pretty, and we’ll use it constantly, even when we get home.  That’s an exciting kind of souvenir, something that kind remind you of a cool place that you will use almost every day.

As both travel geeks and foodies, we’ve been having a fantastic time exploring the culinary options here.  Here are some discoveries that we hope to replicate when we get home (up to ingredient availability and our own culinary fu):

• Pisto manchego: Naively, through the “US grocery store food lens”, I thought of “manchego” as meaning “Spanish cheese”.  Of course, it really means “In the style of La Mancha” (region in central Spain, south of Madrid).  Duh.  So there are many non-cheese foods that are manchego.  Pisto manchego is Spain’s answer to ratatouille and, IMNSO, is far better than the French version.  (Largely because the French version tends to be very tomato-heavy and more acid than I like.)  Susan succeeded with a very creditable version of this already.  Whee!
• Salmorejo: A thick soup-verging-on-dip.  Similar in construction to gazpacho (which is more familiar in the US, I think), but containing a large amount of bread blended in.  It must be the bread that makes it come out with a thick, incredibly creamy texture and flavor.  The first time we tried it, we swore that it had to have a ton of cream or cheese or something in it.  Nope — as far as we can tell, it’s just veggies, olive oil, and bread.  We wanted to try this at home, but our pathetic kitchen here, of course, has nothing like a blender or food processor and this stuff would be excruciating to try to make manually, I think.
• Calamares: Calamari.  The Spanish, by and large, have seafood nailed.  You can get calamares almost everywhere here.  You walk down the street and random bars have calamares plates and sandwiches.  (Yes, that’s breaded, fried calamari on a hoagie roll.  No sauce, just bread with your breaded cephalopod.)  But, on average, they do it really, really well.  The mediocre preparations here are roughly equivalent to the all-but-top-tier calamari preps that you’ll get in the US, and it’s not at all unusual to get calamares here at random pubs that rank with the best we’ve had in the US.
• Palmeras: Palm-shaped pastry cookies.  They seem to be made of something like rolled phyllo dough, baked crispy, and then dipped in chocolate or some other glaze.  (Had a v. nice strawberry one the other day.)  There’s a divine pastelería (pastry shop) just down the street from us.  This fact is very, very dangerous.
• Cocido: A stew made from (what else) salt pork, chorizo, blood sausage, onions, and probably some spices I don’t know.  In madrileños (Madrid-ian) style, also includes chickpeas.  Obviously filling, so it makes a good fall/winter food, and yummy.  (If you like pork, of course.  ;-)
• Croquetas: The Spanish version of French croquettes.  Bechamel mixed with (of course!) ham, breaded and fried.  (Did we mention that the Spanish really seem to like deep frying?)  Little balls of cardiac doom, but so yummy…
• Pulpo gallego: Galacian style octopus.  See above about Spanish mastery of seafood.
• Paella and other arroz dishes:  You can get decent-to-good paella in the US, so it’s familiar to many of us.  (Though it helps if you have a madrileña postdoc.  ;-)  But rice is a kind-of religion here.  There are restaurants that appear to specialize in rice dishes and whose menus list like 30 or 40 different rice dishes (and nothing else).  We have not yet taken the chance to try them, but that’s on the “to do” list.
• Aceitunas: Spanish olives.  Oh.  My.  God.  My new addiction.  I have always hated green olives, but that turns out to be because the green olives you get in the US suck.  Olives are also big biz here and the green olives you get here are lovely.  Smooth and mellow and rich, essence-of-oliveness flavored.  You can get them whole or, my favorite, pitted and stuffed with anchovies  (Aceitunas rellenos con anchoas).  Yes, even if you think you hate anchovies, you should try these.  (If you can find them, that is.)  The salt does lovely things for the olive and it’s a dreamy combination.

I’m sure there are more things that I should mention, but it’s late and I’m sleepy, so I’ll call it a post here.  Maybe we can come up with more later.

Bon appetit!

I have not tried the Schokinag drinking chocolate that Alyse recommends, so I can’t really comment on it.  But from the page I found about it, it looks like the recommended way to prepare that chocolate would produce an extremely rich hot cocoa.  (Susan and I have tried a variety of drinking chocolate that involves cocoa+melted chocolate solids that I picked up in Vancouver last year.  It came out very rich, but very hot-chocolatey in consistency.)

But when I say ganache, I mean really thick.  The stuff we were served was the consistency of honey with a little air whipped into it.  I have never been served a hot chocolate beverage anything like it anywhere in the US, including at the specialty chocolate shop Xocoatl in Taos, which specializes in Aztec-style chocolates.  (BTW, for those in the area, they do produce a killer, uber-rich hot cocoa — sort of chocolate’s answer to espresso, down to the demitasse.)

Anyway, I always appreciate pointers to yumminess back in the US.  I’ll keep an eye out for the various sources that people have pointed out.  And I’ll be in your debt if one of you can help me find this.  But I know that I would remember having encountered anything like this in the US.  ;-)

Oh, and as another followup, one of my local colleagues listened to my story and the description of where we found this dish and identified the chocolatier.  She remarked that this is a well-known chocolate shop here and is probably the pinnacle of chocolate con churros in Madrid.  So we’re now spoiled, I’m sure, by having started at the top.  ;-)

Over all, Sunday was a bit of a bust.  Well, a “more travel flexibility day”, anyway, as we failed to get in to see the thing we wanted to see.  But, as we were wandering around in downtown Madrid, looking for something else to do, we made a mighty culinary discovery.

We ran across a self-proclaimed “Chocolatería” (chocolate shop).  Of course, we had to investigate.  And the primary thing on the menu, that everybody seemed to be ordering at 11:00 AM, was “chocolate con churros”.

Oh.  My.  God.

When you order this, what you get is a plate of fresh, hot pasteries, and a mug of chocolate.  We were expecting some variety of what we would call “hot chocolate”.  But this stuff was much more like…  Well, like warm ganache (or slightly thinned melted chocolate, if you prefer).  I would say it was medium-dark, maybe 60% cocoa content, and spiced with hints of cinnamon and something else that we couldn’t identify.

And it was absolutely divine.

Churros are a long, thin pastry made, as far as I can tell, by extruding a doughnut-like dough through a star-shaped template into hot oil.  So they come out about the thickness of your thumb and maybe 8″-10″ long.  Crispy, and warm, and lovely.  And oh so wonderful when dipped in the ganache-like chocolate.

Why does America not have this?  Well, I’m guessing that you can find it if you look in the right places in ABQ, but you’d have to be able to speak Spanish there too.  We’ll be sure to look when we get back.  In any case, the fact that this dish has not become widely popular in the US is a terrible culinary tragedy.  We will have to see what we can do to replicate it when we get home…