Category: Food

Cooking / Food / Galicia / Tourism

Galicia! Day 4

This post begins with a rewind to Day 3 and something I left out: a phone call after we returned home that evening from Mr. M’s sister, Conchita, asking if we’d like her to cook us a meal the next day. Conchita, you will remember, had previously helped cook some of the food at the furancho, to great success of course. Conchita is one of those Spanish mother types I had only dreamed of meeting and learning to cook from. She and her husband, Cito, live on a 40-acre farm about an hour from Sanxenxo. In her words, people come from miles

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Food / Valencia

Look at Dreamer navigatin’…

This is from our day in Valencia. Dreamer loves the Google Maps app. Really takes charge… Got us to the Central Market in Valencia, where I was able to buy lots of fresh shellfish and have it cooked at a restaurant right outside the market. Oysters from Galicia pictured below, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The rest was simply too messy (read: delicious) to safely get a picture of. Percebes (goose neck barnacles) came next, followed by langostinos, then two giant shrimp. Oh yes, my friends, this is just the first of many dispatches from the Shellfish

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Food / Restaurants

Pure Tripe

Took me four different tries, but before we left Madrid, I finally found a restaurant that served a typical Madrileño dish: callos, or stewed tripes. And yes, they were delicious. Unctuous and perfectly savory, just melt-in-your-mouth goodness. When cooking entrails, it requires some skill to get to this point. In the photo below, you can see a nice piece of crispy blood sausage in the center, too, which was the perfect counterpart to all of this goodness. I think I may be drawn to tripes in particular in a quest for the ultimate Kosher sin: there is some evidence that this word shares an origin from

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Favorites / Food / Getting Acquainted / Madrid / Restaurants

Madrid in Our Rearview Mirror

We drove to our home region of Castellón, a province in Valencian Community, on Wednesday. But I tend to process my experiences chronologically, so before I write about our adventures here, I want to wrap up our Madrid chapter. While Madrid is a fast-paced world capital, our best moments in the big city were those in which we were able to slow down. My favorite experience in Madrid was our Sunday night dinner with Doer’s exchange family, with whom he stayed 16 years ago. They invited us to their home in a Madrid suburb and prepared traditional Spanish food, including various

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Food / Spotted Abroad

Un Poquito de Homesick

After a jet-lagged week of navigating a new culture, we were bound to feel little bites of homesickness nipping at our heels. I think it’s safe to say after a week of eating out (with one exquisite exception – more on that later), Doer is ready for his own kitchen again. I’m thinking about my family after learning my grandmother passed away. This wasn’t unexpected news, but it’s still very sad, and it lends a bittersweet feel to the days. Even though Spain is very different from where we’re from, we keep stumbling across strange little signs of home. On

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Food / Restaurants

La oreja del cerdo de Van Gogh

What better way to start out detailing our food experiences than this perfect dish at Gastromaquia in Madrid’s Chueca neighborhood, the Wilton Manors of Madrid if you get my drift… and the residents certainly want to make sure you do, from the first moment you arrive at the rainbow-painted Metro station! Gastromaquia was easily our best meal yet in Madrid. Since we went for dinner at 9:30 PM like rubes, we miraculously got a table on a walk-in and watched as everyone showing up after us without reservations was made to wait up to an hour. All of the courses we

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