The Fallas are coming!

After visiting the quintessential Spanish city, we returned to Burriana with Dad and Deb to find a lot had changed, starting with the enormous falla that had materialized outside our apartment building during our four-day absence. We will finally get to the Fallas in our next several blog posts, we promise. While the festival did take up a lot of our time during Dad and Deb’s visit to the Valencian Community, we did manage to show them a few non-Fallas highlights in Burriana, so we wanted to get that out of the way here first. Although Burriana is a seaside community, we

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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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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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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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