Good Eats!

Food.

I’m sure that all of you have been wondering about the supposed “Mediterranean diet” that my host family prepares. Well, I have a few comments on that.

I love the food here. It is not, as many of you are probably thinking, spicy like Mexican food. In fact, they are notoriously scared of anything “picante” or “spicy”. The most-used ingredients in our meals are potatoes and eggs, probably. Besides that, we have eaten a lot of seafood such as fish and calamari, which are amazing. When preparing calamari, they buy whole squid, slice it into sections (rings), and fry them. Last night we had calamari sandwiches: baggett, fried calamari, and mayonnaise. I could eat them endlessly. There is also a ton of ham, and we have chicken on occasion as well. Oh, and we have “pan”, or bread, at every single meal without fail – and it’s going to be tough to return to sliced bread. The baggett style bread is just way better.

There is another major difference between our meals and Spanish ones: we always have three main things. For example, at home we eat a meat, some sort of starch, and a vegetable. Here, we have meat only or potatoes only… unless it’s a stew, which we have often as well.

Well, I have three dishes that I would like to describe for everyone that have been especially… interesting, and I’m sorry, but I only have a picture of one of them.

The first dish we had the week I arrived. It was an entire plate of cold white rice with cold tomato sauce (the consistency of tomato soup… not Ragu) on top. Then, I was given 2 hot 6” chicken sausages and a fried egg for good measure (they love throwing in an egg to complete a meal). It was an eclectic mix of flavors and temperatures to say the least.

The next dish is really a cluster of dishes that spanned a length of time lasting three days. I do not remember exactly when we had this, so let’s just pick Friday – Sunday for the story. There was an unidentified pile of prepared meat on the counter on Friday morning, and I didn’t know what it was (obviously… it was unidentifiable). It had the appearance of chicken wings and legs, but there were also some random bones sticking out of unfamiliar places. To help with the mental image, it reminded me slightly of the undeveloped twin that some people carry in their sides… you know, the ones that end up being little bundles of flesh, teeth, and hair… Anyway, I was given two pieces of the meat along with my dinner that night, and I found it to be pleasing.

The next night, the family had guests over, and our dinner was more of a buffet style spread on the table of whatever we wanted. The spread included cheese, ham, really fishy fish, mussels, and this crazy meat again. I was happily chewing on another piece of the ambiguous meat when I noticed Fernando, my host father, digging through the pile looking for his favorite piece. I asked him what he was looking for, and he said, “the head.” Well, that was exactly the segue I was looking for, and I asked him – obviously with tact – what type of meat it was. He said that it was “conejo” (rabbit), and that he loved the brain the best.

On Sunday, we had a stew in which the recently identified rabbit was served again. I was munching away, pulling out bones as I came across them when I found myself chewing on a more rubbery substance. I pulled out that bone and saw teeth on it – yes, the great mandible jaw bone of the rabbit was mine, and I have to say that it was pretty darn good.

The final meal is the one pictured below. We had it on Monday night, the 22^nd of February. It was a plate full of smelt fish that were dipped in flour and fried. We ate them, head and all, by dipping them in mayonnaise. It was surprisingly not that fishy, but maintaining my cool under the deadly stare of those lifeless eyes was difficult.