Spanish views from a small town

Day 5. My throat is now almost completely clear. My nose is dry, but that's because of the lack of humidity in the air. My voice is still a touch gravelly, but it's very recognizably mine. I declare this Covid finished, though I won't waste a test until Friday, when my seven days are up. I am running out of ideas on what to make to eat. My husband has been eating at his mother's, or making for himself next door, so I get to eat things he normally doesn't like. Except, I stocked the fridge and pantry thinking he would be quarantined with me. So, I don't have all the exotic ingredients I would otherwise need. My husband did give me two avocadoes last week, passed to him by someone who has an avocado tree. They went to one of my healthier meals at the beginning of my quarantine, homemade guacamole with bread. I also did vegetable soup on my worst day, salads, chick peas in sauce with chourizo and vegetables, and Oriental-style stir fries with plenty of vegetables....

Yesterday, scrolling through Facebook, an article caught my eye,  La hambruna española que fue borrada de la historia. It talked about what we remember in Spain as the "years of hunger" which happened in the 1940's, after the Civil War, during the Second World War.  According to the article, it was more than just scarcity of food, but an actual famine comparable to the famine of the Netherlands of 1944, or of Greece during the Occupation, or even the Irish Potato Famine. Between 200,000 and 600,000 Spaniards are thought to have died during it, either directly of hunger, or of hunger-related diseases, such as typhus. The origins were not just because of the overwhelming disaster of our war, but also because of attempted state planning by Franco which failed miserably. Here, in Galicia, it didn't hit as hard because we didn't (and don't) have great tracts of land given over to commercial farming, but, rather, small plots that feed family farms, which excedent w...

Christmas and its pantagruelian feasts have ended; now it's the New Year's turn next week. Having my cooking enthusiasm grow and wane at will, after organizing two special meals, my mind seems stuck and I still have little idea what to make for lunch today. Oh, well. Food we have, but I'll still go food shopping this afternoon, only I can't leave the township. Sigh. The good part is that it's sunny, even though it's cold. Tomorrow, however, a cold front will move through, and the storm, Bella, is supposed to leave us with lots of rain, high winds, and a red alert along the coast, with waves topping at ten meters. The weather for the next week is supposed to remain cold, with sun chased by cold rain showers, snow on the higher mountains, with the wind coming straight from the cold, damp Arctic. Typical winter weather. Yesterday was a peaceful, and tranquilly boring day. Yet, not boring in the sense of wishing the day to end, go to bed, and start anew the next mor...

We have our bread delivered daily by a local bakery. Every morning, around eight thirty, they drive up, the passenger comes out, hangs the bag with a loaf on our door, and continues. Every day, except Sunday. That day, we're on our own. So, either my husband or I drive to a bakery roundabouts. Today, I drove into Rianxo and went to one that has very good bread. The smell of fresh bread reached down the street and pleasingly lodged itself in my nose. So did the smell of fried onion that was being prepared for their empanadas . There was a line in the street, and as I was standing there, cars drove up and parked where they could, and people left them to join the line. It's a popular bakery. When it was my turn, I went in to the little cubicle (even without Covid-19, it can't take much more than three people), and put in my order for a loaf, and, while I was at it, asked about their empanadas . I was told they had only corn ones today, unless I wanted to order one and come...

My husband has finally been bested by the Scoville scale.  He loves hot, spicy food. Whenever I put some cayenne pepper into a stew or a sauce, he tastes it, and then goes to get the Tabasco. Sometimes, he so generously sprinkles it, I can smell the acrid odor of the vinegar from the little bottle. But he likes it. He also loves hot chourizos . Whenever he buys some, he asks for the hottest the butcher has. Only once has he ever said a chourizo was up to his level, and the small company where he bought them admitted they had committed an error by putting too much hot pepper in that batch. Whenever someone offers him a sample of the hottest chourizo on sale, he tries it and shakes his head. It's not that hot. So, the other day in Pontevedra, when I was visiting an American food shop, I stopped at the shelf with hot sauces and pepper flakes. The owner, upon seeing my interest, immediately came over to me. He explained that the sauce I was examining was made from the Carolina R...

If the United States can go overboard, it will. If the rest of the world can copy it, it will, too. Not only does the rest of the world copy the clothes, it also copies the foods. Fast foods of all kinds, with all different kind of flavors, have appeared all over the world. Fast food franchises, from McDonald's to KFC, to even Dunkin' Donuts, have opened up in a great number of foreign cities.  When a craze appears in the U.S., it spreads everywhere, and touches everything. I have read that pumpkin flavored foods are in every supermarket once September hits. Some of the foods thus flavored are too weird to even think about. Pumpkin pie cheesecake ice cream? Greek pumpkin pie yoghurt? Pumpkin spice English muffins? Pumpkin spice coffee creamer? Pumpkin spice liqueur? Pumpkin spice cream cheese spread? Pumpkin wine?? Mexican chile pumpkin mole?? Pumpkin spice Kahlua?? Pumpkin pie spice butter spread?? Pumpkin spice puffed corn???? Have we gone insane with the pumpkin?  Well,...

The rain has made a comeback today, at an inopportune moment. After last week's sun and moderate temperatures, many were hoping it would last until at least the beginning of this week. In many places there have already been celebrations for a month, but those celebrations culminate this week on Shrove Tuesday. Carnival is here. Carnival is ancient, and has roots that tap into pagan spring rituals of fertility. It celebrates a time when the old is destroyed to make room for the new. The habit of eating all the bu tchered meat from the previous fall, along with all the animal fats saved for cooking, is typically attributed to the onset of Lent and its dietary restrictions. But the original purpose of pi gging out around this time of year, lies in that , long before industrial cold was developed, it was meteoro logical cold that preserved the food. W ith the warming temperatures, the preservation came to nil, and the food would rot if left uneate n much longer . Another ritual wa...

Food. I've written about it before, but it's an everpresent theme and something we think about every day. Every day we choose what we eat for breakfast, what we make for lunch, and what we reheat for dinner. As well as what we can stuff in our face between meals when hunger strikes like an angry tiger. Unless it's a very special meal we usually buy timesavers so that the preparation is faster. We can get together a meal for four in around a half hour or less now. And we do so without thinking much about where the food has come from, except at which supermarket we bought it and if it was on sale. It wasn't always like this.  I have a book somewhere in this mess, I believe, called Russian Journal. It talks about a husband and wife who go to Soviet Russia in the 1970's. The husband is a doctoral candidate at Harvard and gets permission to do research in Moscow University and then-Leningrad. The wife wrote the journal about their stay. In one chapter she mentions a vi...

I'm just about to sit down to a plate of sushi. When I first arrived here almost twenty-five years ago there was no way I could have said that. In Boston I had been accustomed to food from different parts of the world. Here there was only Spanish food and the ingredients for Spanish food only. My palate had just begun to emerge from a childhood of "I don't want that. I hate that. I don't even want to look at that!" to an appreciation of different foods. Though here you will find the freshest food you can throw at a plate, I felt like a castaway, condemned to the food of yore with no difference in sight. Gradually, though, it started to change. As Spain began to receive immigration from different parts of the world and people travelled, new things began appearing in supermarkets. Little things, like cole slaw. Only it's not called cole slaw, but ensalada americana (American salad). Once, looking at the usual refrigerated pizzas, etc, I noticed it but ignore...