Galician food review: did we eat like kings or peasants

Months before going to the North, a basque guy told us we would eat like kings. I told him we are vegetarians, so we will probably eat like peasants. Because of the apparently excellent seafood (oxymoron in my opinion, how can you even approach it with that stench?), Galicia especially really has the rep for good food. There are actually pulperias, which means octopuserias. The north ended up somewhere in between king and peasant for us silly stubborn vegetarians, as we still relied heavily on pizza (only good for about four days in a row…), but there were significant improvements in some areas.

1) Pan Gallego: FINALLY, we went to a place where people eat brown bread, and they hand it out like it’s air. You don’t buy a whole loaf, because they are baked into rounds of like a half meter in diameter. Graded on a worldwide basis, this bread gets a B. It’s not exactly German barley bread, or brown Irish soda bread, but it’s a solid effort. I have heard lots of Europeans disparage American bread, because they think we only eat airy wonder bread. But every grocery store in the states has good reasonably fresh brown bread sometimes with walnut, sunflower seeds or any of many other interesting ingredients. American bread is excellent if you buy the right kind, which is not hard to find (as I said…..every grocery store). In contrast, all I can say is that in general Spanish bread is basically something you keep around in case you run out of toilet paper. Most Spanish bread is bland white bread, which is kept uncovered all day so that if you don’t buy it in the morning you can etch glass with it. If you succeed in biting through it you find that it is full of powdery sawdust. For the first time in my life I do not routinely buy bread when I go to the store. Not so with pan Gallego, graded on a curve for Spain this bread gets an A.

2. Queso de Tetilla: This is the nun’s tit cheese, named so because it is often made in convents and has a characteristic breast shape, complete with a nipple. Recently we had a british visitor who was a cheese enthusiast, so my Spanish coworkers were trying to explain the tetilla. He thought they were saying that the cheese was made out of human breast milk. In general cheese is an area where Spain does pretty well, and In contrast to bread totally kicks the ass of the US. To this day I still don’t understand what “American cheese” is nor do I want to. All I know is that United Statesians simply prefer an English cheese, cheddar. In our defense, we are clever enough to add chilis into a cheese, so although our time honored traditions are weak, our innovations are strong. Our standard cheese we buy in Madrid is queso Manchego, which is a blend of sheep, cow and goat milk which runs along a gradient of aging. This one is good, especially the curado, considering its the cheapest thing in the market. I don’t know a lot about the somewhat more expensive tetilla, but we went to markets where old ladies were selling super fresh cheese alongside all manner of local produce. Contrast this with Madrid’s frankenfood imported from Almeria’s creepy white tent agricultural system. I have confidence in the quality of the Galician cheese. I bought one that seemed to be smoked a bit, although this was subtle. It was good and versatile and reminiscent of Gouda, and of a similar softness. Like gouda its a little bland, but if that’s what you are looking for the cheese gets a B+.

3. Galician white wine: You are served a teapot-like thing and then drink it out of bowls. I think we had one from the Rias Baixas region, but as I am a wine ignoramus I don’t really know. It was a white wine, which I normally don’t like. This one gets an A-, damned good but I’d still prefer a decent beer.

4. Galician beer: Estrella Galicia replaces the hegemony of Mahou and Cruzcampo in the north. All three of these are complete garbage, so its hard to notice the difference. Ocassionally, Galician bars will have a portugese beer on tap, Superbock. For a medium light lager, Superblock absolutely crushes all Spanish beers that are not made in Barcelona. So Galician beer gets a C+, only on the merits of the occasional presence of the neighboring country’s beer.

5. Pimientos de padron: When I first came to Spain I had no hot sauce, and nothing more exciting in the roomie’s spice cabinet than paprika and black pepper. I went to the produce section of the grocery store, and asked if they had pimientos picantes. I was directed to a bag of pimientos de pardon. I was so pissed, they were about as hot as an icicle down the front of your pants. I showed them to my roommates, who were afraid of them because apparently most are not hot, but occasionally there is a wild ass one in the bunch which melts your face like a laser. Knowing the Spanish take on chilis I was skeptical to say the least, as some Spanish people think their patatas bravas are spicy (only once did I experience spicy patatas bravas and those were not in a restaurant). I have seen pimientos de padron as a tapa before in Madrid, one of the few truly vegetarian ones. But tapas aren’t usually free in Madrid, so I was reluctant to shell out 4-6 euros for a small dish of food that wouldn’t come close to satisfying my nutritional requirements, and despite everyone’s recommendations would not even be hot…at all. I mean no detectable capsaicin, like an Anaheim chili.

So with some trepidation I finally tried the things in Ferrol, just down the road form Padron which is the source. As I predicted, I never encountered a hot one. But John did and Becky did. Basically all these are are whole fruits, stem and all, fried and salted so that the outer skin is a bit singed. You eat it whole except for the stem and the former sepals, like you wound a pepperocini. I had no idea what I was missing because these are truly awesome, at least in Galicia. The flavor is somewhere in between fried okra and New Mexican green chili, without the potential slime problem of okra. We had them like four times, I want some now. A.

6. Galician breakfast: I keep harping on this, and I am aware that different cultures do different things, but the Spanish breakfast is wholely inadequate. It’s not that the foods are bad, there just isn’t enough calories or volume. The toasted bread with crushed tomato and oil of the south is largely replaced by croissants in the north, both of which I totally enjoy, but even if I was a 5 year old girl I would still be hungry. This is not a matter of culture, it just doesn’t make biological sense. Bodies need fuel BEFORE making demands of them, even if the demands are only a normal workday. This becomes especially poignant when you are cycle touring. Riding a bike all day you can rip through 4000-10,000 calories. If you burn more than you have in the tank you go into a caloric deficit and begin eating yourself. Once you go down this path (called “bonking” for the “bonk” sound you make when you fall down and can’t get up), it takes hours to recover even if you then have a giant meal. People undertaking endurance activities know that you eat before you feel hungry, because if you feel hungry you can expect your day of activity to end shortly. The problem in Spain is that if you ask someone if they have something else available to eat (meaning more substance) they look at you as if you can’t possibly be asking that. Of course, the kitchen isn’t open yet…why would the kitchen be open? D+ (the croissants are tasty with jam and butter at least, make sure and eat the butter you will need the calories).

7. amount of food. with the generous giving away of bread for lunch and dinner, and the generally larger size of the food, I wasn't walking away hungry from meals not called breakfast. So this was a big upgrade. B.

the backwards caministas

OBEY

these people are looking for the pirate ship from "The Goonies". Chunk is in the middle.

here is "the riddle of steel" pondering the riddle of where the hell is the campground. crom's beard!

We are back to the hellhole vampire city after two fabulous weeks of vacation. And the best part is that we still have two weeks of vacation in Italy coming up next month. The northwest is my new favorite part of Spain, although the cities are underwhelming (hard to beat Barcelona), the general attitude of people and the rural surroundings really take the cake.

I am sort of running a half-assed cycling blog here, with the hopes that it will one day be useful to touring cyclists. So far none have ever left a comment....but just in case they are out there I should go into a little advice about getting around with your bike on the train. This ain't Amsterdam, ace. Spain is lagging behind Europe in making its trains bike-compatible

Do to outlandish luck, and a successful hapless dumb foreigner act (we are good at this because we are in fact hapless dumb foreigners) we arrived in Santiago de Compostela from Madrid with our bikes, on an overnight sleeper train. I really made an effort to find out under which circumstances you can bring a bike, and under which you cannot. The information is not made available easily and when you get the information it is totally ambiguous. so its a crap shoot. Generally speaking you cannot bring a bike on a national train (meaning a long distance train usually with only a few stops). The exception seems to be if you have paid the high price for a family sleeper cabin. Even then you are limited to 4 bikes per cabin, though even as a bike enthusiast i have trouble seeing where the bikes would be stowed. They are supposed to be dismanteled, although really they only require removal of wheels and pedals, and supposed to be bagged but apparently wrapping in plastic is sufficient. We had bought tourist class beds which are 4 to a cabin, unisex and with strangers. So at the platform with 10 minutes to spare we had to rip the bikes and gear apart, squeeze through cavernous hallways to our separate cabins and appease our roomies about our bikes taking up the whole cabin. We had only 10 minutes to spare because despite arriving 45 minutes early, we had to wait for the platform number to come up onto the board only 15 minutes before departure. Then a horde of people who had actually arrived later than us beat us to the line to the escalator, then we got turned away from the escalator and told to use the very slow and busy elevator. I had it easier than becky, because her cabin was full of old women who brought such large bags that they could not lift them into the overhead storage and thus consumed the only logical place for a bike frame (on end, fork stuffed into the closet), So we actually put the bike frame precariously overhead. Most of the ladies were satisfied, but one kept bitching that it was dangerous. it was really her fault that there was no place else for the bike to go....but we were totally bending the rules to the breaking point, so we had to try and make everyone happy. My cabin had one guy, so i had time to help becky, and stow my stuff without creating a major ruckus although i felt like i was creating a major ruckus. However, even after finishing I was so stressed I couldn't sleep for hours.THIS IS THE WRONG WAY. HERE'S WHAT TO DO INSTEAD: If you want to travel on a nice efficient national train you must do so on one with sleeper cars like ours, these are called trenhotel. But shell out the bucks to buy the cama familial. Otherwise you need to string together multiple regional trains or media distancia trains which are much better able to accommodate bikes. When you search the RENFE (spanish national train company) website, many regional trains will not come up. So you have to be clever, and chop your trip into segments, and search based on these until some regional train options pop up. On our way home yesterday we took a regional train from Oviedo to Leon. This was exactly like the commuter trains in the cities. With a little bungee magic I was able to secure my bike vertically to some rails so that it did not block any exits and i could be free to take a comfortable seat and read. The stretch from Leon to Madrid was a regional express, which had an entire care empty in the back with d-rings for securing bikes and wheelchairs. We also saw a media-distancia train with a specila handicap/bicycle car. it took 9 hours mind you, but it was so much better than the stress from the trip to Galicia, and it only cost 35 euros each, and no bike disassembly.

Ok, heres what we did: We stayed a night in Santiago de Compostela. So heres the deal about this town. A long long time ago, someone found some bones in the future site of the cathedral. Due to some miracle revelation and the stamp of approval by some bishop, these bones were somehow pronounced the remains of St. James the apostle of Jesus, a man who was excuted in Jerusalem. How did he get to Galicia, well that link involves a holy unmanned boat, and the miraculous enclosing of the remains in stone. No flying spaghetti monster, however. Why noone questions the obvious truth...that someone elses bones were found...is a matter of religion. My god has meatballs and thousands of noodley tentacles. Why James? I don't know, there were 11 other apostles after all. I guess you've got to rule out Judas, and Peter was already taken in Rome, and Thomas was a doubter of Jesus's zombie skills, and John was kind of an asskisser. Whos left...Sneezy, Dopey, and oh yeah St. James. So anyway, since the pope bought all this it became truth, and for centuries religious pilgrims have poured to the cathedral site from all over Europe.There are numerous pilgrimage routes culminating on the cathedral. Anyways, its a nice city and a nice cathedral well worth visiting. It is third in importance only to Jerusalem and Rome for catholics, though I reckon most American catholics don't know much about this.

We rode out of there on a hilly inland route towards a Coruna. It was really confusing because 70% of the towns are so small they don't appear on the map, towns have multiple names (Spanish and Gallego, yep Galicia has its own language) and the road numbering system appeared to be different from our map. But we made it. The really small roads are nice for their lack of traffic, but if you tend to worry about where the hell you are I'd suggest sticking to the secondary highways. A Coruna really pissed us off because it turned out to be a a big city we could not escape. Our escape route spontaneosly turned into a full-bore freeway, and we decided to get the F out on the train to Ferrol. I will say that the beaches at A Coruna were very nice, otherwise we didn't give this place a second look.

The short train ride went around the bay through awesome little houses and farms. In Ferrol, we stayed with John, an affable former roomate of Becky's. He is some form of naval engineer who works at the ship yard, and gets a monthly stipend (in addition ot his salary) for living expenses. His stipend is 50% more than my salary. He gave us a bar tour of Ferrol and showed us a couple absolutely perfect and almost empty beaches. All of the Medditerranean is currently writhing with human flesh, but these far superior beaches are empty! Somehow, despite barely speaking Spanish, he knows how to get every barman to bring out a secret stash of liquor concoction for free. One guy had replicated Bailey's perfectly, and another guy had found a way to recreate the gummy coke bottle candies as a drink. I also managed to learn what a kite suit is and actually witness kite surfing, and get shitfaced which is one of John's specialties.

Aftre this break, we started our ride for real, taking the western coastal highway, then an overland route to the north coast. Up to this point we were having trouble finding places to camp. But as of the town of Viveiro the character of our tour changed a bit. Here is is possible to go on a beach bum bike tour. You can ride in the morning, early afternoon, and arrive to ste up camp with plenty of time to go to the beach and have a swim. The water is cold usually, but it only takes a few minutes to get used to. My favorite was in between Foz and Ribideo, where awesome waves were crashing into a tiny beautiful beach around sunset. Although I previously had an aversion to developed campgrounds, a hot shower is key in this circumstance. If you had warm weather you could repeat this cycle for at least a week...ride a bit, hang out at the beach, ride a bit, hang out at the beach. Shortly to the south was As Catedrais, which at low tide features all sorts of water sculpted arches, passage ways in the rocks. As with a lot of places that are cool, its popular, so you have to put up with hordes of humanity. But definitely worth a stop.

Shortly after Ribideo, we entered Asturias, and the first thing we saw was an Asturian bagpipe and drum band. This is also where we started following the northernmost pilgrimage route backwards. it was funny watching the look on pilgrim faces wondering who was going the wrong way, us or them? Luarca is a notable town along here, a it sits in a canyon with a small harbor with a light house. The view from the light house featured the distant green hills so typical of Asturias (and the labels of Asturian dairy products, this is happy cow country), a nice beach, and efficiently stacked town built on the canyon walls which reminded me of an old world Bisbee, except for the aforementioned oceanic business. We camped on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, unfortunately there was no super easy beach access that night, but it was awesome. Finally we made our way to Cudillero, a foggy harbor town, also incredibly steeply built on cliffs. Then we spent one night in Oviedo. We decided we wanted to finally go get shithoused at a sidreria on our last night in Asturias. We passed up an expensive looking one in the tourist district, and then literally the next 5 or so were closed. Considering that we were in the biggest town of Asturias which is famous for its cider throwing bars, this is absurd.... and I guess I already said how we got home. Luckily it won't be long before I get out of this city again.

random darts

1. Next teusday, we are off to galicia/asturias for 2 weeks of cycling. I will be really happy to be somewhat cool again and see some green somewhere in my field of vision. I love deserts, but when the summer rolls around I am really craving wet greenness.

In Spain EVERYBODY is on vacation for the month of August. You can't count on anything getting done, be it burrocrat papers, or simply keeping a shop open. Its a ghost town at our work. It the only time of the year in Madrid that it doesn't feel like someone is following you around all day pushing you because you are not moving fast enough. So, the city heat blows but you might think that some people would be stoked to hang around and enjoy a more relaxed madrid.

But heres the curious antropological fact: Instead of taking the opportunity to be rid of their fellow humanity, everybody does the same thing. They go to the beach all at the same time. I've seen it on the news, it looks like every beach on the meditteranean is hosting Woodstock. Except theres no concert to watch, its just the beach. That is a strange contrast, Americans tend to want their space but Spanish people love to be surrounded by hoardes. You couldn't pay me to go to one of those beaches right now. I like going to the beach, having a swim, reading a book in the sand, throwing sticks to dogs, whatever....but what do you do for a month at the beach. I don't understand, at all. Isn't that exceptionally boring?

2. I was thinking of Roll this morning. Haven't seen the guy in over 10 years. I think he's a hot shit tattoo artist in portland now.
"You dont learn from books, college boy, you learn with your fists!"

3. When I was a kid we went to church every sunday at the church that was associated with my catholic school. It was boring. So boring that I read the bible to pass the time. Granted it was an illustrated bible for kids, but it was big and I read the damned thing front to back. I tended to like the monsignor (this is above a normal priest, below a bishop), I don't know why, I barely ever listened to what he said because I was so enthralled by Leviticus. I puzzled quite a bit over the organ. There was a person near the alter on the ground floor, sitting at and playing the organ. The wierd thing is there was a large almost bedroom sized wooden box with pipes coming out at the ceiling. I was told these were the organ pipes. I couldn't get my head around how pushing the keys on the organ caused air to come out of the pipes, thus making the sound. The best I could come up with is that there was a team of people inside the wooden box at the ceiling. They would have to be kneeling because the ceiling would be low in there. Clearly, when one pressed the keys on an organ it would send a signal to the person manning the corresponding pipe, and they would give it a lungful. I figured the signal would be something like a stoplight.

Later my fascination with the box of pipes morphed a bit. I would fantasize about how I could get into it, or at least up there. I could swing on a rope form the giant crucified jesus, to the angel sculpture midway up. Then with a few deft moves i could just grab a curve of one of those pipes which might allow me enough leverage to get up there.

One day, I started to visualize something that the monsignor said. He said the church was God's house and Jesus's house. I'm sure I understood this figuratively, but I had a daydreaming problem. Sometimes still to this day, what is in my head is just more intriguing than the actual world and i get lost for a little while. So I thought about where in the church Jesus lived. The priests always emerged from behind the alter, and I always wanted to go back there and see what was there. I think this is part of their theatre that grabs you imagination when you're a kid, and perhaps keeps you somewhat in their thrall in adulthood. I figured they lived back there, but i guess people probably don't live in the back of churches. Anyway, it didn't seem like Jesus just lived with the priests, what would he be doing back there when they came out for mass? Just having a cup of joe and reading the newspaper? It had to be somewhere else, and the only possible explanantion was that the organ pipe box, was Jesus's bungalow apartment in the church. Another thing the monsignor said was that the church was a house of love. This of course, would influence the decor of the Jesus apartment. I imagined all white walls, except for a big red valentine-esque heart shape painted on one wall.