Holiday decorations - Banyoles (January 2019)

From Flickr album: 3 Kings - 2019

Little gilda snack - Barcelona (May 2017)

From Flickr album: Barcelona and Banyoles - May 2017

Correfoc - Banyoles, Spain (August 2015)

Welcome to the Mouth of Hell

View in Flickr album

Christmas pageant - Fontcoberta, Spain (2011)

The town of Fontcoberta, near Banyoles in Spain, hosts a live Nativity pageant. The audience walks through the old town to see different vignettes.

More than meats

supplies for impromptu bbq

At the end of Meats Sweats's description of protein-heavy holiday foods, I noted:

A visit to my life around Christmas would leave you thinking I subsisted entirely on cookies, booze, and spiced liquid eggs. My upcoming June trip to Spain will give me a chance to get another perspective.

Well, yes, there are veggies and variety in Catalonia! Burgers, cupcakes, and pizza too.

cupcake craze hits Barcelona....

...and the burger fad too

Between the rich food of the wedding (the reason for our visit) and the near-constant dining out, we still ate too many sweets and too many meats (and I say that as someone who follows a quasi-paleo diet). But that was entirely due to our lack of a kitchen than it was some to deviance in the culture.

Admit it, you're a little disappointed. Shouldn't there be some place where all food is meat? A kind of Willy Wonka world of salami and steaks, undulating bacon rivers, and soft lard beaches. Yum.

Meat Sweats - Christmas in Catalonia Pt. 2

Christmas Eve dinner - 2 meat dishes, sweets, red wine

Welcome to part 2 of your request for food, fotos, and fotos of food. Stop now if you're vegan.

What struck me most about the food was the amount of meat. Meat, glorious meat. Not a vegetable in sight. No complaints! All of the food was delicious, served with friendship and love, and I enjoyed every bite. But I was surprised at the lack of greenery.

Christmas Eve roast chicken stuffed with sausage, dried fruit, pine nuts


Christmas Day dinner included roast chicken and blood sausage.

One 7-course meal consisted entirely of seafood and meat dishes. A long-promised salad turned out to be a bit of frisee perched on the side of plate, topped with a lonely olive. I devoured them both and reached for the flower arrangement.

Jamon (ham) from La Boqueria market

But, then, it was the holidays. A visit to my life around Christmas would leave you thinking I subsisted entirely on cookies, booze, and spiced liquid eggs.  My upcoming June trip (2013) to Spain will give me a chance to get another perspective.

Note to self: Add Magnesium Citrate to packing list.

Molt de gust - Christmas in Catalonia, Part 1

 
all that remains of Basque pintxos (tapas)

By popular demand, this crowd-inspired post will be about food and fotos and fotos of food. But first, some context.

My little brother Brett, who lives in Geneva, invited me to join him and his girlfriend for Christmas with her family in Barcelona and Banyoles -- that's in the Northeastern part of Spain, Catalonia, for those of you without an atlas handy.

I always have an atlas handy.

That'd be a great name for a detective or adventure man, no? Atlas Handy fired one shot. The waiter fell to the ground with a thunderous thud. Faint, but not dead. Atlas missed. Or, did he? A great cry arose from the great hall beyond. The generalissimo, that evil-doer? El muerto. Atlas Handy finished his scotch, bouncing coins off the waiter's flaccid belly.

Ahem.... Context. Spain. Christmas. I'll make a separate post about the peculiar holiday traditions of Catalonia, but since I was there with a family, my time was spent with them rather than hitting the tourists hi-lights.

Shell sculptures light up the Barcelona night. Christmas Day, one traditional dish was a chicken broth with these kinds of pasta shells (escudella).

Sure, we walked past some famous stuff, but mostly we shopped, cooked, ate, drank. Like being at home, only it was Barcelona and therefore 1000 times more awesome.

fried chicken on bread with mayo, topped with a local pepper & a bit of Basque sausage

Tapas -- small plates, sometimes just a few bites -- are the most popular way to eat out. Also called pintxos (in Basque... check your atlas), most of our meals away from home were eaten in this style. Accompanied by wine and sometimes coffee, we enjoyed tapas as early as 11am and as late as 11pm. Barcelona is a famously late-night, all-night city, so even as we finished a meal at midnight, other people (younger people) were just beginning.

Some places, you sat and ordered from the menu or by pointing at a display case. Other places were more like a buffet, where you wandered around picking bites off the board and balancing a plate, a napkin, a camera, a drink, and some handsome Spanish man -- dear lord, a whole country of black-haired men, sigh.

smoked salmon with roe on bread, topped with "baby eels"

Prices seemed quite reasonable, certainly cheaper than tapas in the U.S. One lunch for 3 people, where we ate *everything* Ron Swanson-style, killed a bottle of wine, and had coffee & desserts was about 75 euro. Sounds like a lot, but the same amount & quality at Portland's Toro Bravo would be 3x that.

At the busier buffet places, your bill was tallied by the number of toothpicks left on your plate -- each bite speared through with one. No idea how people don't cheat that system. Undercover pintxos police?

Post reaching TLDR status. I'll save the topics of meats, markets, and traditional holiday dishes for another post.

I am so hungry now.

local green peppers, not spicy, except sometimes they are

All the fotos: Spain - Christmas 2011