Supper

Arugula salad with hazelnut vinaigrette, hazelnuts, and jamón serrano,

Just to make it as classy as possible, we also had Tijuana-style bacon-wrapped hotdogs. Yum.

Supper.

Pictured below is the star of the show from our paella dinner on Saturday night. Salad: goat cheese, tomato, toasted walnut, canonigos, and balsamic vinaigrette. Appetizers: Jamón, chorizo, manchego cheese, olives and green chile dip. Dessert: Flan. Drinks: Manzanilla sherry, chardonnay, pomegranate wine (an experiment from Jay), green chile wine (also from Jay and half-way drinkable), and Lustau East India Solera sherry the Lustau paired with the Flan and was a life-altering experience. Yum.

On an unrelated note, Lisa are have Vietnamese in Santa Fe right now on our way to see Arcade Fire.

The jamonero.

When you buy a whole leg of jamón serrano imported from Spain, you're immediately confronted with the problem of how you're going manage the huge, unwieldy, fat-embalmed piece of meat. In a proper Spanish home, your jamón sits on a special rack that makes handling the thing much easier. A whole jamón is pricy, so after you've spent all that money, if you're a sometimes tightwad like me, you'll immediately be too cheap to cough up another $50-60 for a professionally-constructed jamonero to store and sit it up properly. Instead, you'll do this:

1. One 20 inch piece of scrap plywood from the floor of your shed, washed.
2. The finest quality cheap pine stud cut down to about 8 inches.
3. Several zinc-plated brackets to hold the various parts together.
4. The highest quality U-bracket that money can buy at the local Wal-Mart.
5. A heavy-duty piece of foil from a disposable pizza pan to protect the jamón from the possibility of reacting with the zinc-plated brackets and the possibly unsanitary plywood.

Voila! Instant jamonero! And it works pretty good too!

Facts:

The best jamón is jamon iberico de bellota. In the US, a single leg goes for about $1200. Ours is a plain jamón serrano and pricy, too, but not nearly so. Jamón de bellota is so special owing to the acorn-rich diet that the pigs eat for a good part of their life and as well as the extra-long curing process. It's probably the tastiest thing in the world, IMHO.

You store your jamón in a jamonero on your counter (out of reach of dogs) covered by a breathable cloth. It should remain good for months as you slowly eat it up.

Supper

Tuna empanada, sherried onion soup with saffron, shrimp wrapped with jamon Serrano, and manzanilla sherry.

The proud chef with her first tuna empanada. A stunning success.

The tuna empanada.

Empanada, shrimp with jamon, and sherried onion soup with almonds and saffron.

Supper and dessert.

For Diane's birthday: Beans. Red chile. Chicken adovada. Mashed potatoes. Quelites. Flour tortillas. Chocolate mousse.

Grabé en la penca de un maguey tu nombre...

So begins the great Vicente Fernandez title track to the movie "La Ley Del Monte." 
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Note:  Don't be distracted by my musings about mariachi music.  This post is actually about Barcelona.
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This past summer, on a whim, Lisa and I went to Albuquerque to see Vicente Fernandez, Mexico's "King of the Ranchera."  He's kind of like the Frank Sinatra of mariachi music.  The show was great fun, from all the cool Mexicans in their cool pointy boots to the man himself, singing his heart out.  Not long after the show, I went out and bought a collection of his songs (in retrospect, I should've done this before the show, but oh well...).  One of the songs was "La Ley Del Monte."  I liked this song right away but there were certain words that I did not know.  One of those words was "penca."  I asked, Lupe, one of my fluent New Mexican coworkers the meaning of this word.  She told me that it was "girlfriend."  I went home and listened more closely, but it didn't make sense.  Translated to English, it would've been, "I carved your name into the girlfriend of an American aloe plant..."  This is how northern New Mexican Spanish can trip a guy up!  I looked around a bit more and found out that a penca is the fleshy, pulpy leaf of the maguey plant (a kind of aloe).  The maguey plant is used to make a tequila-like hooch.  The next day, I re-consulted with Lupe.  She had gone back to listen to the song overnight and soon helped me get the definition right.

Anyway, it's a great song.  The basic idea is that Vicente is coming back to town, having been away for many years fighting in the revolution.  He confronts his childhood sweetheart--the same girl with whom he had carved his name into leaf of a maguey many years before.  In the intervening years, she has married another.  Vicente somehow manages to comandeer a live performance at a local fiesta to sing a song about their childhood experience with the maguey and he reproaches her for her faithlessness (He also cries copiously while singing the song, which is something of a trademark of his videos).  The final cool thing is that the lyrics are almost psychedelic in their weirdness.  He sings of pencas that can speak and rebuke the faithless woman.  Even the new pencas that grow on the plants have their names carved on them.  Symbolically, this seems to be somehow representative of the true depth of the their love even though she is married to another. 

OK, so on to Barcelona:  When we visited Barcelona this past Septiembre, this song was fresh in my mind.  One afternoon, we visited a famous park, Parc Güell, which is well worth a visit if you have several hours to stroll around.  Parc Güell was designed by Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, the famous architect who is kind like the Frank Lloyd Wright of Barcelona.  Gaudí's works are everywhere in Barcelona.  While walking through the park, we noticed some plants that looked like the maguey plants that we had heard about in that song.  Upon closer inspection, we saw that carving your name into a penca is a bit like carving your name into a tree over here.  They all had declarations of love etched onto the pencas.

Here are some pictures:

In this picture, aside from more pencas, you can see a Gaudí tiled tower on the right, as well as Gaudí's still unfinished cathedral, La Sagrada Familia off in the distance in the center (you'd better click on the picture if you want to see it, currently surrounded by cranes).  Of all the cool things in Barcelona, La Sagrada Familia is the one thing that will very literally take your breath away more than anything else you have ever seen in your life.  That's the way I fell about it.  It's jaw-dropping in a very real, and literal sense.

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Here is Vicente's dramatic, titular scene in La Ley Del Monte.  It's low quality video, but still compelling, even if you only speak English.  You'll get the idea.

Bisti and Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Again!

We took the dogs camping to my favorite places again this weekend.  Here are some pix and video.  You'll get the best effect if you click on each pic for all the details.

From a little-visited part of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness:

We found a couple of massive fossilized tree stumps.

We found a couple of vacant eagles' nests.  Here's a video and a couple of pix:

We're not sure if it's legal to get this close.  Actually, we're not even sure this is an eagle nest, but that's our best guess.  In any case, it is not currently in use.

Another eagle nest can be seen on the top of one of these hoodoos.  It was located only 100 yards from the one above.  When you google "bisti eagle nest" you see photo after photo of the same nest in the same part of the wilderness-i.e. the place were more visitors go.  Here are the floyderdog blog, you get truly unique eagles nests!

Lisa found a dinosaur toe or finger bone.  Go ahead:  google "dinosaur phalange image," and you'll see a picture just like this one, except ours is a better specimen.  Once again, the floyderdog blog comes through!

From the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah WSA:



Each time I go to Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah, I try and try and try to get a decent photo of these yellow/orange hoodoos, but I never quite get the light I want.  These are the best pictures of these hoodoos that I've take so far.  They're still underwhelming.  Someday, I'll have truly great pix of these.  One thing I need is a really great sunset, which I have not been lucky have during any of my serious efforts to take a picture of this area.

Lucy was spayed just four days before we I took this video.  She's crazy.

It was windy when we got up Sunday morning.

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A few months back when we visited Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah, we met a professional photographer named Cecil Whitt who was camped out near us.  We chatted with him.  He gets up daily before sunrise and goes out and take pictures until the sun comes up.  Then he hangs around his camp all day sleeping, eating cold beans, and drinking Miller beer until just before sunset.  Then he marches back into the hoodoos and takes pictures until well after sunset.  He does it day after day wherever he is shooting.  Ah, now that's the life!  I was very curious to see what a true professional could do at Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah.  He has finally posted his pictures on his website.  They are fatastic pictures.  He even has some photos of my beloved yellow hoodoos. 

I have read some of his thoughts on photography.  One thing he admits freely is that to make pictures like his, you need to start off with a good photo, of course, but you also need to tweak them in photoshop.  His pictures are fantastic, but I can tell you that the final product looks different than real life.  Even with the best light at the twilight, the colors are never so vivid in real life at Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah as they are in his photos.  I don't write this to be critical in any way.  To the contrary.  I wish I could make similar images myself.  His philosophy is that part of the art is the way you process the final picture.  Also, upon reading his thoughts on photography, I realize more and more that my goal to create a twilight shot at Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah that is almost exactly how it was in real life is not realistic owing to the optic limitations of a camera compared to a human eyeball.  Except for very particular circumstances, the light and subject of a given setting almost always have a far greater range of color and contrast than a camera can capture.  Therefore, it is usually impossible to capture an image that is "just like it really was" at the time you took the picture.  In my pictures above, I have tweaked them minimally in an effort to make them look as close to my memory of the "reality" as possible.  In Whitt's photos, you'll see a whole new of range of ideas.  Look here to be blown away by his images.