Back to the Point: Spain

The point of this blog was to put up our pix from our trip to Spain last September in a piecemeal fashion so that viewers could understand what they're looking at and not suffer vacation photo burnout. Now that we're planning another trip to Spain in six weeks, I'll have to hurry to get my pix up. Let's see how I do.

Breakfast in Madrid: Breakfast is not a hearty plate of pancakes and sausage. It's more often a quick pastry and a cafe con leche. Since I don't drink coffee, I end up with fresh-squeezed orange juice. You don't sit at a table with a grumpy waitress coddling you until you're hard-boiled. Instead, you head for a place like La Mallorquina in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and eat your pastry standing up as if you were in a bar, except that it is all baked goods and coffee. More detail here.

Our first breakfast in Spain at La Mallorquina on August 31, 2009:


The scene in La Mallorquina during our 1st breakfast:


Here is a treat from La Mallorquina on our last day in Madrid before heading home (9/11/09):

Caracoles (aka "snails")

According to my interary, we arrived in Madrid on August 30th, 2009, and then we ate snails. This is true. "Where," you might ask, "did you eat those snails?" Or even more likely, you might ask, "Why did you eat those snails?" I will try to answer these questions.

The second question is easier, oddly enough. Lisa has heard me going on and on about Spain for years now. It was important for me to introduce her exactly right to Madrid. There was no way that we were going go hang out with all the Irish expats at some Irish pub just because they have better beer, that's for sure! Nope, we needed some really classic Spanish food in a really authentic Spanish bar. We needed to eat standing at the bar drinking una caña, the small-sized, refreshing draughts of beer that cut the sweltering heat but don't leave you bloated. You can bet that we'd be throwing our used napkins on the floor too!

Lisa never really got used to the idea of throwing your used napkins on the floor in Spanish bars even though everyone else in the place was doing so. This led to great fun for me throughout the trip, because I commenced with surreptitiously tossing my used napkins at her feet as often as I could just to "accidently" remind her that this was the local custom. Fortunately, I'm a pig. I use a lot of napkins. Otherwise it would've appeared that I was just intentionally throwing countless crinkled napkins at her feet just to be annoying.

So how did we end up with snails/caracoles? Well, the first bar que tenia una buena pinta (that looked good) had a massive pile of fried squid in their window. On my first trip to Spain, I noticed the many bars with pictures of fried squid outside by their front door. The squid in Spain is different from chewy-poor-excuse-for-calamare that you find in Italian restaurants here. In Spain, the squid is chopped cross-sectionally across the "head" of the squid. The head is hollow on the inside, so each cross section is a round segment which, when breaded and fried, looks just like a fried onion ring. One of my first impressions of Spain was that, "Gee, these people sure seem to love their onion rings!" Despite my initial ignorance, it wasn't too long before I learned that those onion rings were really fried squid. I did eat some squid sandwiches. They weren't bad. They were fairly tender and tasty enough dressed with lemon juice on some decent bread, but I never really got a taste for them. They are kind of bland. You can see a nice picture of an authentic Spanish bocadillo de calamar (i.e. a squid sandwich) here.

So again, why the snails? Well, the bar was authentic. We were in a touristy area, it was mid-afternoon on a Sunday, and the place was packed with Spaniards (and us). This is always a good sign. There were no Germans/Brits/Japanese here. I didn't really want squid, so I asked the bartender, "What is the especialidad of the house?," tripping over the word "especialidad" just like I always do. "Calamares and caracoles" was the answer. So we had snails. They weren't bad. They're a bit chewy, but the broth was flavorful and fairly spicy by Spanish standards. We ate the whole plate. Here's a closeup:


And where did we eat the snails? Well, I can only guess. I know exactly where the place is. Until yesterday, I was under the impression that there was a picture of nearly everything in the universe on the internet, but I have found at least one place in Madrid that has not been documented yet. This is quite crazy because you can go to Google Maps these days and get a street level view of nearly everything. If you go to Google Maps and type my address, 1311 South Pacific St, Las Vegas, New Mexico, and then double-click on the little icon on the map, it will take to a street level view of my whole street. My house is there, plain as day, with a little spring snow melting in the front yard. So why can't I find this specific bar in Madrid? I can't say. You can do street-level tours of many major streets in Madrid, but not of this one (Calle de Postas). This is most inexplicable, because Calle de Postas is the main, quarter-mile long pedestrian route between La Puerta del Sol and Plaza Mayor. These are probably the #1 and #2 on the most visited sites in Madrid. The Calle de Postas is full of life with all kinds of street performers day and night. There are loads of tourists and locals strolling up and down the street 24 hours/day. Why this street is not viewable at street-level on Google Maps is a mystery to me. Several adjacent streets are viewable in exhaustive detail on Google Maps.

My failure to pinpoint that specfic bar on Google Maps led me to spend several hours poring through Google Images searching various combinations of Calle Postas Madrid Caracoles Calamar Bar Cerveceria Etc. Again, this is one of the most lively, most visited streets in Madrid. There is a lot of action. I figured I'd find thousands of tourist photos documenting every crack in pavement of Calle de Postas from Sol to Plaza Mayor. I had no such luck. I did finally find some websites that recommend the best calamar in Madrid. They listed two places on Calle de Postas, Cervecería Sol Mayor and Bar Postas. After extensive searching, I finally found a picture of a mime performing on Calle de Postas with a picture of Bar Postas in the background. It looks like the place, but dang it, the angle is wrong. I'm pretty sure, but not 100% sure. I never did find a picture of Cervecería Sol Mayor, so who knows? Lisa seems pretty sure that Bar Postas is the place, so I guess we'll just have to go with it. This whole exercise demonstrates how much time a person can waste on the internet looking for answers to trivial questions. Here's the only picture of Cerveceria Bar Postas that I could find.

Chocolate Con Churros

Not far from La Puerta del Sol in the center of Madrid is La Chocolatería San Ginés. Although I am not an expert on the subject, I have been told by native madrileños that the CSG is the world-wide standard for chocolate con churros. It is the standard by which all other churros are measured. It's like the Yankees to baseball. It's Yellowstone to national parks. It's the Louvre to art museums. It's Elvis to rock and roll. It's Everest to mountains. It's El Camaron to flamenco. It's Coke to soft drinks. It's Saudi Arabia to oil. I could go on, but the point is that the CSG is the gold standard.


The churros at the CSG are served plain, without sugar. There are sugar packets at the table that you can add to your churros on your own. There is no cinnamon in sight. The churros are served with hot chocolate. As you can see, it's served in a cup, but it is barely liquid. It's more like warm, thin pudding. It's a very rich chocolate much stronger and closer to dark chocolate than your basic hot chocolate in the US. The churros are fried dough, of course, but are not overly greasy. There is a good crunch and a light, steamy interior. They are satisfyingly crunchy and chewy. You dip them in the chocolate.

Chocolate con churros is a common mid-afternoon snack, una merienda it is called. It is a very filling snack what with all the fried dough and the thick chocolate. It is substantial, but the truth is that you need a filling merienda around 5:00 p.m. to tide you over, because you probably won't have supper around 10:00 p.m. In other words, without la merienda, you'd starve while waiting for dinner.


By pure chance, we stopped for the night one night in Astorga in northwest Spain. Astorga is located along the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgramage route to Santiago de Compostela, the site of St. James' remains (more on this some other day). Aside from the pilgramage business (which was and still is a business), it turns out that back in the 1800s and 1900s, Astorga was one of the main chocolate manufacturing centers of Europe. There is not much chocolate manufacturing in Astorga any longer aside from a few artisanal producers. I guess the Swiss cornered the market somehow. Aside from chocolate, there are a few other interesting sites in Astorga. For example, there is a gothic cathedral for the pilgrams that is famous mostly for being overwrought (pic here).


Right next to the cathedral is the most famous site in town, the Palacio Episcopal (above). It was designed by Antoni Gaudí, a famous Spanish Catalan art nouveau architect who lived around the turn of the 20th century. The building was commissioned by the local bishop to be the bishop's residence, but upon completion, it was deemed so extravagant that nobody dared live there.


El Museo del Chocolate of Astorga.


The cathedral and Palacio Episcopal were interesting, but for us, the most interesting site in Astorga was El Museo del Chocolate. The museum itself was not all that interesting. There were lots of displays of antique chocolate-making mortars and pestles and forms. There were also a very large number of displays of antique promotional items like the one above. The coolest thing, though, was a video that showed the old-school technique that they used to make the chocolate. This was very interesting. Afterwards, the gift shop was also very interesting, because you could sample and then buy all sorts of different handmade chocolates of varying percentages of cocoa. After extensive sampling, we eventually bought some dark chocolates and some milk chocolates, both with almonds. They were all very good, but the milk chocolate had a richer flavor and creamier texture to my palate. The dark was good and flavorful, but a little too brittle and waxy. The brittleness lessened the richness and creaminess that I prize. We also bought package of the chocolate that you use to make the chocolate for chocolate con churros. I think we left the place with five pounds of chocolate (literally).



Here is a picture of Lisa's first batch of chocolate con churros from just a few days ago. It took us five months to get around to making them mostly because neither of us has ever made a churro before. The chocolate came from the bar we bought in Astorga. The churro recipe was from Lisa's brand new Spanish cookbook, Spain and the World Table. The first batch of churros was excellent, but next time, we will omit the cinnamon and probably use one less egg to see if we can come closer to matching the CSG churro gold standard. And the chocolate? Delicious!