Spain, Part 4: Food Glorious Food

When Mr X and I are abroad, we get serious about the business of eating. Well...I guess it doesn't matter where we are, we love to eat. I'll try just about anything and I find that this sense of culinary adventure usually leads to delightful discoveries. Once in a great while I'll stumble upon something disagreeable, but that always contributes to a good laugh and a great memory. So here I'll take you through some of our Spanish meals:

For some meals we went out, but for others we simply went to the grocery stores. The above is a photo of the results of such an occasion. Slices of Jamon Iberico with leftover (from a restaurant meal) tortilla de patata. It was such a delicious meal - I loved it. For desert we had Crema Catalana from the grocery store. It was just okay.

The picture above and below were from another evening's trip to the grocery store. Once again we had some jamon iberico but we paired it with some fantastic aged manchego cheese and perfectly ripe strawberries. For dessert we scored with Tocino de Cielo...pretty much like flan but surprisingly tasty. I really liked it. The name is strange though - "Bacon from Heaven." I have no idea why they would call it that. It tastes nothing like bacon, I assure you. But it might just be from heaven.

These pictures are in no particular order but I swear we didn't eat jamon at every meal...the order is just off on these. Below (the next 2 pictures) we enjoyed a meal at the Museo del Jamon so of course we ordered ham. Accompanying it was some crusty bread, some sweet flavorful melon and croquettas de jamon. Another superior meal. We were too full to order dessert.

This was a tortilla de patata. It is perfect in it's simplicity: potatoes with eggs and onions. It SO good. Later I had a sandwich were they put a slice of this tortilla between a sliced baguette...nothing else on it - no mustard or mayo or anything. You're probably thinking it sounds just so bland, but you would be wrong.

Mr X ordered some rabbit and chicken paella at a restaurant in Toledo. It was the best paella I've ever tried and one of the best meals we enjoyed while in Spain.

We decided to try out some 'real' flan after we'd experience Bacon Heaven. I figured that if the stuff from the store was so good, the real stuff from a restaurant would be better. Turns out Bacon Heaven couldn't be beat, though this flan was quite good as well.

This was my favorite meal:

It was a very tender and moist roast piglet with fries. I loved the fact that the hoof was still attached and there were even hairs still on the leg. I tried to get a close up of the hoof for your viewing pleasure.

At that same restaurant Mr X ordered the pigeon and although it was mouth-watering in it own right, we both agree that my little piglet was the more superior meal.

Here Mr X is enjoying garlic soup. He tries garlic soup wherever he goes - Germany, France, Spain... He always likes it but I believe it is his opinion so far that the Germans make the best garlic soup.

This doesn't look like much but it was incredible. It's called pisto manchego....kind of a Spanish ratatouille. I loved it.

And now we get to the not-so-good choices:

I just had to take a picture of the above because it looked so completely unappetizing. I'm not entirely sure of what it is but I believe it's a slice of bread with some sort of vegetable filled mayo explosion on top of it. The little pieces of bread next to it with the cheese and wieners tooth-picked on it didn't look much better in my opinion. You would think that after seeing these two things I would have chosen something much tastier but I didn't. This is what I ended up choosing:

A fried calamari sandwich. Tasteless and rubbery. The bread wasn't even very good but everywhere we went people seemed to be gobbling these things up so I thought, "they must be that good if everybody is eating them." *sigh* Nope.

Mr X ordered some sopa de mariscos. Seafood soup. I didn't think it was bad at all, I actually liked it but after a few spoonfuls the fishiness of it does get a bit overwhelming.

This was the worst thing we tried while in Spain. It was a shrimp empanada. The outside crust was very flaky and pastry-like but the inside was revolting. It tasted like slightly rotten mashed shrimp. I tried several bites, thinking maybe it would get better. I shouldn't have given it the benefit of the doubt because it just made my stomach upset.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed trying out the Spanish food. Some of it I absolutely loved but I still like French food better. And Italian. And Greek. And German. And Czech. (That makes it sound like I don't like it - I do....my problem is that I just love food in general.) I'm such a pig.