Susan’s Summer Vacation: A Culinary Journey to Spain

When it comes to traveling, exploring food is my mission. I travel to discover food and find out about the lives of the people who create that food. It’s such a fantastic way to get a glimpse of a country’s culture, to be able to step into someone’s real life, whether you speak their language or not. The language that I’ve found people communicate the most easily with is one based on interest in food. My experience has always been that when you speak the language of food, when you are truly interested in a country’s cuisine, how they prepare it, and get involved with tasting, wondering, enjoying, sharing that cuisine, it really opens up people’s hearts.

The way I go about this is simple. No matter what city or village I’m visiting, I work really hard to explain that I want to see and taste the food from the local area. What people eat at home and how they prepare it, NOT what’s going on in the normal places where they send tourists. It’s critical to keep pressing on this because typically in many countries I’ve visited, the hotels, taxi drivers, and guides tend to think you don’t really want the local fare, that what you want is a nice, clean restaurant, a tourist trap. But eventually, with persistence, you can get them to tell you about the local places, and that’s what I did on my summer trip to Spain. I tried to make sure all the restaurants I went into were loaded with locals, off the beaten track, and had menus that looked exciting. Plus, I made sure to go to all the local markets where you often find some of the best food at little stands, treats from someone’s home, very cool, very exciting, and truly very inspiring.

Traveling around Spain is pretty simple and pretty spectacular (very different than my most recent travels through India). Who wouldn’t be in heaven exploring tapas from all over Spain. Because I love to cook as well as eat, I carry a little notebook with me everywhere I go and keep a food journal. If I eat something yummy, I write down what ingredients I think are in it, how I think it was prepared, even though I’m totally guessing. I try to paint a picture (and take one too even though I hate taking pictures) of what the dish is and how I think I can reproduce it when I get back home. It’s all about being able to recreate and experiment with a dish when you get back home and maybe even come up with something better than the original dish. I don’t worry about an exact recipe, I just want to remember what I had in two months when I finally get time to take a look at my notes. If you love to cook and eat, you’ve got to try doing a food journal on your next trip.

Here a few interesting ideas from my Spain food journal that I’d like to share with you.

Tomato Toast
Every place I went in Spain, on the side, I’d get served these wonderful slices of toast called Tomato Toast. It’s just bread drizzled with a delicious olive oil, toasted in a skillet or on a griddle, and then rubbed with garlic. The finishing touch is taking a really yummy tomato, cutting it in half, and rubbing it on the toast until the toast turns red. It’s served with slices of Spanish Tortilla or thin slices of some wonderful salami or delicious warm manchego cheese, just a bit more interesting than crackers or bread.

I had another dish I just loved that was a variation on this. On top of the Tomato Toast were caramelized onions cooked in olive oil with lots of black pepper. The onions were cooked until almost crispy golden brown, bringing out the full flavor of the natural sugars. The toast was coated with this and topped with a slice of goat cheese and some slow cooked, mashed up eggplant. Wow, it was wonderful.

Dessert
There were a couple of desserts that really stood out for me and they are very simple to make. One was in my favorite town of Granada. I LOVE lemons so this dessert was perfect for me. Basically it was something like this:

1 quart of crème fraiche or crema
1 cup of condensed milk
Juice of about 8 lemons

Put all the ingredients in a blender and puree until combined. In the bottom of a martini glass, place a spoonful of orange marmalade then fill the glass with the creamy lemon flavored mixture. Freeze until set up and serve. Wow.

Then I had a wonderful rice pudding in San Sebastian with way more cinnamon and milk than the American version so it was very soupy, but very traditional for that area. Fantastic.

Café Granizado
I’d been walking all over Madrid, lost, and it was about 105 degrees. There was this tiny stand, with ice cream, thank God. I ordered a Café Granizado. What I got was a strong coffee served over crushed ice with caramel ice cream in it. That was the MOST refreshing cup of coffee I ever had. It was exactly what I needed and suddenly I could have cared less that I was lost in Madrid, exhausted, with no taxis to be found.