Erik's Blog

On Saturday, March 6, 2010, I attended the 517th annual Fest da Arribada (“Arrival Festival” in the Galician language) in Baiona, Galicia. In the port of that small town, 517 years ago, on March 1, 1493, a boat called La Pinta returned to Spain bringing news of a New World to the west, filled with bizarre mostly naked humans, corn, potatoes, peppers, tobacco, tequila and cowboys. It was the first of Christopher Columbus’ ships to return, and, should your childhood textbooks be believed (they absolutely should not!), the first proof that the Earth was not round. Normally Spaniards need little to no provocation to have a celebration, so there’s been no stopping this party for half a millennium!
(more…)

This past weekend, we went to Vigo, Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of Spain near the Portugal border. On Thursday morning, we got up early, left The Wee One with my in-laws, and drove seven hours west to the province of Galicia. That afternoon, I worked like normal, feeling extra worldly burning a charred spot on a hotel desk with my laptop, while Marga studied for a test about Project Management or some such thing. On Friday morning, she went to take her test and I worked all morning, except for when I when I went out for a brief cafe con leche and a palmera pastry for breakfast. Friday afternoon, I worked some more and then went out to meet Marga and walk around the city.
(more…)

Just when I had almost forgotten about the First Annual Tapa Week from last December, it rolled around again and we celebrated the Second Annual Tapa Week this past week in nearby Laredo, Spain. I must say that this is quickly becoming my favorite festival of the year. There is little better in this world than going from bar to bar with friends and enjoying a fine wine and an elaborately constructed snack with each wine.

And it’s not just that I’m a glutton for…er…gluttony. As I mentioned last year, there are several reasons why I am in favor of this festival as a general local citizen. It gets people out into local establishments, spending money and applying social lubricant, it provides a stage for local restaurateurs to showcase their craft, and it generally makes for a more contented populous. Triple win!
(more…)

If Simon’s going to go all quintessential for SP4: A New Hope, then I guess I should too. As an expat, one encounters a lot of strange stereotypes about what foreigners think your country is like. Probably the most common I’ve heard is that Americans eat nothing but hamburgers. Rather than dispel this myth, I’ve sort of adopted it as part of my “the American expat” role. For five or six years now I’ve thrown a hamburger party on the Fourth of July, and somehow it’s become a ritual on my daughter’s monthly birthday celebrations. So here we go.
(more…)

This year I made another “Thanksgiving Pizza”, which I choose to define as a pizza with turkey as a topping eaten on the fourth Thursday of November. My in-laws are visiting this entire week, so we had a nice dinner with family. Even Nora had some turkey today mixed in with her vegetable puree, which she dutifully ate twice the normal quantity of (I told her overeating on Thanksgiving was a requisite for her to keep her American citizenship). Other Nora news includes a third tooth, a top incisor that is making an appearance setting off a chain of events that somehow effects her bowels, setting a new record of eight movements today, one requiring an emergency bathing procedure. I would like to wish all my users a wonderful Thanksgiving, and thanks to you all for reading. Here, have some pizza.
(more…)

I intentionally left out details about the food we ate in my posts about our trip to Bordeaux a week ago mainly so that I could combine the photos into this one mouth-watering post.

The truth is that we ate way more than we usually do and came back feeling bloated. In the week since we’ve been back, we’ve been nearly fasting, and feeling much better.
(more…)

One of the best things about autumn are the pumpkins. In Spain, there are very few round orange pumpkins that match the image that an American has when he thinks of a pumpkin. That’s why it was so difficult to find one for Halloween last year. This year, however, I have agents embedded in the farmers markets scouting out the perfect gourd.

Today at the grocery store, there was a particularly fine pumpkin specimen, of the type most commonly seen in Spain. So I pulled Nora out of her stroller to take a photograph with it. At first she was terrified at being out-of-stroller in the grocery store for the first time, but eventually we sat her down on the checkout conveyor belt and got a photograph with her and the big gourd.
(more…)

I do have to admit that feeding Nora vegetable puree is actually kind of fun. After the first feeding, I realized, “So this is what bibs are for!” After the second day, it occurred to me to ditch the bib, as the shirt underneath always got stained anyway, and why wash two items when you can only wash one? A feeding session seemed like the perfect occasion for a timelapse video. So here we go…
(more…)

Last Friday, the day after her six month birthday, we took Nora to the pediatrician, who gave us permission to start giving her vegetable puree, fruits, and even meat! Rather than grill her up a good t-bone steak, we’ve decided to start with the vegetables, so Marga made her a leek, carrot, and potato puree, while I set up the tripod to capture the event on video.
(more…)

Recently someone told us of an outside-the-box way of preparing a Spanish tortilla de patatas. Rather than cutting up peppers and cooking them inside the tortilla, what if you put the tortilla inside the peppers? An inverted Spanish tortilla!

When a friend of ours who has a little vegetable farm gave us a bag of enormous gorgeous green peppers, we knew we had to try this recipe.
(more…)