Gypsy Kitchens: Tortilla de Patatas

Tortillas are, in the opinion of many, the most beloved of all Spanish foods. They are served everywhere from high-class restaurants to dive bars. They sit on kitchen counters and under napkins in bodegas, eaten as snacks or full meals, fresh, cold or reheated.

Completely different from their Mexican cousins, Spanish tortillas are essentially thick cakes of egg cooked with some kind of vegetable or starch - zucchini or broccoli, for example. The most popular type, by far, is tortilla de patatas, or potato tortilla, which we recently made and ate for breakfast with a big group. It's simple, tasty and cheap - the perfect Spanish dish for autumn.
Perhaps the best thing about making tortillas is that they require only three ingredients: potatoes, eggs and onion. One could definitely throw in garlic, herbs, peppers - anything, really - but those are add ons. To make a good sized tortilla, use about a dozen eggs and half a dozen medium sized potatoes.
Wash and eye the potatoes, scrubbing the skin well with a brush under cold water. Peeling is optional, and pretty unnecessary. The slices should be between one-eighth and one-quarter inch thick, and semi-uniform to ensure that they cook evenly. To get them down into the pan easier, cut the pieces in half. Dice the onion.
In a medium skillet, saute the onion and potatoes in about a quarter cup of oil, cooking slowly enough that they don't brown much. When the potatoes are tender and done, remove the mixture and discard the oil. Clean up any sticky leftover crumbs, re-oil the pan and begin heating again over low heat.
In a large bowl, combine the potato and onion with all of the eggs and a few pinches of salt. When the pan is fairly hot - enough to sizzle a drop of water - pour in the mixture. Cook slowly, over low heat, until the egg has firmed all the way to the top, but not until it is hard. There should be a fair amount of jiggle when the pan is shaken.
The most difficult part is the flip - it requires a lot of nerve and a steady hand. We carefully loosened the edges and bottom of the tortilla, then slid it out onto a large plate. Then, after oiling a final time, we inverted the pan over the plate and completed a kind of twist move that landed the tortilla with minimal damage. Unfortunately, this is a process that can't easily be described or taught, as there are a lot of variables.
We cooked the tortilla - as many people do - the night before and had it for breakfast. It's good cold, served with "pan con tomate," which is essentially toast with olive oil and tomato rubbed on top.

Here's the recipe:

Tortilla de Patatas

Ingredients:

1 dozen eggs

5-7 medium boiling potatoes, scrubbed and eyed

1 medium onion

Olive oil

Salt

Process:

- Halve the potatoes and slice into 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick pieces. Dice the onion well.

- In a medium to large skillet, saute the onions and potatoes in 1/4 cup oil until the potatoes are soft and fork-tender. Remove the onions and potatoes from the pan and discard the oil. Rid the pan of all crumbs and stuck-on stuff, and re-coat with oil (use a more moderate amount this time).

- In a large bowl, mix the potato, onion, eggs and a few pinches of salt.

- Heat the pan until drops of water will sizzle, add the egg mixture and reduce to low heat.

- Cook the mixture slowly until almost firm on top, but with a good bit of jiggle - this should take between twenty and forty minutes. Use your imagination to figure out a way to flip the tortilla, then cook for about five minutes, raising the heat to medium. Remove from the pan.

- Serve cold or hot.

Barcelona on an Easel

Barcelona has art seeping out of its veins. High brow, low brow, pierced brow, unibrow, whatever - it's here. You can visit one of the 700+ museums or just walk around and, either way, feel like you've done some art viewing. You can tour the absolutely impressive Picasso Museum or enjoy the accidental canvas of a garage door with layers of aging concert flyers, like this young woman.
That's not to say that street art, in all its forms, has been completely embraced by the city. Unlike other European capitals of cool, graffiti is actively fought against, considered "something that degrades the urban fabric." It is routinely painted over and removed in public spaces. However, since keeping storefront shutters clean is the sole responsibility of the shop owners, commissioned pieces on them can't be touched. And tag artists wouldn't dare deface them.
Of course, you can just look down at your plate. A baguette is painted Rothko red by a halved tomato to prep for a sandwich. Silver sardines are piled into a pintxo Frank Gehry would approve of. An eye for design is so inherent that you sort of feel like it's second nature. Barcelona is a city that never feels like it's trying too hard to make things pretty, but leaves you smitten with its style.
It can definitely be argued that Barcelona's artistic identity begins with Gaudí, the great Catalan Modernist. Showing up to "see Gaudí" is probably the most common tourist experience. And you know what? It's some really crazy stuff to look at. But more fun still is walking along the beach and finding a sand castle artist's rendition of the Sagrada Família. It wasn't quite finished yet, but still much further along than the real thing.
A block away from Park Güell, where a mosaic dragon guards the staircase of a whimsical garden city, this performance artist could easily have been missed. But, in Barcelona, you tend to notice things like this. You get used to looking around as you move, confident that there's some detail to be spotted, some art to be seen. And in a city with a tradition of being nontraditional, it's always worth seeing.

Autumn Roast: La Castanyada

To smell a chestnut roasting on a European street corner is to smell autumn at its most basic. Add the scent of sweet potato cooked with hot coals, and you have a scent that transmits harvest, tradition and location – the smell of La Castanyada.
The Catalan festival of La Castanyada - which loosely translates to “the chestnut time” – is an old tradition surrounding All Saints’ Day. In the particular mythology of this kind of thing, chestnuts and hot sweet potatoes were cooked and eaten during the cold nights around the day of the dead, when bellringers needed to stay up through the darkness to chime prayers and commemorations for the departed. It has become something of a celebratory event on both the 31st of October and the 1st of November, with special recipes, small “panellet” cookies and lots of moscatell wine. In Barcelona, the street carts roasting nuts and roots get busiest as the sun goes down and the night’s chill sets in.
Barcelona isn’t a cold place, of course, and this year it’s particularly balmy – especially for those of us unaccustomed to southern climes. While the Barcelonés walk around in sweaters and scarves, we were feeling quite warm in short sleeves. The atmosphere is autumnal, the temperature is temperate. But the cool night air off the Mediterranean carried with it a melancholy of shortening days and summer’s end. Joining the huddle around a Castanyada stand, a universal sentiment of fall came over us – like what’s elicited by the rustling of leaves or Halloween night.
But La Castanyada is perhaps one reason why Halloween hasn’t caught on here in Catalonia as much as it has in other parts of the continent. It’s a simpler holiday, and it feels more fully autumnal, a flickering of food and fires against the tableau of a fading year. It’s said that the roasting of the sweet potatoes offers an opportunity to remember and commune with the dead. It's nice, instead of the ghoul-aping of Halloween, to feel a communal search for heat and closeness.
The women who traditionally sold their “castanyes i moniatos” from simple braziers were called the “castanyeras.” They sat bundled in blankets and headscarves, their fingers blackened from the work and smoke, scooping nuts into paper twists with special “espàtulas” scoops. The image has endured, though the vendors have changed. We saw many versions of these scarecrow-like figures, some set out in jest, some with care.

Halloween in Barcelona

We really thought Halloween was like American football and peanut butter – something beloved at home that never really caught on in Europe. But the pumpkin seed seems to have been planted in Spain and, here in Barcelona, the holiday has gained some popularity. This isn’t to say that trick-or-treaters were knocking on doors for croquettes. There was simply a nice peppering of festivity throughout the city on Halloween and the night before.
The first signs appeared in obvious forms – stag parties roving the streets in costumes, international students in flamenco dresses, a Happy Halloween banner hanging from the doorway of “Fish&Chips.” But it definitely reached beyond the expat scene. Little kids wore FC Barcelona uniforms and Scream masks. One girl struggled not to trip on her oversized sweater, an orange and block horizontal stripe number of her mother’s. Paired, of course, with a fedora and Freddie Krueger claws.
There was a plastic pumpkin here, a cotton cobweb draped there, a line of wrinkling jack-o-lanterns lined up on a balcony. These pumpkins grinned from a market stand. Without the pop-up costume shops, convenience store candy displays and masquerade party sitcom plots, Halloween feels a lot more simple. You can celebrate if you want or just go about your day without anyone judging you for your lack of interest.
So what is Halloween at its most basic level? Scary of course! Costumes were more ghoulish than witty, more bloody than skin-baring. The most idea-oriented thing we saw was a group of teenage boys dressed as comic book samurai, complete with absurdly oversized swords and cartoonish wigs. Most people, though, were just going for dead or undead look. All of the zombie homages may be a little nod to the more widely celebrated Day of the Dead (November 1st).
Day Light Savings ended on the Saturday night before Halloween, giving everyone an extra hour to party it up. This bar was still being decorated when we arrived at around 10pm. Things get started really late here. People began to stream in, none in costume, most excited to order the themed drink of the night: absinthe. The bartender took great pains to get it all right, but no one really seemed to care, preferring to mingle than watch the chemistry of it all. It’s just something about that liquor’s goblin green color and borderline mythic history and edge of danger that just screams Halloween. For me, the candy bowl set out on the corner was a truer badge of authenticity.

Barcelona Cervecerias

Some are slick, some are shabby, some offer gourmet beers, others pour local, cheap stuff. Barcelona is full of "cervecerias," which are very difficult to define.
Spain has more land cultivated with grape vines than any other country in the world, and only France and Italy produce more wine. But beer is much more popular here than it is in those other countries, and there are a lot of places to drink it. It's something of an American invention, really, that tapas and pintxos are the provenance of wine bars - more often they are eaten with a glass of beer.
Technically, cerveceria means brewery, and a few of Barcelona's establishments actually do brew their own beer. But in general, the difference between a bar and a cerveceria is pretty slim - something like the line between a cafe and a bistro. Food is a big part of the distinction, as some bars don't have food but almost all cervecerias do. In effect, the best translation might be "pub."

One of the best things about cervecerias is that they're open through much of the day and night, meaning that one can have a beer and a bite to eat whenever the need arises. The food can be heavy or light, but is almost always something small. Cargols, squid, shrimp and cuttlefish are popular; sausages and meatballs are ever present. At larger places, the selection can be overwhelming, the creations exotic. On the other hand, the plates are often as simple as this - a few roast peppers sprinkled with sea salt.

Barcelona has a long history of brewing. The small Moritz brand was originally from here - but is now bottled in nearby Zaragoza. The company - which was founded in 1856 - was only recently resurrected, after nearly four decades out of business, and has enjoyed something of a cult following among chic locals, who extoll its pale malt and lemon flavors. Ask for a beer in most places, though, and you will almost certainly be given an Estrella Damm. Estrella, also local, is one of the largest brands in Spain, and is a brew usually drunk without analyzation.

Things Portuguese People Like

Sweets. Saying they "like" sweets may be an understatement. Portuguese people really, really like their baked goods. From morning until night, people gather at the counters of pastelerias, sipping coffee and eating something fresh, dense and almost invariably yellow. Pastries are delectably eggy, from tiny creme brulee custard cups to something as simple as honey sweetened egg bread. The thing is, Portuguese people happen to have some incredible baked goods at their disposal at all times. So, it's pretty easy to see why they have such a sweet tooth.
Serving Platters. Tables in Portugal are pretty uniform - white paper place mat or table covering, simple white plates, simple silver utensils, a stubby wine glass for water and a thinner one for wine. But the final items, that never ever fail to appear on your table, are serving platters. Anything ordered, comes in a separate dish, most often an oval tray, which is set beside your empty plate with some serving spoons. It may make tables more crowded and necessitate more washing, but there's something nice about transferring a portion of steaming hot food to your dish. Serving yourself makes you feel a little more at home, I think. Plus, the portions are always so humongous that it's nice not to have it all in front of you at once.
Football. Like port wine, you can thank the English for this dominant presence in Portuguese culture. The sport gained popularity in the 19th century, when students "brought it back from England." Nowadays, their star player is Cristiano Rinaldo. Ever heard of him? Here are some kids playing soccer with a plastic bag after their first ball, a plastic bottle, rolled under a dining couple's table. This was in Guimarães, where the night sky was lit up with soccer on tv.
Little Beers. A French study in 1999 ranked the Portuguese as the world's biggest drinkers. So, maybe it's an attempt to scale back? Super Bock, the Portuguese beer, is available in these "mini" bottles. Beer glasses at bars are the size of a New Jersey diner juice glass. You can order a larger one, but the assumption, if you don't specify, will be that you want the little beer or mini beer bottle. Locals say it's so that the drink is colder. Makes sense, but still gives bartenders a whole lotta extra work.
Balconies. When we first arrived in Portugal, in Guimarães, our hotel receptionist said that the main squares were "full of beautiful balconies." For some reason, we figured he actually meant terraces, for dining and such. From that night forward, throughout our two weeks, we saw more balconies than we could count. I'd say it's a dominant architectural feature. And Portuguese people don't just have balconies, they use them. Hanging out their laundry, showing national and football club pride through draped flags and banners, sitting outside for a smoke, having a potted garden or decorating with old mannequins, statues, etc - they really make balconies an extension of their home.
Fado. This type of music is widely believed to be a Portuguese invention. The word comes from "fate," and it is a mournful, soulful style of singing that speaks of tragedy and loss. Originally, sailors were the main fadistas. Soon, though, singers such as Amália Rodrigues ("The Queen of Fado") put the music on the national and international map. Rodrigues' house is a big attraction in Lisbon and the Fado Museum (seen above) makes a lovely trip. Mostly, though, you encounter fado through the radios playing everywhere and at restaurants that offer live performances.
This shade of yellow. And what a pretty shade it is. When buildings weren't white, they were almost always this color. Bright but warm, it looks beautiful at dawn, dusk and all the hours in between. It really is a sort of uniform shade and... come to think of it.... matches their egg pastries! Mystery solved.

The Alentejo

The first thing we saw in the Alentejo region of Portugal was a dead cow. It had been dead for a little while, lying amid rocks and scrub not far from the dirt road. This isn't the coast or the wine region, it's the backcountry, a place that is slowly becoming emptier and more forgotten. For all its harsh beauty, the Alentejo is being left behind.

The landscape is one of desert grasses and cacti, rocks and sheep, barking dogs and land turned by hand. There are cork oaks and olive trees in rows. Summer temperatures are among the hottest in Europe. A rainstorm during our stay brought relief for the farmers; it hadn't rained in five months. It smelled like fall and burning grass. The yellowed earth was particularly striking when the sky was blue and the autumn light cast long shadows.

Already the most sparsely peopled part of Portugal, the Alentejo loses residents every year. Young people leave for Lisbon, Guimarães or the southern coast, leaving their parents and grandparents to work the rocky earth. The further into the countryside we went, the older the people - men hunched over donkey plows, women making lace with crooked fingers. The picturesque, whitewashed villages are even becoming emptier. In Marvão, once a bustling town, there are only 15o people left and the streets are silent. In Castelo de Vide, above, shutters hang loosely in front of vacant windows.
The region is ancient. Monoliths from prehistory, roman roads and ruins, rocks piled for millennia. In the middle of a cork forest, down a rough road, a little clearing exists around the Menhir da Meada, the tallest on the Iberian peninsula. Emperor Augustus, of Rome, built a cobbled highway through the plains around 25 BC - even then, the land was mostly empty. Travelers passed through on their way down to the sea, or up into the Spanish netherworld of Estremadura.
There is amazing beauty mixed in with the rust and stone - and some good food, too. We ate deliciously salty cheese, dogfish soup, hearty kale and Pão de Cabeça bread. From a farmer, we bought an assortment of tiny, sweet tomatoes and two perfectly ripe persimmons - the fruit was almost liquid inside, and honey-sweet. Oranges grew everywhere, showing up bright against the fall browns.
We camped for a few days down the street from a small bull-fighting ring, across the lane from a pasture where the bulls were being raised. One feels, here, that this is Portugal's mortal corner. Unlike the timeless seashore, or the age-old beauty of the cities, this is a region that reminds a traveler that age can also mean death.

The locals tend to lump all tourists together as "northern-european." The people they mean arrive here from the sterile outside, wide eyed and infrequently. They come for the heat and quiet, or to find some mythical piece of real Portugal. What they are looking for is on the verge of vanishing, a way of life that no-one wants to lead anymore.
The Alentejo after all, isn't changing, just petering out. But, on cold October nights in little bars, the locals huddle together and drink. Reserved on the street, in a taberna they are a cheerful, loud lot - even the most elderly of them give booming greetings and goodbyes. At the end of these short days, with winter approaching, the scene is certainly that of the "real" Portugal, of a people entrenched in their earth and place, happy to see that their friends and neighbors are still there.

Portuguese Food

It only seems natural to begin a post about Portuguese food with bread. The bread is exceptionally good here, never sold stale or even sub-par. When you sit down to a mean in Portugal, the items covered in the couvert are brought to the table. This always includes bread, usually a plate of butter and sardine paste packets, olive and sliced cheese and sometimes other fun treats. You pay for whatever you eat. The bread is simply irresistible. Light rolls, denser rye breads, they mix it up enough to make you always just have to try it. With a bakery on every corner, there's never a restaurant, bar mini-market that doesn't serve something as fresh as can be. Pão is a sort of religion in Portugal and the best breadmakers add things like potato puree and orange to attain the perfect flavor.
In some parts of the country, bread extends to the rest of the cuisine. "Dry soups" or açordas are a staple in the Alentejo region and, because they're so yummy, have migrated elsewhere. It can best be described as a bowl of mushy bread, sort of like the bottom of French Onion soup. Only, the olive oil, water and egg soaked cubes are flavored so wonderfully with coriander, loads of garlic and (in this case) specks of liver, that it feels less provincial than it does ingenious. It's not very often that a make-do-with-what-you-have approach results in such tasty food across the board.
And that's really the best thing about Portuguese food - it truly is its own thing. Most dishes are sourced almost completely from local ingredients and a respect for the what is caught, raised or harvested is evident in the simplicity of a lot of the preparation. Throughout the country, especially in the Minho region and around Porto, we saw enormous leaves of kale sticking up over the fence of gardens, stacked up and draped over someone's shoulder as they carried it home, piled into the backs of trucks. Shredded up and mixed into a potato puree, it would appear in front of us as caldo verde, green soup.
Homegrown and traditional, the cuisine doesn't feel stodgy. Here's some melon I ordered as a starter in a particularly modern (read: vegetarian) restaurant. The large, green skinned melões popped up at roadside stands everywhere and I'd been wanting to try it. The honeydew like fruit was served sliced with roasted sesame seeds on top. And was excellent. Why do anything more with it when the melon's that ripe? Something else I will always remember fondly about Portuguese food is ordering "fruit" for dessert and being offered "apple or orange." Merlin was given an apple with a knife and I an orange with a wet nap.
One enormous exception to all of this talk about the fruits of the land and local sourcing: bacalhau. Salt cod has an almost mythic history in Portugal, so it continues to be purchased and prepared in enormous quantities even though it is completed imported these days. Being as there was so much fresh fish available, we really didn't order it very often. But boy did we smell it at the grocery store. You can't imagine how much bacalhau was available. Piles and boxes and coolers and shelves. In the chain supermarkets, the stock took up a huge corner - as big as the entire butcher counter. Here, a woman weighs one fish as she cuts another with heavy machinery. There are anywhere from 365 to 1000 Portuguese salt cod recipes (depending on who you believe).
If bacalhau is the king of fish in theory, I'd say that sardine is the king in practice. Fresh, grilled, canned, you find them everywhere. I've had a lot of sardines in my life and the ones here are a little bigger, a little plumper and always perfectly grilled. You never get that bitter aftertaste. The canned varieties are delicious and sold in a greater abundance than its not-locally-fished foe tuna. Sardines are so omnipresent that one even snuck into my photo of arroz com polvo e camarao (rice with octopus and shrimp)! Slightly soupy rices like these are a staple and never described differently than "rice with blank." I appreciate the clarity. I also appreciate that its all cooked together, stocking those little grains full of aromas and juices.
Speaking of octopus, here's some next to "smashed potatoes." Almost any meat or fish you order, especially grilled varieties, come with salad and potatoes, boiled or smashed. We opted for boiled the first few times, thinking that we were hearing "mashed." Oh, what missed opportunities. Smashed potatoes are roasted crisp in their skin and then squished down to create various Pacman-like shapes. Doused in oil and garlic, they're hard to beat. Just don't burn the roof of your mouth like I did. Twice.
This is not to say that the most popular preparation of potatoes isn't good ole french fries. Because it is. The loveliest of plates would come covered in them, literally. Sometimes even the waiter couldn't tell which plate was which. I think it's done in an effort to keep the fries from getting soggy and the main course from getting cold. Poking out from beneath this heap is another regional rural specialty that has gone countrywide: carne de porco à Alentejana. It's roasted pork and clams that is commonly referred to as "Portuguese surf-and-turf." Being as they'd never just mix the two ingredients together for no good reason, the clams were actually steamed right in with the roasting pork, bathing the meat in salty juice.
With these enormous plates of delicious food, plus all... that.... bread... bar snacks tend to be light. There are always bags of potato chips, candy and nuts for sale. Very often, there are cans of sardines and rounds of sheep cheese. If you get one of these, you'll be handed a plate, knife and some cubes of fresh bread to go along with it. Mostly, though, the snack of choice is tremoços - lupin beans. I saw them for the first time in a Portuguese bar in Andorra. A man sat with a bowl of broad, yellow beans and a plate of their discarded, translucent skins. We bought some at the market, sold (like the Andorran's) with little black olives mixed in here and there. They taste a lot like soybeans and can be eaten with their skins, though getting really good at popping them out makes you feel like a real local.