Boquería barcelonense

We have arrived! The last stop on our trip to food heaven. It is funny how meeting dear friends of dear friends, about whom you have heard myriad stories over the course of the last decade is exactly like you would imagine, and at the same time, totally surprising. We are staying just inside the Born district of Barcelona´s Ciutat Vella with Kerith and Stefan, and, as one would imagine, tearing it up and having a fabulous time. Kerith has always haa always taken on a sort of mythic quality as she and K. took a cross-country road trip a few years before our famous road trip of epic proportions. She is just as cool and interesting as I expected, adjusting to the Spanish lifestyle, and practicing ashtanga yoga. Stefan has been a chef when not on the road, and we have all been salivating over the cheeses that made their way across the peninsula in our car. We have eaten pintxos and imbibed red wine, as expected, eaten churros and visited the enormous Boquería market, right on the Rambla, where we had an amazingly fresh and delicious lunch of mixed seafood and vegetables, prepared before our eyes at the Kiosko Universal. We continued our gastronomic journey and surreptitiously snapped photos of fresh fish heads and hanging ham hocks, mushrooms, marinades and more. On the evening´s agenda is degustation of cava and queso manchego. Sigh.

I thought I had had enough cheese to sate my apetite after K. and I have been living on a smoked tetilla, also known as Queso San Simón, acquired in Santiago de Compostela, and kept in the car for the last week. Sure, you´ll say, what about the pilgrims? The cathedral? The gothic flourishes and buttressed walls? Yes, yes, beautiful to be sure, but come on, it was really all about the food. Of course on the way north from Lisboa we did find that Portugal had redeeming cheeses, a particularly lovely queso fresco de cabra from Santarém, eaten with glee on the steps of the Sé, along with juicy black olives and a whole wheat nut bread and blood-red plums. Porto, on the other hand, visited at night, as we were hooked into a sort of alternate reality loop in which the road signs that pointed to O Porto centro all kept leading us back in a maddening loop, no matter which exit we took, to the very same place, not anywhere near the center of town. We finally managed to break the spell and wend our way into the center where we stayed at the Pensao duas naçoes, before exploring a few more port wines and an especially interesting cherry liqueur, Ginja, as it is known in Portuguese. Despite the trials and tribulations of not actually receiving checked luggage at the other end of the flight, the night before was spent in Lisboa at the Pensao estaçao central, just off the Rossio, where at midnight we discovered, just up the stairs, a great little café just inside the Bairro alto, called the Café Buenos Aires. We had a fabulous salad with multiple cheeses of the goat and Bleu variety, with grilled eggplant, and egg, and strangely enough, fried potato, alonf with hummus and a few glasses of tinto. I formally retract any complaints that good food could not be found in Portugal. It just needs to be sought with additional foodie noses.

We breezed through Coimbra, Braga and La Coruña (not all on the same day) but stayed the night in Cedeira, a quaint beach town on the Cantabrian sea, still in Galicia. We had octopus and a cordon bleu, thin milanesa of pork in a sauce of natas, and a Spanish ensalada mixta (which, of course, involves the inclusion of tuna fish). We drank cider and wine, and in the morning discovered, quite accidentally, a fortress that overlooked the sea, provoking an impromptu hike into the environs.

We hauled ass across Asturias, visiting, briefly, the Picos de Europa mountain range, and revelling in the bucholic bliss of cows with bells and mountains that cut open clouds as if they were cotton. We made an emergency pit stop just before crossing in to Cantabria to buy Asturian natural brewed cider and Queso Cabrales, a odorific penicillin based blue with a mix of cow, goat and sheep´s milk. After a few days without refrigeration, the bite was a bit too much to handle for breakfast, but that didn´t stop Stefan last night when we unloaded our spoils on the kitchen counter.

Santillana del Mar turned out to be quite the surprise, far from the quiet, idyllic seaside village that we expected, the town was packed as it celebrated the año jubilar, and an international acting festival which involved beautiful melodies floating over the town, with lighting on acrobatic ballerinas dancing through the air, and angels in six-foot belled dresses, sirens splashing in illuminated tanks and fire-wielding faeries. It was sheer miracle that we were able to book a room, and even more, that we managed to park and get there, as the Casa Angélica was inches from the festivities that centered around the plaza mayor, but extended in snaking circuits about the village streets. Our lunch the following day was a shared caldo montañés (we both avoided the morcilla) with beans and chorizo, a salad, and baked merluza (hake) in a creamy, vaguely tomato-based sauce. We skirted the coast some more, and I dipped my toes in the ocean as often as our travels permitted. And once again, in Bilbao, our efforts to obtain K.´s luggage were thwarted as TAP swore up and down that they had sent her bag from Lisbon the day before, and Iberia claimed never to have seen the thing. Despite (or perhaps because of) our comfortable lodging in Bilbao, it was nevertheless redeemed, despite a highly overpriced, and smoky Sunday night foray into the Marqués, the only open restaurant in the vicinity. We had the most expensive gazpacho known to man, but enjoyed it far more for not knowing its price beforehand, and we sampled (as it could not be called anything else) viera (sea scallop) and pepper stuffed with marisco.

The Pinxtos in San Sebastián (Donostia) in the adorable, but highly overcrowded beach town on the Basque Coast were excellent, but the night´s highlight was neither those, nor the accompanying Sangría, nor even our self-made concoction of hot chocolate and Cointreau, but rather the foolish French boys that were parading around the promenade, marching to the orders of a Sergent, and dropping their pants to run in circles about the Kiosko. We laughed until our sides were apt to split, and then laughed some more.

The only other food of note where the pimientos de padrón (padrao), little green peppers lightly sauteed in olive oil and salt with a hint of garlic. We had these in Galicia and again, here in Barcelona, where several shocked us with a piquant punch. Ah yes, we have been, perhaps, ignoring the pleasure of the langue in lieu of the pleasures of the langue... that is, skirting all of the language regions and wildly trying to navegate road signs in languages that are intelligible to varying degrees, and mostly only because of the drawings, but that, my friends, is a post for another day.