Pig's ears and shrimp for brains

I may have written previously about the somewhat eccentric, arguably barbaric eating habits the Spanish often have. However, since Spain and food are two of my favorite topics, it's hard to ever stray too far from that central theme.

Coming from America, the land of milk, honey, and a firm belief that whatever we eat should not in any way resemble something that was once alive, Spanish eating habits may seem strange. For a long time I thought that I enjoyed tapas, those Spanish appetizers that come free with your caña (beer). I have come to realize lately, though, that my American sensibilities often get in the way of enjoying most of these treats. Unlike the American image of tapas, real Spanish tapas are not delightful slices of artisanal French bread topped with fine cheeses, truffles and foie gras.

Real tapas are served at little corner bars frequented almost exclusively by old men and lit with harsh fluorescent lights, no matter what time of day. They consist of lots of fish parts, many of them raw. Sardines, squid, anchovies, you name it. Also popular are dishes with the ever present canned tuna - especially empanada (tuna/hard-boiled egg pie, actually better than it sounds) and "russian" salad (a kind of macaroni salad with, of course, tuna). Getting a dish of paella is a nice surprise, but the shrimp come whole - with shell, tail, head and, yes, eyes.

I am opposed to all of these things, but I acknowledge that this is mostly for no good reason. I'm sure it’s all very tasty. There’s American in me that I can't seem to kill. But I don’t like my shrimp to be able to look up at me with their cold, dead, inky black eyes. No thank you. These are things I'm trying to work on.

There are tapas that lack skeletons and slime, but these - fried potatoes and the only very mildly spicy pimientos de padrón - while considered by the Spanish to be very spicy, are pretty boring. There are also delightful fried croquetas, cured meats and cheeses, chips and olives (all you normally ever get free these days) and my favorites, the egg dishes. But why limit myself?

In an effort to expand my horizons I tried two "new" delicacies last weekend - fried pig's ear and shrimp head.

First the shrimp. I was told that this was "shrimp brains" but I'm not entirely sure that shrimp have what we would normally classify as a brain and if they do, I'm sure they must be very, very tiny. First I had to learn to peel my own shrimp. First you grip the head and savagely rip it from the body. I am not very good at this and shrimp brain juice got everywhere. Next you pull the tail off and then the little legs. Once you've pulled the legs off you can peel the shell from the shrimp. Mmm shrimp, normal enough. To eat the "brain" suck the juice out of the head you pulled off, pull the shell up and off of the head and eat the weird white gooey bit. This has a very strange consistency. I don't recommend it unless you don't have a problem with that. I have concluded that all shrimp bits taste pretty much the same. Although it's nice to say I tried it, I probably won't do it again :)

Pig's ears are something I normally think should be fed to dogs or something, but here in Spain you can fry them in tons of olive oil just like anything else. The plate I got was enormous. There must have been several pigs worth of ears cut up there. These were actually really tasty and I would try them again. Mostly they were just really greasy and fatty with little bits of pork. They were strangely crunchy in the middle – that’s the cartilage you're crunching on – but not so weird I couldn't eat it. Better crunchy than gooey, in my opinion. It kind of just added to the fried sensation.

Hopefully one day I will have tried all the different pig parts one can eat (although I guess I probably already have in the form of sausage). I'll keep you posted.

Grand Re-Opening!

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't posted anything lately. Some of you may have noticed the change, but don't feel bad if you didn't. In fact, I can't really say even I was aware of this fact except in an abstract way or, even more surprisingly, that I had such a loyal readership who would notice such things.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! It has been 4 months since my last confession. As you all know, I'm back in Madrid until August and have been enjoying my time so far. I was going to start this re-inaugural post by introducing y'all to my new digs, having sadly relocated from that impossibly tiny closet/room I was inhabiting in the fall, but then I realized that this was as close as I would ever get to visitors and that maybe I should make the bed before I take pictures to post all over the internet. You never know - there may be people out there who are dying to hire me for some incredibly cool and well-paying job and who miraculously also happen to read this blog and who would be completely turned off by the mussed blanket and lack of wall decoration. Therefore, regretfully, I am postponing that post until a later date when I can be bothered with things like making myself look presentable.

So what exactly have I been doing here if I don't spend my time making my bed or fashioning hip wall decorations from found objects? Pretty much the same things I do when not living abroad - namely wasting time on the internet, spending time with friends and struggling to communicate in the simplest of situations (okay, maybe with the exception of that last one). My Spanish skills (or should I say "skillz") have improved to the point where I can confidently know how much the cashier at the grocery store is asking me to pay her without looking at the register's display, but not to the point where I can adequately ward off the advances of the creepy janitor guy in the same grocery store.

The most "productive" way I spend my time is editing (and very occasionally writing) stories for MAP, an online magazine about Madrid. Although I must admit that this takes up far less of my life than I would like, I do enjoy what time I get to spend on it and (future employers kindly skip down to the next paragraph now) it sounds really excellent on my resume, considering the actual amount of work required. It's actually a very informative and well-written "zine" but probably not at all interesting if you don't live in or ever plan on visiting Madrid.

I should maybe add that this job was ridiculously easy to get, especially considering how the other English magazine in this town completely ignored my pleas for employment. I think it may be the only time in my life that I will meet someone who seems genuinely impressed that I actually have a degree in journalism and thinks that it might be useful or, say, actually qualify me to do something useful. Perhaps based on the (mistaken) idea that I know what I'm doing, the "real" editors (as in, the guys who have their money invested in the site) have spent a lot of time consulting with me recently about business plans and how an operation like theirs works.

This, while nice, is obviously misguided. The fact that I have a degree in journalism should key them (or anyone) into realizing something about me: namely, journalists are bad at business. Journalists are the kind of people who want to bring down the machine, or at least they usually start that way (with the possible exception of those strange ones who only want to cover entertainment "news", but I don’t really count them as journalists, so it's a moot point). And since they ALWAYS consider themselves so much above "business" (best said with a grimacing facial distortion) they end up sucking at business. "The news," they will tell you, "shouldn't need to make money." And this is why our society is now trapped in a vacuum of crappy corporate news. If only journalists could figure out how to make the news make money, we might be able to break away from News Corp. and Time Warner and all of them, but they cant, so we don't. It's all very tragic.

This all brings me back to MAP. When they started the magazine they thought they had a great idea - a site updated daily with new, fun, cool, trendy things to do in Madrid. They thought if they made a site and slapped up some ads that soon they would be rolling in the dough. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a very naive business "plan". In its two years of existence, the site has cost these guys much more than it's ever generated. This is all very useful information for someone like me to have.

Now we come to the interesting/sad part. Since this is a commercial world and we live in the google era, it turns out that in order to make any money (or indeed, to break even!) you have to hawk hotel rooms and plane tickets, cater to a more elite audience and strip all originality from your writing in order to seek the good favor of the holiest of all deities: Google (and their search engine kin, the lesser gods of the internet). Search engine optimization is so much more valuable than interesting writing. So now many of our witty headlines and zippy opening lines are being systematically replaced with boring google-friendly ones. The good news is that I can now say I have experience with SEO!

One last little tidbit about the adventure with the magazine. In their quest to reinvent the magazine as something financially self-sustaining, a lot of travel guide-style content is being added, as quickly as possible, in order to build up a base. Although the site was always meant to be a guide to an extent, it was supposed to be a "locals" guide. Now they're adding a lot more information (why would someone who lives here need to know about expensive hotels?), including a lot of historical articles about various landmarks. I volunteered to write several of these but before I got a chance - get this - the job was outsourced to India! I always thought that my job as a native English-speaking volunteer writer would be safe from outsourcing, but it turns out that the Indians seem to have excellent English and can churn out really superior articles at an extremely high 20 landmarks a day for less than a cup of coffee (or something). Oh well.