Spanish Food

People are complaining that I’m not posting pictures of food in Spain. The reason for the lack of photographic evidence is that I made a choice between bookstores and restaurants, and bookstores won, obligating me to buy an additional suitcase. I’ve mostly been eating yogurts and fruit iny hotel rooms. But there have been two restaurant visits I want to share.

One was at my favorite seafood place in San Sebastián. Unlike most of Spanish food, what they serve there is not in the least fussy. The seafood is so fresh that nobody feels the need to mess with it. This is what food should be, in my opinion:

In Madrid I went to a restaurant serving traditional food from the region of Murcia. I had the famous Murcian salad:

It contains pickled tomatoes, onions, boiled egg, olives, and for some mysterious reason, canned tuna. The habit of people in Spain to spoil every dish with dollops of canned tuna is something I’ll never comprehend. The salad was one of the most hideous things I’ve ever eaten. And I’m from the USSR, so I know a lot about disgusting food.

The regional specialty is “arroz del caldero”, which is rice cooked in an iron pot. Here’s the pot:

And here’s the rice:

It has tiny shrimp in it and, blissfully, no canned tuna. Other than that, it’s rice. To relieve the boredom of just rice, you get 3 different types of mayonnaise to accompany it:

The mayonnaise family is superb. And the rice is… rice. On the positive side, it’s quite minimalist, which allowed me to eschew the traditional Spanish problem of eating monstrosities made up of a million ingredients that aren’t meant to coexist.