Madrid, like most European cities, is made up of some main vector points, main avenues, main points of reference, and then somewhere around 12.43 million little streets going absolutely everywhere other than exactly where you want to go. In Madrid it is possible to get there from here, just not directly. But then, that is what makes traveling outside of the Roman gridlined cities so pleasant. For instance, New York and Boston are both wonderful cities, but Boston’s roads are made up of blacktopped cow paths, whereby those of the Big Apple are built for precision moving to and fro in carriages/cars/and someday jet packs.

So, in Madrid, should one wish to travel from, say, the Puerta del Sol to anywhere directly out of your line of site - presuming you are standing on the corner of Calle de Arenal and Calle de Preciados - then it will take you two hours. Two perfectly pleasant hours of wandering about, but two hours nonetheless.

Here’s the thing, though. All that wandering about makes for hungry wanderers.

Enter the bocadillo.

It is true that the Brits can lay a righteous claim to the best sandwiches in the world. But that claim rests on the propensity on God’s Sceptered Isle to put almost anything that can be placed between two pieces of bread between two pieces of bread. The results are often as stunningly delicious as they are confusing. Not so elsewhere, for sure.

The chorizo or jamon bocadillo is what happens when everything superfluous gets out of the way, and nothing but unencumbered (and I’m going to use a term of art here, so bear with) umph remains.

Nothing more than a delicious bit of chorizo or delicious jamon between two pieces of crispy, and often still warm bread, the bocadillo has a lot going for it. If, at the hour mark, after passing that delightful but slightly decaying monastery (for the third time), an opportunity for a glass of wine and a fortifying bocadillo presents itself, what is one to do?

There is a regrettable - albeit slightly amusing - story behind green bean casserole at chez DL. Some years ago we were living in group house chock-a-full of preoccupied - but interesting - graduate students. One of the few benefits of that particular living arrangement was that, by some quirk of interstellar fate, a number of us actually liked to cook. This was our first Thanksgiving together, and we were all going to contribute a family (or traditional) dish to the common table to go along with our 22 lb turkey. 22 lbs? Yes. We had 20 people for dinner, which as you might imagine, makes what follows particularly painful.

I had been locked away working on a classic, a closely held family recipe, only emerging on occasion to talk about what a revelation it was to be for everyone when they tasted it. I, literally, used that word. Revelation. I also used the words: secret, my mother’s recipe, and a classic family tradition.

Some little while after we wrangled the turkey out of the oven, and gathered the multitudes at the table (well…tables…lots and lots of card tables lined up end-to-end), I slipped into the kitchen unnoticed, rummaged around, and then with great fanfare, swept into the dinning room announcing the pièce de résistance of the evening.

me: laaadddiiiees and gentlllllllemen, I present what can only be called a unique expression of family ingenuity, a dish passed down generation to generation, and to me at my mother’s knee…

the multitude:

me: huh? huh? Good huh?

the multitude:

Utter.

Complete.

Silence.

For about ten seconds. At second eleven, the laughter began. At second twelve, the first of seven people fell out her chair, tears streaming down her face. At second thirteen, the mocking began.

me:

Sitting at the place of honor on the table was the most picture perfect green bean casserole ever created, glistening green and cream, topped with golden brown French’s fried onions.

Somewhere in the next several minutes, as people picked themselves off the floor, returned from walking around and getting their breath back, I learned that not only did every household in America make the green bean casserole but that the instructions were printed on the side of every single can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup sold in the United States (a fact I seem to have missed in my intentness to read and follow every direction on the yellowed scrap of paper I had kept on my person for weeks).

And on Thanksgiving, every single year since (and it has been fifteen or so), I receive at least two phone calls from people giving me grief. Everybody still finds it hee lar ee us.

This year, in an effort to redeem myself, I did a version that had nothing whatsoever to do with Campbell or French’s. Oh no…I bought green beans; I used shitake mushrooms; I made chicken stock; I cooked flour; I FRIED ONIONS for god’s sake; I coddled, stirred, cooed, and finally baked a superb rendition of the classic.

I served it very quietly, and was pleased that no one seemed to notice.

But, you know what? It was really good.

So…the other day I’m in a coffee shop, minding my own business (literally logging into my work email), and I hear the following exchange:

He: So…ummm…the other day I was out at a restaurant, and…umm… I thought that really, this is just the place I’d love to take you.

She: Oh. Really? Where was it?

He: Idontknow, I was there with some friends. It was Vietnamese though. We had a really good soup.

She:

He: Yeah, it’s called…

..and here I’m stretching it, because I’m seriously unsure how to convey this…

Pha hoo ah

She: yeah, really? I know what you mean, maybe, I’ve had that, but I didn’t think it was pronounced that way

He: well, yeah! Pha hoo ah. That’s it.

She:

He: no! really!

She:

He: so, wanna go some time?

She: uhhh, whatever.

Turns out He is a suave and worldly college kid, She is an attractive slightly loopy barista with an eye for pretentious suave and worldly college kids. Fate intervened, but…

Vietnamese cuisine in America (at least outside of SoCal) can generally be summed up by the noodle dish pho. This is not a bad thing. Every cuisine gets their star. Italians have pizza, the French have themselves and sometimes bread and snails, the Russians borscht, the Chinese things that go woof (ed. what I say above is ‘their star’, not the extreme American perception, so I happily amend to Peking duck — thanks M.), Americans hot dogs, and the Vietnamese have pho (pronounced, by the way, fuh (like here, although there are some serious arguments even amongst Vietnamese on this point, and it goes way back to the North/South conflict after the war)).

Your basic bowl of pho is made up first of the broth. Generally made from beef stock,various meaty cow bits, various bony cow bits, and onions, it is simmered until the someday-to-be-pho-cows come home. During the simmering process a variety of spices are swirled in, through, or flashed from across the room. These generally fall into the ginger, cinammon, anise, and clove camps, and all impart their own particular essense to what becomes unmistakable pho.

Added to the broth are onions (green and white), cilantro, and in the most classic (but certainly not only) version, thin strips of meat. This is then brought to you in a bowl twice the size of your head. Along with the bowl is a plate of condiments. It is the condiments that turn a perfectly good soup into something you must eat before you die.

Thai basil, bean sprouts, and lime are the most usual. These are pulled apart, squeezed, and dropped into the broth and beef. The combination of flavors and textures is indescribable, and can often be improved with some jalapenos or hot cock (aka sriracha).

There are good places in the US for pho (for a complet(ish) list check out Pho Fever), although most seem pretty scary to those without a cultural emissary. Doesn’t matter. Go on in, ask for pho bo or pho tai and you’ll be fine.

So. Clearly it’s taking me an ungodly amount of time to actually get the highlights of the Spanish trip posted. This has absolutely nothing to do with the usual litany of time pressedness, forgetfullness, or plain ol’ time managementness. No, there is a much better excuse, which I’ll mention here and then get back to regularly scheduled programing.

Here’s the thing…as an extra special soon-to-be-birthday gift, I got a brand new standing mixer. Oh, yeah, actually…it’s a brand new RED standing mixer. With meat grinder and pasta cutter included. I’ve been involved in some very, very decadent, even naughty culinary liaisons. There was a particularly exhausting evening with pork lard and unbleached flour, and I just finished my post-whatever cigar after an evening of making spaghetti carbonara from absolute and complete scratch (minus the pancetta of course, which can only be purchased after an awkward conversation with a guy in a white coat, who wants to talk about size). None of which has a single thing to do with eating one’s way through Madrid, except perhaps a difficult segue from pork lard to tonight’s posting (but you get a sense of my difficulties)…

There is no better place in Spain to wander bar to bar eating tapas than Madrid. The insistence amongst Madrileños that one is unable to appreciate fully a little snack until sometime around 8 in the evening is both charming and slightly terrifying for those of us who’ve learned that sensible people require eight hours of sleep and that one should never, ever eat right before going to bed. Combining that timeworn dictate with another — that the yummy bits of the pig have the words loin and chop associated with them — gives any mildly interested eater in Madrid fine opportunity to be all rebellious and even deviant.

Orejas de Cerdo is a good place to start. This Madrileño specialty is nothing more than a couple of pig’s ears, roughly chopped, then caramelized over a fire. What makes this really interesting is both the enormous richness of the dish (lots of cartilaginous lubricating material as well as fat) and the competing textures of the cartilage itself, the meat, the fat. A little bit goes a long way.

Orejas wasn’t even on my list of things I HAD to try in Madrid. Bull’s balls, check. Baby eel, check. Morcilla - the awesome blood sausage - check. Spanish cod roe, check. Orejas, no. It’s not that I have anything against the pig; some of my best and tastiest friends have been pigs. It just hadn’t occurred to me that I’d crave ears. That was, at least, until I saw what may be the best (and most compelling) presentation in the history of pigs’ ears.

Imagine a space a couple of closets wide, but deep, like Narnia wardrobe deep. On the right hand side as you walk in there is a roaring grill, and you can smell the onions sauteing in the flowery olive oil before you see it sizzling behind a pile of sausages smoking at the front of the grill. Between the fire and you is a long table of tapas, of almost every variety. Sausages, mushrooms, little omelets, shrimp three ways, calamari both dusted with flour ready for the oil and stuffed ready for the grill, piles of peppers to be roasted with a few flakes of sea salt, stuffed pimentos lacking only a little drizzle of olive oil, and then…innocently nestled between the jamon and the something stuffed in pastry, was a bowl of freshly chopped ears.

How could I possibly refuse?

So, I’m perusing July’s Gourmet magazine (I mean, of course, I am…have you seen the picture of that cherry pie on the cover?), when I come across this startling (as in eyes bugging briefly outside of my head) bit of trivia:

One in five Americans live on a diet of ten foods or fewer.

OK? Pretty horrifying, yes? But, wait, it gets better:

Among the most common choices? French fries, fried chicken, chocolate chip cookies, and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

Now, it is possible to go on and on about how nice it must be in the Fat & Rich World to have a diet of ten foods, how it must be nice to have all that diversity. Fair enough. I’ll concede that, and more. But in the context of the United States, where the median income is $46,000 and 77% of us live in urban areas, something is horribly wrong if our fridges and cupboards hold nothing more than dehydrated cheese powder.

I am not a cook because I am a crusader for health (or, for that matter, the environment, whales, or gay rights), I am a cook because I believe in the power of food to expand our sense of who we are and where we are (see the DL About for more on this).

But this - whatever it is - isn’t healthy.

At the same time the Food Network is encouraging - successfully - thousands of people to stare slack jawed at the television, their brains spewing out the same alpha waves as they do when watching porn, as chef this-and-that gets her own show (and thousands, if not millions, of rabid fans), and as farmers’ markets explode in cities, suburbia, and exurbia (what we used to call “the country”), we discover how very little all that exertion really matters. Of course, only in the byzantine recesses of this nation’s educational bureaucracy does food ever correlate with statistics, and only then in terms of mouths to feed. But something is going on here.

It goes beyond the simple jeremiads about convenience, mechanization, the disconnect between food and land, economic, cultural, or racial proclivities, or media. But where isn’t clear. We’ve got to figure it out unless we be reduced to the nutrient pastes of science fiction: a single food applied quickly, leaving room only for the future.