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?