I woke up at 3:30 A.M. and couldn’t get back to sleep. Jet lag sucks. Finally I decided to get up and look at my pictures. Then I started to get hungry, so I decided to post all my food pictures. So. Here are just a few of the items I ate in Spain.

The famous Pimientos de Padron, my new favorite food. Only we can’t get them here. The peppers look like jalapenos, but they are not hot, except once in a while you get a hot one, so it’s like playing Russian Roulette in your mouth. They fry these quickly in olive oil and then sprinkle them rather liberally with coarse salt. These peppers are on almost every menu in the northwest, but we sadly couldn’t find them anywhere else. Actually we did see them on a menu board in Sevilla on our last day, but the menu board did not seem to belong to anyone. It was just sitting in the street, driving us crazy.

If Brian had these at The OB Vine I would eat them every single day. I am serious. WAIT! They ARE grown here in California. BRIAN! If you start making these I will come in every day instead of only five days a week. Check it out. Shannon’s Favorite Vegetable in the World.

Our favorite tapas bar of the whole trip – O Bispo in Santiago de Compostela. We ate there something like twenty times in four days.

This is not a food picture, but a picture of a bar called O Cortello in Pontevedra. It was one of the craziest, weirdest bars I have ever been in, and we had incredible fried calamari there two nights in a row. This place is not for the squeamish. It is dirty, there is a dog in the kitchen, and there are some pretty strange goings-on. I loved it in there.

We always ordered coffee in our room when that service was possible, but one time Mom accidentally ordered a complete breakfast (to the tune of about thirty-five bucks.) This is what we got. Check out the pile of bread-type items. Thankfully we had plenty of zip-lock baggies and we were eating muffins from this breakfast for weeks. Also, I caught a slight cold around that time, so we figure St. James was responsible for the slip-up, so that I would drink some orange juice. St. James was always looking after us after I hugged his statue, I think.

Mmm… a bottle of Ribeira del Duero, looking at a castle keep, in our room in Vilalba. Later I ate the freshest piece of fish I have ever had in my life, but I forgot to take a picture of it.

A fat plate of Cabrales cheese (zip-lock bag came in handy here as well) and chorizo cooked in hard cider, at the Parador in Cangas de Onis near the Picos de Europas mountains.

Probably our favorite meal of the trip and we had the same thing two nights in a row – room service in our fantastic room in Cervera de Pisuerga. Potatoes, tomatoes and peppers baked in a clay pot, a steak sandwich, wine, and German MTV. I was in heaven.

The breakfast room at the Parador in Cervera. Please take note of the bottle of Syrah for the people who like a little strong red wine with their cereal.

On night, on a whim, I decided to order a room service meal of many bottles of wine and some different baby foods. Just kidding. This was a display of possibilities though, of which Spain has many.

Spanish stews kick ass. This one is potatoes and chorizo, and I ate it in the Rioja with a fine bottle, of, uh, Rioja.

Just so you don’t get the idea that eating is Spain is perfect, voila, a misfire in Bilbao. The wine was off and the chorizo squirted me when we finally had the balls to ask the bartender for a fork. The two old dudes drinking big-gulp sized brandies and singing tunes from the pre-Franco days were kind of humorous though. Someday I want to go back to Bilbao and go to all the bars there, which could take a couple of years, even if you visited a few a day.

Then we got to the south, where Clive and Sue fed us lots of healty food which at that point we surely needed. Clive, now known as Man of La Plancha, cooked up all these vegetables for us the first night on his grill. They grow all their own vegetables, watched over, at the moment, by Guard Bunny.

Another delicious dinner from the creative minds of Clive and Sue. Pork kebabs, rice, mushrooms and lots of wine sure tasted good after a day of spelunking and uber hiking.

Red peppers stuffed with a seafood mixture and topped with two cream sauces (carrot and asparagus? I think.) A lovely presentation and a tasty dish, in a quiet restaurant in El Bosque. There was a little boy in there that was kind of tripping on my hair though. He came around and stood by the wall near me for a while, to try to figure out how purple was possible.

After I had to say goodbye to the Czech architects from the Sherry tasting, I decided to go for some Spanish boys instead. Just kidding, this is just a picture of a picture, silly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 6:44 am and is filed under What's Happenin' in Spain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.